An Armed F-16 Over ZOA

[Rob Law]

All,

I'm not sure how many people live in the Pleasanton (CA) area, but yesterday during Bush's visit to the Bay Area there was a F-16 armed with 4 sidewinders and two drop tanks on station just outside the SFO Class Bravo. It was a blast to see this guy basically doing donuts between the sunol intersection and the livermore airport. He was up there for about 40mins. I had my scanner but couldn't hear anything from him, I guess he was transmitting on the mill freqs.

Finally when he had enough I guess, he did a couple of nice S-Turns and bugged out to the SW. I looked at the sfo air traffic monitor and found his track, he was at about 6k with a peak speed of almost 500 knots. I guess he ignored the speed restrictions :ph34r:

Speed restrictions...we don't need no stinking speed restrictions.

Rob

[bradl]

You could probably have heard ATC though. From what I've learned from contacts at KLAS TRACON, since Nellis AFB is so close to KLAS, some of the fighters may land at KLAS. They'll fly in duo group formation (second pilot squawking standby), while the lead broadcasts on the high UHF band freq. Tower (ATC, actually) are plugged into their normal freq, plus the high band equivalent for military. So you would probably only hear the ATC side of things, but nothing more.

BL.

[Rob Law]

Actually Pleasanton is in a valley in the bay area so I cant hear any atc comms because my line of sight to the transmitters are blocked by hills.

And believe it or not the Oakland sector of NORCAL is really quite quiet. Oakland airport is really not that busy except is spurts. Most of vfr traffic in and around livermore stays outside the Class Bravo so they don't even contact norcal after they leave LVK

Rob