I JUST put solar panels on my roof (haven't even turned 'em on yet, waiting for the electric company to pull their thumb out.) For me, the cost was pretty much a wash. It was a $250 deposit to get the ball rolling. About 1/3rd of the cost of my setup will be covered by the Federal tax rebate. The remainder will be…

I love this 'cause you can't see the camera reflected in his visor. Classy.

The Russians paint their fighters exactly the same way I used to paint my BattleTech minis.

Somebody misjudged the wind, eh?

What's the additional lever that appears to fold out from underneath the engine power controls? Thrust reversers?

Read the headline quickly; I thought it said "Jochen Mass Took Out 'A-Lister'" and I was all, "GEORGE CLOONEY NOOOO!"

I guess now we know how many times you're allowed to mock the producer's car.

Agreed.

Well, no. The aircraft was a valuable military asset (having been constructed partially with Federal subsidies). Beyond that, the Japanese didn't have the intrinsic knowledge of how to build such sophisticated aircraft or, to an even greater degree, something like the Wright Twin Cyclone. Keeping the IJN from…

Great article, thank you!

I, for one, appreciate Mr. Regular's conspicuously recurring Ben Folds Five references.

Who trained the Hermit Kingdom's PR flacks?! Their ability to consume a whole paragraph with multisyllabic words while saying nothing at all is nothing short of breathtaking.

Presumably, but in this particular case I think the Thai aviation authorities would have jurisdiction.

The best advice I never took was from one of my mom's cousins. He was a marine mechanic, and offered to more or less apprentice me in the business. "Cousin Al" was a bit rough around the edges - he had a lot of ink, much of which did not look like it came from the sort of establishment that sterilized its equipment,…

Ahahahahaha, I lost my shit at 2:31.

>It is batshit crazy to me to build one of these fucking things yourself

Fair enough. But the math is pretty well understood. Frati's "The Glider" ( http://www.seqair.com/TheGlider/TheG… ) was published back in 1946, and has about as detailed a breakdown of the aerodynamics, loads and mechanics as you could ever hope…

I'm an aviation nut in general, but lately glider flight has utterly fascinated me. I'm fixin' to take some lessons this summer; I'll definitely bring a camera along.

I read somewhere that in an ejection sequence, the -35's canopy doesn't blow off. This is because for the -B model, if the engine failed in vertical flight while it's close to the ground, blowing the canopy would drag out the length of the entire ejection sequence too much. So the seat is just shot straight through…

Collapsible ladder storage:

I honestly don't know what the law says about that. As I understand it, usually "identity theft" is done explicitly for monetary gain: you use somebody else's pristine credit report to cover up your own carnival of fiscal irresponsibility in order to defraud a bank out of some money. It might be hard to get an I.T.…