During my AT last year, I supported Enterprise Strike Group during their pre-deployment workups. While I was onboard the USS ENTERPRISE, I had the opportunity to get some good pictures. Here is a Super Hornet getting ready to launch. The Catapault Officer is touching the deck and in the next motion will point down the cat signaling the launch.
(Note: all my submarine pictures were taken with a conventional camera in the 90s. I need to spend some time getting them scanned in, so this will have to do.)
Is the Super Hornet a twin seat or single seat? It appears in that photo to be a twin.
Thanks
don’t let Pinch see this post bullnav!
Wild Bill, there are so many different version of this freakin’ airplane that it’s hard to pin down. I know that the original Hornet came in one and two seat models. Not sure on the Super, but the Navy/MC is just starting to fly the “Growler,” which is a 2 seater designed electronic warfare (replacing the old EA6B Prowlers) that is designed on the Superhornet model.
Doesn’t really matter HOW many seats they have – they are all tankers, in the long run :)
F/A-18 came out with only 2 models first off, the A/B/C, which were the single seat standard flavor and a F/A-18 D (used almost exclusively by the USMC), which was a 2-seat version, but the extra seat was nothing much more than just that – an extra seat. F/A-18 E Super Hornet is a single seat, and the F/A-18 F is a dual seat with a dedicated, designed-from-the-start back cockpit for the Weapons System Officer – which is what we see in Bull Nav’s pic.
One of the cool things about the F (called the Rhino) with the new electronically scanned array radar is that you can “de-couple” the cockpits, so each aviator is working on their own battlespace challenges – the Nose Gunner (also known as the pilot) can be working in an air-to-air mode while the GIB (Guy In Back, or as my dad called him, Talking Ballast) can be in an air-to-ground mode. Nice.
Pinch – Thanks for the explanation about the Hornet. I was just going to find a link somewhere and point folks to it, because I know not a whole lot about Hornets. Except they look cool. I have a picture from the same underway of a Hornet on the #4 cat and a Superhornet on the #3 cat. I will try to post it this week to show the difference.