Wings for Freedom

Day 3 of the Virginia vacation and things got busy today. Unfortunately it looks like no amount of snowboarding will be covered this trip or this post. Bummer. Instead I’m going to talk about my time spent visiting my brother. This has been well-spent time because I really haven’t seen him much in the last few years.

He graduated from Purdue in 2005 in the Navy’s officer training corp. He was sent to Pensacola, Florida for his primary flight training, which lasted about a year. During this time I saw him all of about a week and a half at Christmas. After completing this, he was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia to train to become an NFO (Naval Flight Officer) in the E-2 Hawkeye, like the one pictured above. After eight months of intense training, he has been winged and assigned to a squadron. This is the reason we visited him.

We left school after my last class on Wednesday afternoon and drove deep into West Virginia before stopping for the night. We left early Thursday morning and arrived in Norfolk around 12:30. This was perfect timing for us to catch a boat tour of the harbor. We hopped onboard at 2 and circled the bay. We got to see a lot of amazing ships, including an attack submarine, and 3 aircraft carriers. They really are an awesome fleet. With those guys supporting us in a war, I believe we are quite a force to be reckoned with. After the tour, we met up with my brother and ate some dinner at a fancy restaurant downtown. Not much else happened last night, as today was an early morning.

We met back up with my brother around 7 this morning in order to get on base for the ceremonies and such that were going on today for him. After a rather boring presentation on the E-2, we were allowed to go into the 2 different simulators they had on base. Pretty high tech stuff. Basically, three NFO’s sit in the back of this E-2 and monitor about 350 miles worth of air, land and sea. They can tell where everybody is! It’s unbelievable.

But the simulators weren’t the end of the tour. We actually got to get into an E-2 to see what the real thing looks like. I’m about 6’5” and I was bending over at the waist to get through the plane. It was a tight squeeze! By now, it was time for lunch. We stopped by an Applebee’s. We had some time to kill, so my brother drove us around the base and gave us a little tour. At 2 his formal ceremony began where he was presented with his wings and officially became an NFO!

All this was fun and good but the real party wasn’t until later in the night. We had time to grab dinner over at a Logan’s before heading to the party. The party was at a bar called Baxter's. Pretty much all the NFO’s came as my brother’s class was paying the tab. It was a pretty entertaining time.

All in all, I have seen my brother more these few days than I have in the last year. It was definitely time well spent. I just hope I can make it back out here again soon. Oh, and my next post will be about snowboarding. Don’t worry about that.