OK, this one is my fault...
It's the early '90s and I'm spending a summer on an overly sunny island off the coast of Oman, courtesy of an Indian Ocean deployment with my Navy aircraft squadron. We are way out in the ass-end of nowhere with pretty much nothing other than what we can cram into our planes to bring with us. There's no in-place supply chain, no local stores, nobody around us we can even talk to about borrowing anything. And then our one and only microwave oven breaks.
We get by for a couple of days, whenever we want anything hot to eat having to walk from the warehouse we're working out of over to the little, well, it's not quite a cafeteria and it's not quite a bar, but it's literally the only place we can get anything to eat in this FSM-forsaken patch of sand and rocks surrounded by ocean. Well, other than the closet in the warehouse where we stash all the junk food that gets crammed into any open space left on the rare flight up from our home-base. And did I mention that there's just one microwave in the building (and probably on the entire island)? And it broke?
Eventually, the next airplane arrives to do a crew-swap at our site and deliver some much-needed supplies. No microwave oven, of course, but we do discover that home-base has been kind enough to send along a big box of microwavable pop-corn. Great. Thanks a lot, Supply Guys!
The new aircraft that we just received is a bit different than the one it replaced, however. It features a brand-new, high-powered imaging radar that allows you to lock the big dish antenna inside the nose radome onto a point and literally take a picture of the target. It's not like looking at a photo, but it's a really neat toy that allows you to tell what kind of ship or plane you're tracking from way beyond visual range. Anyway, the important point that occurs to me is that you can lock the antenna into a single position rather than having it constantly rotate like our older radar system. And it shoots microwaves. Very powerful microwaves.
I stuff a couple of popcorn packs into my pocket, round up a couple of other avionics techs and inform Maintenance Control we're going out to the flight-line to do some OJT (On the Job Training) on how to operate the new radar.
We swing the nose radome up and find a convenient spot directly in front of the radar antenna to stash our popcorn bags, then run up the aircraft's electrical system from a generator cart. Radar systems like this have a very large safe-standoff distance when operated on the ground, so it's customary to activate the aircraft's strobe lights and taxi lights as a warning not to approach. Once we ensure that there's nobody in the danger zone, we energize the radar in imaging mode and aim it straight ahead. Now, we can't see into the nose radome while doing this and we obviously can't leave anyone out there to watch what's happening, so we just give it a couple of minutes then shut down to go outside and check.
It actually worked fairly well. The bags are puffed out, so we open one up to check. The corn didn't all pop, so it needed some more time to cook. But it tastes great. Then we hear the sirens. Not police sirens, or ambulance sirens, but something that sounds like air-raid sirens from old movies.
We quickly secure the aircraft and run back inside to find out what's going on. Everyone else is already packed into Maintenance Control for the same reason, and have just been informed that our host nation's radar warning systems have been going berserk. With a sinking feeling I realize that an imaging radar will have pretty much exactly the same RF characteristics as a fire-control radar. I own-up, sort-of, and remind them that we were just "out doing some training" on our new radar and that may be what they detected. The maintenance chief calls it in and, due to nothing else happening, the sirens eventually stop.
As I slip out the door with the other techs, I hear somebody behind me ask "Why am I smelling popcorn?"
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Ei ollut suokaasua eikä sääpallo.
Tosin luin sen 2000 alussa jossain kohtaa, ilmankos en löytänyt kun hain sen ajan TM netistä, oli noin vanha.
