The skin on all planes is ultra thin to save weight. It’s only there for aerodynamics so most planes don’t us the skin for structural strength. It’s what’s underneath that’s important. Look at the nose of about any A-10 in a picture. It’s all dented up from the refueling boom clanging into it as they try to get the…

Nope, an A-10 getting hit would follow the same procedure, RTB and asses the damage. They just have a statistically better chance of making it back, with 2 engines, armor around the pilot, redundant systems, etc. You jettison stores to reduce the stress on the air frame and so that if you do ball it up on landing you…

Unless they jettisoned the whole rack with the bombs attached, a 500 pounder is going to leave a 10 inch diameter hole in the ground and stop about 20 feet under. In dry, sandy ground the hole might collapse and fill in. Finding them is not as easy as you might think unless they hit rocks in which case they might…

The “Japanese public” isn’t any more monolithic than ours is. Some hated it, some loved it, same as any political move here.

Yeah, particularly since they elected Abe.

Thant means turning around and making another pass. Not a good idea if one of your horizontal stabilizers is about to fall off. When you get hit you don’t usually know how bad it is either. Better to RTB than risk having to eject and get captured by those guys.

It could have been a 23mm or 14.5mm too. Lots of them around and they’ll do a job on a plane and can reach higher. Depends what press reports of “small arms” mean. The Haquanni network even has 57mm anti aircraft guns supplied by China.

The fuses have anti withdrawal booby traps. It’s a very risky proposition trying to dig one of those up and use it. It can be done but most of the old artillery rounds and aerial bombs used in Iraq for IEDs were looted from Saddam’s stocks and didn’t have fuses in them. So they were much safer to handle. If you don’t…

You mean Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin. Palin never said that, and btw Russia is only 2.5 miles from Alaska (Big Diomede and Little Diomede islands). The straight freezes in winter so you could technically walk from the USA to Russia. Mainland to mainland is about 55 miles, but you could see that far on a clear day…

I hope the driver had his helmet resting on the front rim before he hit the water! M-60 tank crews liked chasing us grunts through the woods at Ft. Benning. They could just run over the pine trees. One guy made the mistake of hitting an oak tree, though, and didn’t fare so well. The tank was fine, but the commander…

You are joking right? Do you remember the controversy about the pilots song book? Ever hear the songs of Dos Gringos? There are a lot of National Guard units deploying these days that pretty much reflect the folks from their area, and some of them are in the Bible Belt. I have a buddy who flew CH-46’s in the Marines,…

Hey, that’s a hardship tour, do you know how expensive Jeremiah Weed is there if you can’t get it at the class VI store and have to buy it on the local economy? LOL!

For pure adrenaline rush very little beats flying nap-of-the-earth in a helicopter. You may only be going 100 knots, but when you are flying 3 feet over the vegetation the rush is incredible. Army pilots who didn’t come back with foliage in Huey skids after NOE training were considered wimps. The brass were less…

Yeah, on the ground when they flair for landing you can hear the hydraulic actuators (kind of sounds like an air wrench at the tire shop).

If it used COS parts, they were probably made in China!

Yes, someone said it has been something like 40 years since a similar incident. The SRB’s are very reliable. If the missile is dropped and the solid fuel cracks, an explosion can occur when the flame front crosses the crack. With modern solid fuels, that’s not likely because it’s pretty rubbery. More likely the…

They typically fire 20-30 round bursts with the 20mm. They don’t hold the trigger down and walk tracers onto the target like WWII.

The marines have been looking for something to fly gunship escort for their V-22’s that can keep up and match the range. This could be ideal. 250 knots may be a little slow, but Sikorsky seems pretty confident that they can do better than 250 knots.

Or maybe keep the blades short and make the rotor 8 bladed. A combination of more blades and greater disc separation may work. Or possibly even a Chinook style tandem rotor with contra rotating discs. The Chinooks blades interleave. Having interleaving tandem-hub contra-rotating discs would be an “interesting” concept!

Yeah, they are composites so you basically end up with a bunch of string. They break but not many pieces fly off.