Well, no, not really. It’s actually a pretty cool series of articles in the Reno Journal Gazette, tracking a carrier air wing and the carrier itself towards deployment. Well worth a read for those who are fans of the bidness:

Next year’s Stennis fliers are now training in Fallon

Before boarding their ship, pilots preparing for next year’s Pacific Ocean cruise on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis rehearsed combat above the Northern Nevada desert.

“It’s awesome flying out there,” Lt. j.g. Joe Berta said of last summer’s month-long practice at Fallon Naval Air Station…

Fallon is perhaps most famous as home of the (ed. prestgious) Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun (ed. actually, that’s TOPGUN. One word, all caps), where elite pilots learn to teach the latest combat lessons. But the biggest job at Fallon is air wing training. During a year, about four wings come to Fallon, each for its month of pre-deployment rehearsal.

Air wing squadron a close-knit team

Joking. Teasing. Trusting. Trying to be the best.

“I love it,” Tennille said of flying an F/A-18F Hornet with the rest of the pilots in his squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. “It’s kind of like being on a sports team. You have kind of a special relationship.”

Tennille, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a degree in mathematics (ed. Geek.), hasn’t played for the Lynx since 1997. He flies for the Black Knights of VFA-154, one of eight squadrons that form Carrier Air Wing Nine aboard the Stennis.

The squadron is the air wing’s basic unit. The Black Knights are Tennille’s team.

“You see these guys every day,” said Tennille, who’s been with the Knights nine months. “You fly together. You eat with your squadron. You sit with your squadron.”

We get it.

Landing at night in the middle of the ocean: It’s not only surreal, it’s a little scary

When a supersonic jet approaches the back of an aircraft carrier to land at night, the plane appears headed for a spot right between your eyes…

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier moving on the Pacific Ocean at night is a dark and forbidding place…

A carrier isn’t brightly illuminated like a cruise ship. There are few lights and they’re dim. Airplanes parked on the deck are shadows. Members of the deck crew appear as silhouettes in the moonlight.

The whole scene is surreal and a little scary.

He needs to get on board with the talking points. It’s more than a little scary. It’s terrifying. You know, for ordinary people. It’s just that we’re so dern brave.

But anyway.

By land and by sea

Leaving family behind is probably the hardest part of going to sea.

“That gets tough,” said Gilliam, the father of 8-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. “As you get older, the time flies a lot faster. Six months used to be an eternity. Now, it’s the blink of an eye.”

Gilliam and his pilots have been away from home much of this year, getting ready for the cruise.

At Fallon, they learned the latest combat tactics. The path Carrier Air Wing Nine followed from the Northern Nevada desert to the Pacific Ocean is typical. Each of the Navy’s 12 air wings trains at Fallon before joining a carrier.

The Stennis is large, almost 24 stories high, with a 4-and-one-half acre flight deck. But it gets small when an air wing such as Gilliam’s, with about 2,500 men and women who fly and maintain the planes, joins the Stennis and its regular crew of more than 3,000 that maintains and operates the ship.

Good stuff, and more at the main RJG site if you’re still interested.