On 2/6/04 7:49 AM, in article , "John
Carrier" wrote:

All the Hornet drivers here, if I'm a Citation X pilot
with 4500+ hrs, how difficult is landing a Hornet ?
I imagine the ONLY place one can acquire training on
them is in the Navy (Marines included).

The F-18 has perhaps the most benign flying qualities of any high
performance jet aircraft. X-wind landings require a particular technique
(as Woody states). Otherwise, it's difficult to hurt yourself if you honor
its envelope, know your procedures, and have a well-maintained airframe.

The big issue with any high performance military jet is getting it airworthy
and keeping it airworthy. Warbirds can be had for ridiculously low prices
(particularly compared to small corporate jets), but getting them up and
keeping them up makes even Travolta's 707 toy look like a relative bargain.
Of course, 1300 gallons give-or-take of JP per sortie (often a particularly
SHORT sortie) makes it pricey as well.

I wonder how difficult it would be to retrofit a nice modern GPS-based nav
system and ILS (not many airports .... any? ... have an operational
TRN-28)?\

R / John

Well put.

There are a few rubs in the flight instruments and systems areas to owning
your own F/A-18.

All the black boxes (circa 14 IIRC from my China Lake days) in the Hornet
are integrated. Some are more important to flight safety than others. For
instance, I'm pretty sure you could remove the radar without significant
penalty and fly the thing around lead-nosed using TCAS for traffic
deconfliction, but if you decided to remove the INS (for cost), you'd
severely degrade your primary flight instrument (which is the HUD)--unless
you could refit a cheap substitute (optical gyros and a GPS? AHRS only?).
But the INS and the ADC both feed the HUD, so you'd definitely degrade the
info on it.

Brings up another point. What FCC PROM is the jet running? My guess is
pre-10.7, but if you're running PROM 10.7, then there's a definite need for
an INS. There'd be some definite engineering and support issues all over.
Better have very deep pockets and be willing to pay a fairly large $/hour
cost. Fuel is probably the least of your worries given the team of folks it
would take to keep it airworthy.

--Woody