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How NOT to get a call sign

Another embarrassing call sign

Locally a CJ-6 was executing a forced landing on a golf course. Everything was going well until he has to swerve to miss a golfer standing there foolishly watching without the presence of mind to get out of the way. The swerve to avoid the bystander put the plane into a small building, the rest room destroying the airframe. You might guess this one, the pilots call sign now is "Crapper".
 
I'm guessing...

OK! Help out us uninformed civilians...Who has a picture of a "snoopy" that they can post up??

...this Dzus fastener tool - the right hand one -

DzusTools.JPG


Is that correct?
 
Years ago...

...My late boss went out for some acro in a clipped-wing Cub they had. After a few doodads, the stick would not move rearward past center and he had a tough time getting it down...had to make a shallow, 50' high, 2 mile approach easing it down ever so gently with power and trim (in a Cub, the stab moves for trim) flying it on the ground.

After they popped the rear elevator horn inspection plate, a stainless steel Zippo cigarette lighter was jammed between the upper longerons at the fin post, acting as an elevator stop!

He chewed Hugh's butt, since he'd done some acro earlier and had lost his Zippo and didn't really look hard for it. Yep, Zippo stuck with him for a long, long time.

Best,
 
...this Dzus fastener tool - the right hand one -

DzusTools.JPG


Is that correct?

Yup, that's it. Used to open the large, half moon shaped, avionics bay doors on the Eagle. Or you could use a dime and some strong fingertips if you were to darn lazy to walk the whole 12 feet over to the tool box. :D
 
...this Dzus fastener tool - the right hand one -

DzusTools.JPG


Is that correct?

It's much nicer looking than the ones I remember (pretty blue plastic handle!) but yes, essentially that is it.

Being flat, it could easily be misplaced just about anywhere.

A Dzus fastener, for those not familier, is similar to our Camloc 1/4 turn fasteners. The military ones always had a straight slot (no phillips) and they could tell if they were "locked" because they would line up with the direction of flight (or as close as possible to that orientation).
 
Pilot Callsigns or 'Handles'

This is a fun thread that hasn't surfaced in a long while, & seeing as a lot of us will be lying low in self imposed virus quarantines soon, we may need a laugh.
I got this from a F-16 Callsign website:

The Three Rules of Callsigns
1- If you don't already have one, you will be assigned one by your "buddies".
2-You probably won't like it.
3-If you complain and moan too much about 1. and 2., you'll get a new nickname you'll like even less!
So, how do you get a callsign?
Do something stupid or have it fit with your last name. Obvious examples, 'Crash' or LT 'Cheese' Kraft. Sometimes it's based on a physical appearance thing like 'Carrot'. After you've earned the respect of your buddies, you'll get a more 'heroic' callsign.

How I got mine - 'Uncle Reco' A few years ago some folks from West Coast Ravens (with wives) came up to Canada for a flying vacation and put on a Formation Flight clinic for a few of us. At the last evening BBQ, it was deemed appropriate to dish out callsigns to us newbies. As I was designated driver for the wives, they felt 'Uncle Reco' was perfect as they were forced to ride in my van camper conversion (ugly is a gentle term to describe this thing) as referenced to one of the characters in the movie Napoleon Dynamite...

C'mon fess up!
 
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How I got mine - 'Uncle Reco' A few years ago some folks from West Coast Ravens (with wives) came up to Canada for a flying vacation and put on a Formation Flight clinic for a few of us. At the last evening BBQ, it was deemed appropriate to dish out callsigns to us newbies. As I was designated driver for the wives, they felt 'Uncle Reco' was perfect as they were forced to ride in my van camper conversion (ugly is a gentle term to describe this thing) as referenced to one of the characters in the movie Napoleon Dynamite...

C'mon fess up!

That was one of our favorite trips. My wife said your welcome for the callsign. Uncle Rico could throw a football clean across mountains back in 1982. He also had a sweet van.
 
Sigmond

Back in the eighties, while in the Marine Corps, I became a certified hypnotherapist (for my own edification). Using hypnosis, I helped a number of people and, when things got slow in a class - I taught ground-based, long-range Radar systems - I would hypnotize a bunch of students.
SO, they dubbed me "Sigmond" (as in Sigmund Freud). That one's hung around for close to forty years now...
 
