Whipped Cream Difficulties

Michael Enzi, fomer Senator from Wyoming. He’s the second prominent person I’ve seen recently who has died as a result of a bicycle accident (the other one was Greg Knapp, an assistant coach for the Jets).

I guess the moral is: be careful out there.

Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was killed in a plane crash over the weekend. The Drive put up a very nice obit for him.

You may not have heard his name, and you wouldn’t recognize him from this photo. But if you follow military aviation at all, you will recognize this photo.

The huge barreling Tomcat screams by in a right-hand knife-edge pass so close to the ship people think the picture was photoshopped. In reality, it was a well-practiced maneuver with specific airspeed, altitude, and angle of bank performance metrics briefed before the flight and debriefed after.

…

The list of Snort’s career accomplishments is long. First nugget pilot selected for training in the F-14 Tomcat along with the most hours in the F-14 Tomcat for a pilot. A TOPGUN graduate and US Navy Fighter Pilot of the Year in 1985, plus a tour as Commanding Officer of VF-33 during Operation Desert Storm leading combat missions into Iraq. He rounded out his active duty career as Commander Fighter Wing Atlantic where he spearheaded adding precision strike capability for all Tomcats. In retirement, he would go on to fly some of the world’s most legendary aircraft on the air show circuit and was a founding member and pilot for commercial adversary services provider Draken International. But Snort stands above everyone else in one area: King of the Airshow circuit in the F-14 Tomcat.

I have not had a chance to watch this yet, but Ward Carroll did a live stream tribute to Mr. Snodgrass on Sunday night. Here it is for bookmark purposes (about 40 minutes):

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2021 at 9:13 am and is filed under Obits, Planes, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.