(Thud)
>by the by...did you ever find that film of the Scav's last ride.  I
>will give left nut for that baby.

  (Holmes)
yikes! No need to get that extreme.... I've attached it to this message,
lemme know if it makes it to you ok.
 
 A little explanation - Scav flew AW on a budget, and he was good about
sticking to it (unlike most of us "one more sortie" types;). He loved the
scenarios, the whole persona bit, reliving history and all that... so he
flew in the scenarios and with me in training but didn't do much flying in
the arena. We were going to wing together in a scenario called Salerno, as
109 pilots, but for some reason (I forget why, maybe an impending AW upgrade
or something) Salerno was cancelled. So the Scav had some budgeted time to
make a few trips into the arena.
 
 At this time I was heavily involved in the training program. My schedule
was - instructor for Tuesday night training, AWTA class on Monday and
another on Thursday, training with Scav on Friday. This left Sun and Wed
open for scenarios and Sat for free-flying. Heh, no wonder I caught a case
of the burnout. 

 Scav had "found" the Hellcat, and was starting to rack up some multi-keel
missions. He wasn't King Kong or anything, but he also wasn't embarrassing
himself much anymore... and we were making a few arena sorties now and again.  

 Two of my students decided to form a squadron (much like the formation of
the Turkey Hams, with me, Quarters and PoohTao all students in the same
class. Btw, Hams just celebrated their 4th birthday;), Rail and TK started
the Seven Screaming Dizbusters.
They recruited a few folks and made a plan for a divebomb mission or
something... sorta their first ever "squadnight". I went along and grabbed
Scav to come with us.
We were both made honorary Dizbusters :)
 
 So we show up and I tell em (pointing to Scav) "he's here to keep the
enemas off of ME!"... kinda like some sorta bigshot, arriving with his own
personal bodyguard/wingman, heh, we had a good chuckle with that... and,
well off we went.
 
 You'll see in the radio chatter that he does just that, blasting some Ki
that was just about to put my lights out. He wound up with 2 keels in this,
I had 4, and he
sorta sacrificed himself to get me out and landed. Ending is a bit of a
bummer... and it was the last I ever saw of the Scavenger... such is life
sometimes.
 
 The film unzips as sdbmis1.cam (for SDB's first mission)

cheers,
        Ho