Posted on 05/04/2004 11:07:15 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
ELECTION 2004 Did Kerry make up jet-pilot story? Seasoned flyers doubt yarn about taking controls over Israel
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 5, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
It's been a tough week for John Kerry's credibility.
He's been called unfit to be commander in chief by many of his Vietnam comrades and commanders.
He's been criticized for accepting a Purple Heart for what amounts to a scratch on his arm treated with a Band-Aid.
Now, seasoned jet pilots are calling into question his latest claim taking the controls of a fighter and flying it over Israel in 1991.
Kerry told the story Monday in a speech to the Anti-Defamation League. He claimed it gave him a different perspective on Israel. He said probably no one else in the room has seen the country upside down from an Israeli Air Force jet.
He asserted that authorities in Israel kept denying his request to fly one of their planes, but that the colonel who was showing him around Israel during a 1991 visit not only got him into a trainer, but let him take the controls.
"I take it off, we go up into the sky, climb up, head down toward Aqaba," the senator said. "And I wanted to look at Aqaba, so I'm coming down over Aqaba, and I suddenly hear this voice on the intercom, and he says, 'Senator, you'd better turn faster, you're going over Egypt.'"
Kerry said the colonel then gave him permission to do "a little aerobatics" and that he made a loop at about 12,000 feet.
"To be able to come out upside down and look down and catch the horizon in back of me and see all the way down into the Sinai to the old base that had been given up, all the way across into Jordan, all the way out into the Gulf of Aqaba, and to see Israel beneath me, and the lines contained, and to see it all upside down was the perfect way to see the Middle East and Israel," he said.
But Internet boards were abuzz with skeptics some of them seasoned jet pilots themselves.
"I'm sorry but I don't believe for a second much of what John Kerry says," wrote Ron Pera, himself a veteran Navy combat fighter pilot."
I believe even less that he makes the comment he took off the jet trainer that he reportedly flew over Israel."
FreeRepublic.com and other bulletin board sites were inundated with similar posts.
"First of all jets are more difficult to take off than propeller planes because they accelerate much faster and the speed they need to get airborne is much higher," Pera wrote in an email to WND. "This requires more precise control and you will not have that the first time you are in the plane. It takes practice to get those skills, a lot of it. Second of all no rational military trained pilot would take the chance of hurdling off the runway at 160 mph just to let some bigwig handle the controls. Takeoffs and landing are two of the most dangerous times during an aircraft flight. Once you are tens of thousands of feet in the air then it is much, much safer to let some inexperienced person take the controls since you have time and altitude to regain control. This is not a blessing on the ground."
Pera added that unless Kerry many hours flying military aircraft "it is next to impossible he took the plane off."
"I speak from experience as a former Navy fighter pilot and I have no problems releasing ALL of my records," he wrote. "Will Kerry flip-flop on this statement also or just yell at whoever asks the question?"
Pray for W and Our Troops
or Abe Yeager.
Brigadier General Yiftah Spector
Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Nahumi
Brigadier General Israel Baharav
Lt.Col. Oded Marom
These are the names of the first 10 of 35 Israeli Aces that have a rank of Lt. Colonel or higher.
Using that as a starting point can you send this along to somone in Israel who could contact any of these individals and ask them what they know about the Kerry story?
There are 25 names left on the list that have not yet been googled.
'Senator, you'd better turn faster, you're going over Egypt.'"
Were this true we'd have heard about it, a minor international incident at the least, more likely charred wreckage in the Sinai and a vacancy in the Senate.
"I Never Sail on Anything Less Than 135 Feet" |
CounterPunch March 4, 2004 I would like to add my two cents about my John Kerry experience. During my career as an Air Force pilot, I spent two years flying a small twin-engine prop plane around the Pacific from my base in Okinawa, Japan. On one trip we had to fly Senator Kerry, his congressional aide, and a Navy Captain (Vietnam, A-4 fighter pilot) was also in Kerry's party to various locations in Vietnam and Cambodia as part of the MIA/POW talks. When I met him, he was wearing a shirt with a picture of his sailboat on it. I told him I had a small 27 feet sailboat in Okinawa, he remarked 'Oh I never sail on anything less than 135 feet'. When we first flew him into Phnom Penh, he went to the back of the airplane and grabbed the pizza that was put aside for the crew and passed it around to his staff. He was never offered any pizza because they were supposed to have lunch with the Cambodian government once we landed. The pizza would have been our only meal that day. Then when we picked him up in Cambodia, he was an hour late getting to the airport. We could not start the engines and therefore the air conditioning until he arrived. Phnom Penh at that time was over 100 degrees with 95% humidity and we were basically sitting in a greenhouse behind the cockpit windows. When he finally did arrive, we were wringing out our clothes from the perspiration. He walks out of the air conditioned car, into the airplane and asks us 'Could you guys get the air conditioning running, I'm a little warm." The other pilot had to physically restrain me from going back there and picking a fight. Then we took him into Noi Bai airfield in Hanoi. After we picked him up the next day (he stayed the night in Vietnam, we stayed in Bangkok) we taxied out, ran up the engines for takeoff, and noticed that our prop rpm was vibrating all over the place. We taxied off to the side to look at it, but there was a good possibility that there was an engine malfunction and the engine may fail if we took off with it. Well, Mr. Senator sticks his head up in the cockpit and says 'this plane WILL take off, I have a press conference in Bangkok in three hours!" (Maybe this is an indication of how he will run the FAA). We ran the engines again, and did not have the problem, so we took off and made it back. During the flight, he told everyone how he had taken a Cessna (a small General aviation plane) up with a fighter pilot, and the fighter pilot remarked that Kerry was one of the best pilots he had ever seen. I don't know about other pilots out there, but it's hard to imagine a little, single-engine prop plane pilot being able to show the 'right stuff'. After Kerry left the plane, the Navy Captain came up to us, apologized and said basically that he knows Kerry is a jerk and that we should be glad we don't have to deal with him every day.... Or will we? Hal Cranmer can be reached at: studioron@verizon.net |
That one always cracks me up. 'The best pilot he's ever seen' in a freakin C152. I guess since Kerry didn't crash land that makes him the best pilot in the world.
I doubt it. Gore was assigned to follow Nancy Sinatra's USO tour for Stars and Stripes.
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