There have been some excellent observations here, refuting Mr. Diaz's distaste for death symbols on military insignia. In the interest of full disclosure, I flew with three fighter squadrons: the Gunfighters (VF-124), the Black Knights (VF-154), and the Hunters (VF-201), none of them named for death images, directly,…

Having the tumbling shell of an already blown up aircraft fall nearly straight down onto a city is very different than having a fuel-laden aircraft drilling into an arena at 200+ knots.

Wow. Neither my Motorola Xoom (one of the first and most popular Android tablets) nor my Samsung Galaxy S III (brand new, totally ass-kicking LTE phone) support this app. WTF?

The military continues to award "feel good" medals for good job performance in non-combat roles. Doing so is a cheap incentive and gives the vast majority of military members, who never see combat, an opportunity to feel good, at the expense of the relatively few warriors who see the value of medals diluted.

Without a cup, one can see the different areas of the sparkler: the bare wire and the fuel-dipped wire. Also, one can see the red-hot metal of a lit sparkler approaching the soft pink fingers.

America does not tolerate having our jets shot down, because in an air-to-air environment, we are supposed to be the best, period. Even one loss is a national crisis which upsets the voting public into a frenzy. So, throwing American pilot bodies into old jets and sending them up against equal and/or superior…

Good thing iPads similar to the ones being denied shipment aren't otherwise allowed in airplanes and, especially, in airplane cockpits...

Or, for $40 you could buy yourself an Estwing hammer that will last you a lifetime and a screwdriver and tip set with about fifty bits, including flat, phillips, torx, allen, square, and nut drivers.

"Fox 2. Cock 1 kill bandit" (Cock 1 fired a simulated AIM-9 Sidewinder. It was not defended and called a kill by Cock 1.)

You were coming... Heh, heh, heh.

Amen, my brutha.

We trained in a pressure chamber to learn to recognize the symptoms of hypoxia. They took us quickly up to a simulated altitude of 25,000 feet within a couple of minutes, and within a couple minutes more, all of us were severely incapacitated to the point of almost being unable to put on our O2 masks.

I'll liken the experience to cockpit vertigo. Your brain may be telling you that the light is nothing and is not another airplane that is going to hit you in about ten seconds, but when your eyes are looking right at it and saying (as I once did to my pilot who was NOT seeing an imminent collision: descend, descend,…

I've had several occasions when either I or my pilot were unable to ascertain the closure of another aircraft and we maneuvered to either avoid it or to further judge its relative motion.

You're exactly right. Being stacked up like that is, literally, eye-watering. It's even worse on the boat; the jets are lined up just a few feet from each other. Even though we were on 100% O2, the fumes entering the cockpit through the ECS were bad enough to almost blind us. I remember sitting there, waiting up…

If the offending aircraft was receiving radio warnings, it would have already followed instructions to turn away. The fact it is being intercepted indicates it is not receiving the radio warnings.

A. You can't shoot trespassers. Legally or morally, anyway.

I'm warning you; do not look this up.

Even in California, eight rounds is perfectly legal, assuming one is not hunting (in which case, three is the maximum allowed and the gun must be plugged beyond that capacity).

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." ~Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis