Tag Archives: IMAX

Back in the mid-80s, when I was writing technology stories, I got to blend the subject into a piece on a visit to the Air Force’s Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas. Later in the early 90s, I went again when the local recon squadron at then-Bergstrom AFB (now Austin’s international airport) went up for the exercises. These videos at OP-FOR, from the IMAX doc on Red Flag, are so good you may get airsick watching them, but they’re from an angle only seen by the participants. My second trip, I got a conference-table full of pilots and backseaters to interview all at once. Not the ideal way to do it, but it worked out. One guy started talking airspeed in knots, stopped and started to translate the knots to mph. I said I was a sailor, so I was used to knots, just a lot smaller numbers. Smiles all around.