Twist28712

If you mean the black sealant or whatever around all the canopy glass, none were black when I was in, I figured that was newish paint style and all canopies were that greenish-yellow color when I was around. Looks like she got updated when she was rebuilt, here's a picture of 339 with the 148th in December 2020. I was Avionics (AFSC 2A352), when I last saw 339 she still had a GAC (General Avionics Computer) that was to be replaced, in the CCIP modification, by the MMC. A lot has changed since then, I don't know how long ago they started doing that to 16s. After Spang, I went to the 339th at Mountain Home (another squadron of 16s that no longer exists, they're F-15s now) and those were the same way (only post-CCIP, I got to play with the MMC and color MFDs on them) It could be as simple as some higher up thought it looked cool the way it always was and they didn't want it changed. You may laugh at that, but we once had to fight hard against a Lt. Col. that wanted us to swap nose radomes between two aircraft because the paint schemes would match better (light grey cone on a darker grey jet and a dark grey cone on a lighter grey jet, he wanted dark on dark and light on light). We lost that fight, swapped radomes, took 9 people an entire day to get them switched then a couple hours on the next shift doing all the ops checks. I'm liking that tail, looks awesome!

339 wore the Stinger from around 2000 to late 2002. She went with us to one of the last ONWs and when we got back, half the squadron went and got new paintjobs. 339 came back without the bee, 829 wore it after that, from like end of 2002 on (not sure if or when 829 lost it, I left Spangdahlem at the end of 2003). If you were interested in doing others, when 339 was the 22nd flagship, 91-0352 was the 52nd FW flagship (same thing, when they got painted after ONW, 352 lost the job to a 23rd jet 96-0082, they traded back and forth over the years). I don't know what years she wore it, but 96-0080 was the Hawks flagship for a long bit. Just interesting history on 91-0339, when the 22nd and 23rd merged back into the 480th, they gave away a bunch of jets to the 148th Minnesota ANG. 339 was one of them. In 2018, while deployed, a sandstorm knocked a sunshade down on top of 339 (and like 5 other jets) severely damaging the aircraft. After extensive work, 3 of the aircraft were rebuilt and 3 others were scrapped. 339 was the last one rebuilt, and she returned to service in January of this year.

First, I like your work here. Very nice. I wanted to know if you would be willing to make a variant of this with an older Spangdahlem flash. I've been looking for 91-0339 from it's days in the 22nd FS at Spangdahlem when it was the Stinger flagship like here: https://imgur.com/a/BqYEZ0C I used to be stationed there, worked on these 16s, including the real version of 91-0340 you made in your pictures (I might have worked on 418 once or twice, that was a 23rd jet, sometimes we combined for deployments)