David Cenciotti

You can study and read everything but nothing can match the learning you get by taking part in a real mission. This was yesterday flying with the Tornado ECR of the 155th Gruppo ETS of the @ItalianAirForce doing SEAD/DEAD. Much more to come at @TheAviationist

I want to believe

Interesting. The scenario may be realistic, but the threat does not appear to be at this time according to Italy’s Defense Minister @GuidoCrosetto, who says there is no evidence to support the alarm raised by El Mundo newspaper this morning that Russian ships and drones are preparing to launch attacks against Italy, Spain and France.

Sept. 22, 2004: the day Oceanic Flight 815 disappeared over the Pacific (well, at least in the LOST universe). Nineteen years ago (!), in 2007, I decided to approach one of the biggest mysteries of the series as if it were a real aviation investigation. I wanted to answer the question: where exactly was the Island? Instead of simply drawing a straight line between Sydney and Los Angeles, I retrieved real Qantas flight plans across the Pacific, reconstructed a plausible route for Oceanic 815, calculated where the aircraft would have been when its radio failed six hours after departure, then, using the MS Flight Simulator I flew back then, simulated the subsequent turn toward Nadi described by the pilot in the show. The result placed the crash site roughly 350 km west of Samoa and 600 km north of Fiji, almost exactly where a tiny island, called Wallis Island sits in the South Pacific. So, in September 2007, I published my completely serious aviation analysis of a completely fictional accident and concluded that Wallis could be the real-world location of the LOST Island. Needless to say, the writers had other plans. In fact, less than a year later, the Season 4 finale revealed that the Island could literally be moved through space and time, making the idea of assigning it a single permanent set of coordinates rather problematic. Still, it remains one of my favorite experiments from the early days of @TheAviationist: applying real flight planning, navigation and aviation procedures to one of television’s greatest mysteries. And since today is Sept. 22, the date Oceanic 815 departed Sydney, it seemed like the right time to dig it out again. theaviationist.com/2007/09/2…

Today I met “Black Devil” (#833), one of the most legendary stealth fighters at the Palm Springs Air Museum. This iconic F-117A Nighthawk logged a massive 5,140 flight hours and flew 75 combat missions through Operation Desert Storm and Operation Allied Force, earning it the second-highest combat time in the entire stealth fleet. Here’s a quick walkaround video of the iconic Stealth Jet and a few shots. I’ll share more of the incredible collection at PSAM.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol vibes here

The C-2A Greyhound has flown for the last time. To mark the end of nearly six decades of service, here is a video I shot in October 2009, when I flew aboard a C-2 and landed on USS Nimitz. The quality is obviously quite low: this was filmed with a small handheld camera almost 17 years ago. Still, it gives you a pretty good idea of what a trap landing looked and felt like from inside the Greyhound’s cabin, where passengers sat facing the rear of the aircraft. A unique experience aboard an iconic aircraft in U.S. naval aviation history. You can find a report about the last flight of the @USNavy Greyhound at @TheAviationist here: theaviationist.com/2026/07/2…

Launching from USS Nimitz in a C-2 Greyhound was one of the craziest things I’ve ever experienced… and I’ve done many, from flying low level in an F-104, to going ballistic in a Typhoon at Mach 1.4, to landing vertically on a carrier. Sad that it won’t happen again.

Since you loved the other videos, here is another clip of the Harrier featuring yours truly in the backseat of the rare TAV-8B Harrier of the Italian Navy. With the sundown of the USMC AV-8B, the jump jet remains in service only in Italy and Spain.