Its, its, its like the king of all YellowJackets, the true assholes of the bee universe. Lets just take all that makes a regular been and a wasp and shove it into the body of a hornet, now, give it a gaudy paint job and a bad attitude. That’s a yellow jacket. This thing, its like, a yellow jacket, grande sized, and…

yeah, pretty much...

I have to believe that there’s a way to use a parachute that’s similar to what the para-jumpers use, the one that’s wide and arc shaped, to perhaps get the initial velocity numbers down a bit, and also allow for a glide back to the vicinity of the barge, then, cut the chute and fire the gimbaled engine and retros to…

OK, I’m going to get this out here because I’ve been intentionally trying to forget this event my entire life. Maybe telling it will help...

Both of which are more expensive than the already proven platforms that they currently use. The navalized version of the Apache was a proposal, meaning that development work on it hadn't been completed. There was still the whole morass of procurement and development costs that would have been needed, making them…

No one can predict what the military will do, its worse than gambling on horse racing.

Believe it or not, from all that I've read on the subject, it has more to do with the AH-1 Venom than the blackhawk/huey comparison.

I have to agree with you there on reliability. The MD600N we had at work was an absolute trainwreck. Every time they flew me some place on it, something broke during the flight. Half the time they wanted to use it to fly me somewhere, it was broken (not scheduled maintenance, which was just insanely time consuming…

Theirs a bit of a weight penalty for a NOTAR system like that, but there's also a drag advantage. It makes for a helo that can't quite lift as much, but can have a longer range and higher top speed given the same starting frame size and powerplant. At least, that's what was explained to me about the MD-600N, a…

I've flown in a similar model, the MD-600N, on several occassions and its definitely a neat thing to see. There is a slight weight penalty for the system, but, there's a drag advantage, so it all kind of balances out in the end. It is definitely, noticeably quieter than a traditional tail rotor equipped helo.

Almost all of them were metalurgy limited. They had power enough to go faster, but would have melted parts eventually.

Because Rear Suspension

And this, right here, is one of the most braind dead decisions that I can ever imagine Ford making. The 1.6L Turbo I-4 has about the same horsepower as the 2.5L I4, but has a MUCH fatter torque curve and higher peak torque. With the additional weight of 5 kids of varying ages, a wife, and gear for a day out in the…

First, thank you for your service. I know that there are a lot of people around these parts that don't appreciate the work that law enforcement does on a day to day basis that makes their lives better, but there are those of us that do.

Rare Bear - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Bear

Delta doesn't find the BR715 to be too bad. They rather like it. It has very low maintenance requirements between regular PMs and rebuilds.

The JT-8D is also almost a drop-in fit with respect to the E-3 and E-8. Not much of an improvement in fuel economy, but they'll be more reliable, easier to service, have more power, and do bring some fuel efficiency improvement to the table.

There's a calculation that I don't remember off the top of my head, that shows that very short trips don't benefit from them. Their biggest overall fraction of fuel gain is from the reduction of drag generated by the tip vortex off the end of the wind, converting that to lift instead. During cruise, which planes on…

The Up-Front cost of those big, high bypass turbofans is considerably more than the smaller BR700s.

Why not just go the Russian Bear Bomber route and mount 4 europrop TP4000 turbo-props on the thing. It'll probably just fly around the world with the specific fuel consumption of those things... ;)