Iconic aircraft is headed to the Reagan Presidential Library

I read an old article a while back, can't remember where (maybe Code One or something?), about some of the daily routine when the program was still unacknowledged. It was interesting because it mentioned them running a night route from Tonopah Test up into the Fallon range, and then over to Lake Tahoe with the sim targets being private piers on the lake. Hard to imagine that not drawing a lot of undue attention today......maybe things were different back then. I wonder if any of those folks with the multi million dollar estates out there knew that their backyard was likely imaged by national assets and was instrumental in training those guys for their success in Desert Storm.
 
I read an old article a while back, can't remember where (maybe Code One or something?), about some of the daily routine when the program was still unacknowledged. It was interesting because it mentioned them running a night route from Tonopah Test up into the Fallon range, and then over to Lake Tahoe with the sim targets being private piers on the lake. Hard to imagine that not drawing a lot of undue attention today......maybe things were different back then. I wonder if any of those folks with the multi million dollar estates out there knew that their backyard was likely imaged by national assets and was instrumental in training those guys for their success in Desert Storm.

Between places like Fallon, Irwin, Nellis, China Lake, etc for all the decades of sharpening the spear for the eventual knock down fight over the plains of Europe we sure as hell didn’t act like it in training.

I feel like we should lease a butt load of land from the Canadians out in BC or something and build a war game area that isn’t just dust, sage brush, and the occasional terrain feature to use as a reference.


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Between places like Fallon, Irwin, Nellis, China Lake, etc for all the decades of sharpening the spear for the eventual knock down fight over the plains of Europe we sure as hell didn’t act like it in training.

I feel like we should lease a butt load of land from the Canadians out in BC or something and build a war game area that isn’t just dust, sage brush, and the occasional terrain feature to use as a reference.


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Yeah, that's fair. Though the desert in NV ended up being a fortuitous training ground for OEF I suppose. I guess the AK ranges are probably as "European" as one can get.....haven't flown in them, but my understanding is that they are outstanding in terms of square mileage. FRTC and NTTR are getting severely small these days, at least without the benefit of multiple ATCAAs, tanker bridges, climb corridors, etc.....and all that non-range add on airspace is really useless for tactical execution, which leaves you with the baseline ranges which are too small today.
 
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