Foghorn

Army aviator buddies gave me this name in 1992. I guess I like to talk and I can be loud, especially after a few beers. I?ve toned it down in my middle age but I can still sound off if necessary.

Jeff...AKA..Foghorn
 
Call sign

Ragman 75, 1965 Laredo, Texas T41 flight instructor, I was assigned call sign Ragman 75, I will leave it up to your imagination as to why. I had four students a day and their call signs were Ragman 76, 77, 78 and 79. On check rides the student being checked had to use Ragman 75.
 
In the Air Force, I was called "Ten Gallon". I'm 5' 4" tall and wear a Texas hat.
 
My nick is not aviation related and I doubt my fellow local pilots even know what it is. I'll try to keep it brief. As a teenager, I developed interests in Shakespeare and also ancient military tech, so I started hanging out with the Society of Creative Anachronism and the Renaissance Faire crowds. My character background was supposed to be from Venice, Italy, so I started to get inundated with winged lions - pendants, figurines, artwork, etc. Flying lion = flion. What has always amused me is how the name stuck everywhere except aviation.
 
Fun re-reading this old thread. Gotta say, the names being fessed up to are rather, err, tame?

Some memorable ones:
A fellow named Giancola = "Gyno."
Another named Lippsman shortened to "Lips."
A guy with a head so big they couldn't use standard helmets. Someone joked they should just given him a bucket - "Bucket" stuck.
A fellow named Skip who broke his arm wiping out in a racing cart = Skid
Even those are fairly tame, and then there were the TDY nametags...
 
One of my kids had a elementary school Spanish project - describe your family.

He made a poster with drawings of the family and captions like "Mi Mama es flaca" (My mom is skinny). "Mi hermano es bajo" (my brother is short).

To this day, he insists he meant that "Dad is strong", but he wrote "Papa es gordo" (fat).

Some friends of mine saw the poster and Gordo has stuck. I even woke up one day on a ski trip to find someone had glued nylon letters across the front of my ski helmet with GORDO.
 
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Airguy has nothing to do with flying, but came from a previous business I had, working with high pressure air systems. I sold and installed air systems for scuba shops, fire departments and paintball fields - and people were always forgetting my name and just hollering at me "Hey Air Guy!" And it kinda stuck over the years, so I just rolled with it.
 
Great thread

This is a great thread, I have really been enjoying it.
Remarkable how much that tool really does look like Snoopy.

I don't have one (yet) but I can share a story about a clever but tame one.

My grad-school mate finished his PhD thesis and turned it in at Stanford one day, and the very next day, reported to AOCS in Pensacola. Already having his instrument rating before he signed up, he was acing the flying, and of course doing well in the classroom too. Finally with about a week to go before graduation, one of his instructors asked him, "OK, what's your story?"

Bill explained that he wanted to be an astronaut, so being a fighter pilot with a PhD in applied aerodynamics seemed like the right path.

So Bill became Doc.

I wouldn't mind having 'Doc' too, but as you-all say, you don't get to pick your own. So I am just waiting to earn one, but doing my best not to do something stupid, at least around airplanes.
 
That reminded me that one of the students in a flight test class I was in was asked why he got a PhD in applied math. His reply was that they didn't offer theoretical math at his school.

There was dead silence when he said that. And it didn't lead to a call sign.

Dave
 
Plummit

I flew Hang Gliders for 30 years and my "Home" flying site was Lake Elsinore, CA. Most every pilot gets a nick-name from the "E" team. Mine was simply "Marc the Plumber", until one day I launched without being Hooked-in to my wing.

After that I was Marc the Plummet. I just spelled it differently to make it License-Plate friendly. ;-)

-Marc

oqc.jpg
 
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I've heard of a pilot who stood up too quickly in the officer's mess one day and smacked his head on the TV hanging from the ceiling, then flailed around trying not to fall down. He became known as... "Spaz"

Another seems to occasionally remind people of a male chicken through his appearance and mannerisms... and thus became... "Rooster"
 
We had a fellow get over-intoxicated in the dorm in Iceland. He fell down the stairwell, nearly ripping his ear off on the banister. Nickname: VanGogh.

