Tour of Duty

Those gentle readers who get to see us in person with any frequency might know that Leo has spent most of the last six months having decided that he's planning to go into the Air Force, when he doesn't play some professional sport (usually football or hockey). 

Checking out the flight gear

Part of Leo's present from LauraLynn & Shannon was a tour of Tyndall Air Force Base conducted in part by Shannon and in part by one of her colleagues, LTC Richard "Pinz" Koch. Shannon met us at the visitor center and escorted us to the flight line, where Pinz showed us into the locker room (letting Leo try on his helmet), walked us past the briefing room (a classified area, so we didn't go in), and then over to the control tower. The week before Christmas, a plane had been diverted from Eglin AFB a little way to the west, and then had some mechanical trouble when it was time to get back in the air. We ended up being on the base just as it was doing some low approaches prior to landing after making sure the plane was in working order.

Getting an explanation of how an AIM-9 missile works

After the plane landed, we got to get up close and personal with one of the F-22s. We got to see an AIM-9 missile, along with an explanation to Leo of how it works. The flight line portion of the tour wrapped up with a walk through the maintenance hangar while we were en route back to Shannon's truck. One of the neatest parts of the tour was Pinz giving Leo his flight patch, taking it right off of his uniform.

In the Air Traffic Control tower, watching an F-22 through binoculars

Because this was Shannon's second tour at Tyndall, she took us back by the area where she had originally worked, training pilots in how to recognize the symptoms of oxygen deprivation. In addition to the main classroom "tank" (which looks like a really big metal box), there was also a flight simulator where they could hook the pilots' masks to a series of tanks that let them simulate a loss of oxygen. I found it interesting that fighter planes keep a constant "elevation" difference between interior and exterior of the cockpit, unlike civilian aircraft which maintain a constant interior pressure pressure (equivalent to external pressure around 6000 feet).

Not to be outdone by Pinz, Shannon also took us by her office (which, even she admitted, looked a lot like an office). We met most of her colleagues in the 325th Medical Group, and Leo walked out of that with both a 325 MG Squadron Patch and commander's coin.

At the very end, we went down to the base's primary beach access to the Gulf of Mexico. Tyndall turns out to have roughly 130 miles of coastline, once all the inlets on both sides are accounted for, a figure that I found only moderately surprising since military bases are usually a lot larger than most people think. Tyndall's beach area includes habitat for some species of sea turtle, and during nesting and hatching seasons, portions of the beach are closed off, even from the troops, by the Air Force's DNR. (Yes, the Air Force has its own Department of Natural Resources -- probably the biggest revelation to me of the entire event.)

On the base's beach, near sunset