Picture of Kids looking inside an F-16 Falcon Fighter Jet.

Visiting the Air National Guard
183rd Fighter Squadron, 6-12-2000
Springfield, IL.

Steff and Libby take a close look at this F16 falcon

Steff has flown the simulators and this Falcon looks very much like the game Falcon 4.0 .   Libby hasn't flown the simulators yet but her time will come. 

With the combination of watching movies about the f-16, building f-16 models, playing with f-16 simulators and now visiting a real Air Force base with the f-16's, these kids really learn their stuff.  Or next visit is the Quad Cities Airshow on July 14-16 in Davenport Iowa.  Steff has been to four airshows so far but most of the other kids have only visited one, Libby has never seen one. 

The airshow visit will be the same kind of learning progression.  Before the show we will watch movies and talk about the kinds of aircraft that we will see there.  After only one summer these kids will have learned a lot, but after two and three summers of this hyper-tech training, these kids will be way ahead of the other kids in their neighborhood.  This is what we are working on now, a group of kids that can be the neighborhood leaders and leaders with the Y-I-BET  as the group expands.

I want the cool kids of the neighborhood and school to be the smart kids of the neighborhood and school.  This is what the Y-I-BET program is all about. 

This is what the inside of an F-16 Falcon Fighter Jet looks like.  The ejection seat is leaned back to allow the pilot to withstand more "G's" in a turn and also to allow the ejection seat to fit into the smaller airframe on the F-16.  The instruments are what is called a "Glass Cockpit" with all of the instruments being on a TV type of screen instead of the older mechanical flight instruments.  This gives the pilot the option of moving the instruments from screen to screen or using specialized instruments in different flight modes and missions.  This is a big advantage in flight control instrument technology.  Also on the F-16 Falcon is the side stick controller.  Instead of using a joystick located in between the pilots legs, the joystick is on the right hand panel of the cockpit reducing pilot fatigue and allowing the pilot to control the plane under a higher G condition.