"That's all good fun, until somebody loses an ear!"
 
Well...I had this middle-age, male notion of growing a pony-tail, and not only did it grow in like I had just stuck a fork in a light-socket, one day whilst scooting around under my -8, my coif became one with my creeper.

There was blood.

After cutting myself loose...

(no mean feat when you're on the floor and the scissors are in one of the upper drawers of your toolbox - while your hangar neighbor is rolling around on the ground)

...and then going to the barbershop to rid myself of this fashion faux-pas, my barber thought I had been attacked by a feral animal.

Even he still calls me Hairball.

And my creeper still rolls funny...like one of those bad shopping carts you get sometimes at the Giant Eagle.
 
Several years ago, our national television network created a documentary that followed several young pilots as they checked out in the CF-18 Hornet.
At the end of the course, there was a ceremony where their instructors awarded them callsigns.
One young man unfortunately had the last name ?Job? and he was assigned the call sign ?Blow?...
 
Fifteen years ago, my not-very-well built Six flipped on its back during a forced landing, making the slowest Six in the area also the worst looking. I had called it The Imitutor but in an instant it became The Dog Ship.
And now my flightsuit name tag: ? Pilot, Dog Ship? which makes sense if you say it out loud without pausing...
 
Have an acquaintance who got the call sign ?Stroker?. Gonna leave the story behind it to your imagination, but you can likely guess something pretty close. Enough said.

Erich
 
I flew Hang Gliders for 30 years

Ha! I flew a WW Duck 160 for 10 in NorCal, when I started volunteering in Sun n' Fun Air Ops I had to have a callsign, since if you got on the radio and said "Hey Steve", you might get several people answering. And since there was a tradition in Air Ops of people having animal names for callsigns (Flipper, MudDawg, Gator...)

Since I'm building a SeaRey, it was easy. Duck.

11200hull.jpg
 
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My Air Force squadrons (31 TES/419 FLTS at Edwards) were quick to hand out callsigns. My own, Thermos, resulted from a poor wardrobe selection (plaid shirt) and overconsumption of malt beverages with my test team.

My boss, an B-52 Radar Navigator, was originally known as Stinky for his prodigious ability to pass gas so vile that the AC and Co-Pilot upstairs would complain. Stinky went on leave back to his family's farm in Ohio, and while there decided to do a little skinny-dipping in the pond. The fish in the pond were hungry, and one took a nibble at Stinky's "bait"...yes, it's what you think it is.

That would have been the end of the story, but he committed a gross OPSEC violation and told his wife...who told her friend, whose husband was the test team director and had no scruples whatsoever about telling everyone in the office. By the time Stinky got back to EDW, he had been renamed Worm-Man and so remains to this day.

:)

Thermos
 
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I had a friend’s father give me the nick name “Fox.” It wasn’t complimentary!

The joke was: there was a Texan in England on his first fox hunt. While on horse back riding with his English friend he saw the Fox they were hunting. He yells out: “there goes that SOB! His English friend says, no “tally hoe the fox.”

As long as my late friend and his father lived, every time we got together they called me “Fox.” I now have a good friend whose last name is Fox. When we see each other I now think of my late friend and his father.
 
Several years ago, our national television network created a documentary that followed several young pilots as they checked out in the CF-18 Hornet.
At the end of the course, there was a ceremony where their instructors awarded them callsigns.
One young man unfortunately had the last name ?Job? and he was assigned the call sign ?Blow?...

Now that's FUNNY.:D:D:D Navy, or Marine??

Ah-h-h, I just noticed you're in Canada. So I guess not US Navy, or Marine.
 
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About 50 years ago some friends and I decided to go on our motorcycles to Myrtle Beach. We were at the arcade there when one of the guys decided to try a machine that had a hand on. You put a dime in and held hands with it and it determined what the romantic level of your hand holding was. His was zero and we still call him Zero 50 years later.
 
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