These brought back a few memories…
We were deployed to the Med, and were flying around the clock on a Victor-II sub that had made the mistake of running through one of the crew’s patterns. We took over the tracking just at dark…
About an hour later, I hear from the flight station, “Hey, you gotta come see this s**t!”
So I stroll up, and I get told to wait a minute then look out the left side of the cockpit. And what do I see, but lights… But they don’t quite look right…
Puzzled, I go back to my seat, look at my screen, and don’t see a radar contact. Call up the SS3, get him to do a sweep, nope no surface contacts anywhere near. WTF???
Flight comes back around again, look out the window again, sure enough, funky looking lights…
O.M.G. THAT’S THE FRIKKIN SUB!!!
They’d forgotten to turn off their navigation lights!!! 🙂
Made for a real easy onstation, and we told the follow-on crew, they followed the lights for the rest of the night! 🙂
It wasn’t until about two days later, they finally turned their navigation lights off.
Q-2 over the Med.
This one was taken about a month before one of the A-3s here came apart in-flight… Sadly only one of the crewmen survived.
Clear water is not the Russian submarine’s friend — especially not when P-3’s are overhead.
The navigation light story is funny. You can imagine that some poor swabbie on the Commie pig boat got reamed for that.
LOL! Bet somebody caught it for that!
An eventful life 🙂
There you go again, picking on some poor Russian Bubbleheads who were just cruising along, minding their own business…. ; )
Running their navigation lights did make it easier for the ‘good’ guys to keep track of ’em. The skipper used to talk in the wardroom about how the Soviet navy (and all their forces, come to think of it) suffered from horrible attrition from the experienced non-coms, leaving only new recruits & politically-connected officers. Great story!
Is the sub in the process of surfacing? Or are they closer to the surface then they think they are?
They were coming up, we’d attacked and they acknowledged…
What if there was more than one sub? One fat, dumb easy to spot that caught everyone’s attention leaving others to do whatever sneaky sub stuff they wanted to do. Not saying that is the case; just the way my mind works.
That was really funny right up to the last sentence.
LL/PH- Yep 🙂
Art- And these ARE stories I can tell…LOL
Les- Snerk… yeah, right!
Rev- Yep 🙂 GOOD for us anyway!
WSF- I’ll just say more than once we tracked more than one… 😀
BP- Yeah, but it’s true. Not trying to hide anything, or sugar coat it.
Mark On Top… Now… NOw… NOW… WEAPON AWAY!!!
Perhaps there where two subs, one suckering you in while the other did its thing. How did the A-3 come apart in mid flight?
Joe- LOL, we’d already done that!
CP- Nah, only one boat… The A-3 was near supersonic and either got into turbulence or was overcontrolled; I never saw the results of the AIB…
Hey, at least the smaller subs can hide. In normal water conditions, my Tridents were visible from the sky at something like 160 feet (keel depth).