the clueless american

Believe it or not, this photo is now circulating through the Argentinian Air Force as an example of how not to land during the student solo. Anyone with minimal Photoshop experience will recognize it as altered. Here's the story:

In January my student had his solo ride to the sector. When he came back to land, he reportedly had a steep descent angle on final. After shutting down engines, he confirmed that he had landed with 5 G's when the aircraft has a limit of 3.68 G's for landing. In an attempt to not sound like an idiot, he then tried to blame the hard landing on the fact that his camera fell out of his pocket on final, and the noise distracted him and caused the bad landing. The news of his hard landing and the camera made it to the base commander in about 15 minutes.

Now, I like my job here and the people in my squadron, but in all honesty following the regulations doesn't rank very high in the Spanish list of priorities. However, when they've decided that something is really bad, as opposed to all of the other illegal stuff I've seen here, they go ballistic. To make a long story a little shorter, my student wound up getting about 2 weeks of arresto where he wasn't even allowed to leave his room except for meals and classes. The punishment wasn't for the hard landing but for having a camera in the airplane on his solo flight.

About a week later I decided to inject a little humor into the situation by showing this photo at the morning briefing. On a side note, I really wanted to do the whole thing in the The Gimp, but at the time I had version 1.3 which had a broken intelligent scissors tool. I Photoshopped a picture from the solo flight of my student from last year into what you see above. I thought adding the date with the mechanical-looking OCR-A font was a nice touch. I introduced the photo by saying that I had encountered a directory on the local net which had photos taken by a remote camera of all the recent landings. My poor student turned white as a sheet when I said I had found a good one from 29 January, the day of his solo. He didn't get much better when the photo came up, but the other studs realized it was a joke and laughed.

Now, the best part is that the weather guy, a nice 60+ year old who's recently started using computers, didn't recognize the photo as a fake and didn't understand my explanation. So, he took the copy I gave him and emailed it to one of the former exchange officers from Argentina. That guy also didn't recognize it as a fake and started passing it around his Air Force. Within a few days the current Argentinian here was telling me what a stir it was causing there. In fact, this morning he told me that he received another email asking for a detailed description of the "mishap" and photos of the plane after it hit the ground. I'm tempted to concoct a fake story and email it to Argentina, but I'm not sure I want to cause any more problems there than I already have!

Because it's very easy to make a claim without proof, I'm including the original photo below so that you can clearly see that the top picture is a fake.