VFA-122 Patch Flying Eagles

In January 1999 Strike Fighter Squadron 122 became the first squadron in the Navy to operate the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. The Flying Eagles are the West Coast fleet replacement squadron at NAS Lemoore, California, where newly winged pilots and Weapon Systems Officers learn the jet before they go to the fleet. Every six weeks a new class of 8 to 12 starts a course that runs about nine months and ends with day and night carrier qualification. Marines come through the same pipeline. The squadron motto says it plainly: We Train the Experts.

The Flying Eagles name belonged to VA-122 at Lemoore long before the Super Hornet. Redesignated VA-122 in 1959 and known as the Spad School, the squadron trained pilots on the A-1 Skyraider, moved to NAS Lemoore in 1963, and took delivery of its first A-7 Corsair II in November 1966, when the school became Corsair College. It closed in May 1991 after about 32 years. When the Navy set up the first Super Hornet replacement squadron at Lemoore, it took the Flying Eagles name. On 1 October 2010 the legacy Hornet Rough Raiders of VFA-125 were folded into VFA-122, making it the single Hornet and Super Hornet FRS on the West Coast, and since February 2016 it has flown Super Hornets only.

The patch is a 4.12 by 5 inch round design with gold scroll tabs at top and bottom and a black merrowed edge. FLYING EAGLES runs across the upper scroll and VFA-122 across the lower one in blue. In the center a bald eagle with brown wings and a white head flies hard to the right, gold arrows gripped in its talons. Behind it is a shield with a blue chief of five white stars over red and white stripes, the national colors carried by a squadron that trains the fleet. It has an iron-on backing, and a few stitches around the merrowed border will keep it there for good.

Many Super Hornet pilots and WSOs on the West Coast have a Flying Eagles chapter in the logbook. The squadron runs with about 225 officers, 408 enlisted Sailors and more than 60 aircraft, and it often sends jets to NAS Fallon, NAF El Centro and carriers at sea for weapons and carrier work. Its maintainers keep a training fleet flying day and night, and with CNATTU the squadron trains maintenance personnel as well. On 6 April 2011 the squadron lost pilot Matthew I. Lowe and WSO Nathan H. Williams in a crash near Lemoore, and they are remembered by everyone who wore the patch.

It fits a shadow box with the patches of the fleet squadrons that came after Lemoore, or the flight jacket worn to a VFA-122 reunion. It is also a good gift for a new aviator just finishing the Super Hornet syllabus, or for a maintainer who kept the training jets on the line. Many Super Hornet crews on the West Coast started here.