PhanCon 2009

Wow, what a great time we all had. From the reception Tuesday night at the VFW post, through the visits to the QF-4 flightline, a visit by the Spook, EOR photo ops of the F-22, and visits to F-22 and Tornado OPs, with a special photo shoot of the 55,555 hour Tornado, a stop by the high speed test facility and finishing with a fine brief on F-4G Ops in Desert Storm, it was packed with interesting things to do and see. I think all were really pleased to get an upclose view and brief on the F-22, weapon bays open! We even squeezed in a four ship F-4 takeoff. Mucho thanks to Holloman AFB for providing a very friendly and thorough look into operations there. Do click on the shots to the right for comments and a hi-res view. Photos courtesy of Fred Sheffler ©2009.

Where next? The attendees voted to try to have PhanCon 2010 at Tyndall AFB, FL next year. We had a good number of new folks this year, and we hope to encourage more new folks to attend next year. For you old hats, yes, we know you've seen and done it all before. We'd like to do something different for you too. Ideas? Members, join in on our private forum to comment further. You should have gotten an email with how to do that. If you didn't then we either don't have the right email address or it was not provided to us. Rectify that by sending an email to our VP OPS. Go to Contacts to send the email.

A salute to the members that made it happen this year:

Jim and Helen Thompson

Dave Wimmer

And the other folks on the hard working eBoard staff: KBob, Fred, Jack, Steve, Clark, Mike, and Annie Lee (AND of course, our SPOOK!)

In addition, this year we used a service called EZregister to securely handle online reservations. It only cost us a buck a reservation, and it provided a very easy to setup interface. We hope you found it easy to use as well. We plan to use them again in 2010, and heartily recommend any non-profit hosting an event to check out their extensive services: http://www.ezregister.com .

The Veterans Memorial Air Park needs your support. Adopt an F-4.

You can help out on the restoration and upkeep of two F-4s at the air park in Fort Worth, TX. They need to repaint both F-4s, plus perform some maintenance. One we fondly know of as Scooby (QF-4S 153821). The other, F-4C 64-0825 , was recently acquired and needs to be repainted in USAF colors. Call 800-575-0535 or write obainof@verizon.net for more info. Or click on the shot of the brochure to the right (Pardon the creases).

• 50th Anniversary of Fighter Wing 71 "R". A pictorial with thumbnail history.
• 497 TFS Night Owl Crew missing since '71 (see Whats New to left).
• The adventures of YRF-4C 62-12200.
• Brief existence of the 75th TRW chronicled 66-71.
• and more