I'm sure I saw this answered here before, but for the life of me can't find it...

Why do the Thunderbirds fly with oxygen maks, and say the Blue Angels do not?

From a wanna be pilot and avid air show junkie, thanks for all your efforts, you guys are great!

Looking forward to spending Fathers Day with the kids and the Thunderbirds at Tinker Air Force Base June 20, 2010!!

It has to do with the F-16's APU. There is a chance that during an emergency fumes or some such could enter the cockpit. This is not a problem if you have your mask on so it's Air Force regs that they have to wear it. The F/A-18 doesn't have this problem.

EPU, there isn't an APU on the Viper. The fuel that runs the EPU is Hydrazine (H-70) and it's some nasty stuff. You come in contact with it, they strip you down and hose you off, then cart you off to the hospital for a series of blood draws and other evals.

Grab's response in the past when asked about why the pilots wear masks:
"We have toyed with the idea of losing the masks but in the end we fly a single engine jet with an Emergency Power Unit that runs off Hydrazine (terrible stuff). Not wearing the mask would violate an emergency procedure that states 100% O2 with the EPU on."

Here's Grab again, regarding the Thunderbirds taxing out with red "remove before flight" flags still attached:
"That ribbon would be the Emergency Power Unit pin and yes it gets pulled at EOR just prior to the EPU bleed air run up, just don't want to play around with Hydrazine in front of thousands of people."

A quick search also provided these topics with the answer about the O2 masks:
Oxygen Masks
Blue Angels Pay Visit to Nellis

APU, EPU, close enough.

I'm just amazed I beat you all to the punch with first reply.

Thanks for the replies everyone.... I knew I had seen it here before, but for some reason, anytime I do a forum search, it always comes up blank, LOL, no matter what I search for! I'm thinking it's just me.

spaz wrote:I'm thinking it's just me.

It is just you.

This is not meant to knock you or anything, but something that may help anyone using the forum search (in case they happen to read this). As I'm sure you know, you can use AND to define words which must be in the results, OR to define words which may be in the result and NOT to define words which should not be in the result. Use * as a wildcard for partial matches.

For instance if I search for "oxygen mask" it gives me over 3 full pages of threads in the results (up to 75 threads) at the moment.

Searching for "oxygen AND mask" yields only 8 threads total in the results (making it a lot easier to find relevant information), because both words must be present in the posts.

You can further this by searching for "oxygen AND mask AND epu" and you will find that only this thread (the one we're currently in) shows up in the results, because it's the only thread that has posts with all three words present in the same post.

Using the OR and NOT function works in the same way as the AND function, and you can use the wildcard feature (*) if people tend to abbreviate words or use a variation of the same word. Example: Searching for "*birds" would give you more results than searching for "Thunderbirds", "Tbirds" or "T-birds", but it may also give you threads with people simply talking about birds.

I use the AND function a lot, because it isolates the words that must be present in the posts I'm searching for. Just pick your keywords carefully and tie them together and you'll usually find what you're searching for.

Trust me Lawndart (love the name btw), any help or suggestions are always greatly appreciated!

Got another question, but it's for another thread, so I'll head over to that one!

Thanks,

(Now all you have to do is teach me how to keep the aircraft from becoming literally a "lawndart" and I'll be good! ).

Good question and great post about using the search - can apply that to all kinds of internet searches, I had forgotten some of those techniques.