To loosen a bolt, try using a hammer to hit the end of the wrench. Works great on drain plugs when changing the oil on jack stands; saves a lot of muscles too!

The photography is up to R&Ts excellent standards. And Sam Smith is an outstanding writer (first found him writing for Roundel). He has a great knack for getting me into his vision.

But, if it happened more often it wouldn’t be as special to watch. We were pulling for him (and Edwards) the last 100 laps. How about Trevor Bayne and Clint Bowyer??? Great finishes for them and their teams as well.

No, I expect it will have a LOT more action than Formula E. And MUCH better than the dog shows!

It’s not just peak G load that you have to review, but the duration of that peak as well.

Zeek, if you watch these posts, note that every one of them ends in a successful landing. Also, those massive altitude changes you see at 300 ft., in reality, is probably less than 10 ft. If it happens at 15 ft. (which it usually doesn’t, wind excursions flatten out close to the ground), you just get a ‘thud’ from the…

“Pathetic” is a word thrown around too much. THIS was pathetic.

It’s not uneven application. The coatings are applied by robotics at LM, and I expect any large re-coating would be done via similar methods at the depot. I also know that the coatings *and* the way they are applied was classified to the moon. Classification may have been downgraded since then (mid-2000s), but I doubt…

Um, I've experienced both, and I'd say the Vulcan and the D model BUFFs would just about be a tie. Win then goes to the B52 based on the ability to blot out the sky. ;)

Ar, Ar. No, B-52Ds. And, I didn’t work on them, I was in a "temporary" work trailer right off the runway. When the Ds did a water-injected takeoff (or the KC-135As at the time), all conversation ceased. And, because they took quite a bit of time to get up to speed, it took some time. Then twice a year they'd do a…

Actually, that's the XF84H "Thunderscreech". I wasn't thinking of non-production aircraft. I worked at General Dynamics/Lockheed-Martin throughout the 80s, and we were *SO* glad when they replaced the D models with Hs.

Ha, HA! I see your gentle Phantoms and raise it with B52Ds doing a water-injection takeoff:

Could actually be a noise abatement procedure. I've seen some base's procedures that call for a max-performance climb within the base boundaries, then transition to a low-power cruise climb profile.

http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.…-2a5c-4719-970e-78ed0f07ba98&pgno=7&pgsize=100

What year are you thinking of?

Um, I’ll take devil’s advocate for that. When the F-16 and F-18 introduced pitch instability to modern fighter aircraft, they also introduced the advantage of generating lift off the horizontal tails, allowing the wings to be sized smaller for a given wing loading. That eliminated one of the big advantages of a canard…

I can only guess from what shows in the video, plus having visited the Arizona memorial within the last month. You can hear a mechanical tone increase in pitch, which I'm thinking is the tail rotor. Also, there is nothing close to a landing area there, so, IMHO, I think the pilot had some kind of failure indication…

Yup, beat me to it.

For your worst case scenario, I’m under the impression they are out of fuel around the finish line

I originally thought so as well, but the police report tells a different story: