using 90 GPH of $6/gallon aviation fuel

putting B52’s in to service as CAS platforms

They cancelled the Comanche but this thing is still bleeding the forces dry? Shit.

But it was cool to see the slat drop when he started really cranking on it about 4:15

Military pilot, airline pilot, other commercial pilot, private pilot?

For some reason I had it in my head that the deck issues were primarily a landing concern because vertical take offs will be extremely rare. Might be less of an issue if they could go to rolling landings, but I don’t know what that does for management of the deck space on a flat top gator.

Marketing exercise? The Brits are already just as pregnant with this as the US. This was actual testing.

I wonder what altitude (I can’t really tell from the video) they were at when this happened and why the lower guy decided not to cut away. If they were at an altitude where normal mortals would start a stack they should have been well above the safe cut away altitude. This, in theory, would have reduced the load on…

Oh, come on. I grant that his almost rabid F-35 hate calls into question his objectivity on the subject, but this isn’t simply a news aggregator site. He is genuninely adding editorial content in most cases and we should all expect some spin in these articles. At least he is backing his position with information and…

We tell the new guys that they make a highly classified AC-17 variant.

What do you suppose would happen if you were sitting in a field or a park a mile or so away from an airport, sort of near the approach but not directly under, and launched a model rocket as AF1 was passing by to land?

If the War College is essential to teach our combatant commanders the strategies they need to win in battle, then Pentagon Procurement History College is needed so that we don’t keep reliving the costly mistakes of our past.

And yet we keep re-electing our senators and representatives who are supposed to be the ones protecting us from this. In a way, they are worse than the defense industry, because at least the defense industry is relatively honest about it. Yeah, we’re here to make money. Now we can make more money if we have great PR…

I’d be amazed if those Sea Kings had less than 10K hours. It is my understanding that airframe hours are less critical in a helicopter than a fixed wing aircraft. However the dynamic components are more critical in a helo.

I know US land based aircraft have the hook, but do the SAABs?

These seats in modern aircraft are 0-0 rated. That is 0 altitude and 0 airspeed. That means if the pilot is sitting still on the ground and something goes catastrophically wrong, he should in theory be able to eject safely.

There are two types of lease that I am aware of. One is a straight up lease like you would get with a car. You pay X amount for Y time and during that time you get the aircraft, you are required to keep the aircraft up and you return it at the end of the lease at which point it gets sold to a third world country. You…

It turns out so in this case. If it was headed straight down the runway, sure, stick with it. But if it looked like it was heading for the grass before he punched out, then it’s a tough call. If it had flipped somehow it could have been worse.

I’m not sure in this case that it “saved” him. Looks to me like he would have been fine riding it out. Not that I blame him, he probably only punched out when he realized that it wasn’t going to stay on the runway.

Some of the items in that post are like saying I could have bought 100,000 oranges instead of an F-150.