Tab Clearing...

• The state of the air war over Ukraine, four years on...


• The Rise of American Bushido


• Meta, belatedly and ineffectively, gets worried about creepers using its pervert glasses.

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Harried

Wednesday saw the official retirement of the AV-8B Harrier II V/STOL ground attack aircraft by the USMC after four decades of service.

Answers to name "Lucky"...

"The pilot of the F-15E Strike Eagle shot down April 3 over Iran was also the pilot of one of the three F-15Es shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident less than five weeks previously, making him “almost certainly” the first Air Force fixed-wing pilot to be shot down twice in the same conflict since the Vietnam war, according to current and former Air Force officials."

This is how you get given a new callsign by your peers.

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Tab Clearing...

• Norwegian F-35s tracking Russian Tu-95 Bears along NATO's northern flank.


• Real time video deepfakes make it easier to scam people live.


• The Russian school training the next generation of hackers, scammers, and influencers, all the better to mess with your mind and shape your opinions.

Rising Sun

Japan, like other democracies in the region, realizes that, despite the US talking about a "strategic pivot to Asia" for something like a decade now, it might well be on its own against China. (You know things are tense in the region if Japan and South Korea are speaking to each other.)

The latest step it's taking is legalizing arms exports, which should be an important source of income for the country, as well as making advanced arms available to nations like the Philippines.

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Tab Clearing...

• Fortunately, that will buff right out: Photos of a visibly patched-up KC-135 transiting through RAF Mildenhall en route back to CONUS for repairs.


• The Click That Cost $11,000: Google placing ads for various third party travel agency intermediaries above the links to the actual hotel is a perfect example of enshittification.


• Europe about to feel jet fuel crunch.

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History Repeats Itself

During World War Two, the Hawker Typhoon and its successor, the Tempest, were vital to the interception of German V-1 "Buzz Bombs" due to their high speed capabilities at low altitudes.

On Sunday, a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon operating as part of the joint UK-Qatari Typhoon Squadron shot down an Iranian drone, probably a Shahed, headed for Qatar.

Qatar operates two squadrons of the jets themselves, and Qatari Air Force Typhoons claimed two Iranian Su-24 Fencer "Aardvarkski" fighter bombers, which would be the first claimed air-to-air kills of the current dust-up.

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War News...

• Three F-15E Strike Eagles got engaged by friendly SAMs over Kuwait, according to CENTCOM. All the Mudhen crews ejected safely.


• In Congressional briefings, administration officials contradict the narrative that we had intel that Iran was preparing a strike Epic Fury was preemptive.


• Dwindling weapons stockpiles could hamper operations.


• Oil prices rising, gas prices will inevitably follow.

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Strange Timing Explained

A lot of assets were still moving into theater, dependents hadn't been evacuated from Naval Support Activity Bahrain and other facilities that were within an easy chip shot of Iranian Fateh launchers across the Gulf, and the attacks were launched in broad daylight... this was obviously something launched on the fly rather than a preplanned zero hour.

Via Matthew Ford, author of War in the Smartphone Age and other books, the Israelis had, in addition to having hacked one of the most popular apps in Iran, gotten intel that Khamenei and other high-ranking Iranian government officials would be meeting in a specific place at a specific time, so that's why the snap launch of a decapitation strike.

EDIT: According to an NYT piece, CIA's trying to claim credit for the intel.

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From 24 hours ago...

That's a lot of big sky iron in one place all at once. Six E-3 Sentries... (mislabeled as E-3Cs, when ours are all E-3Gs) ...at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi. That's something like roughly a third of our AWACs fleet right there.

It's out of SRBM range for most of Iran's arsenal, and I don't know what their MRBM fleet is looking like after our last round of bomb tag with the Islamic Republic.

We're gonna wind up burning up a year's worth of ballistic missile interceptor production in the next couple weeks, I bet.

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Death Ray Spray-and-Pray

Apparently the valiant men and women of the United States Customs and Border Protection agency were using borrowed Army anti drone lasers to protect us from the scourge of children's mylar party balloons (or, since I suppose they could have drifted north from Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande, los globos).

A Pentagon plan to use a high-energy, counter-drone laser without having coordinated with the Federal Aviation Administration about potential risks to civilian flights prompted Wednesday’s unprecedented airspace shutdown over El Paso, Texas, multiple sources told CNN.

Two people familiar with the matter said later Wednesday that Customs and Border Protection, not the US military, was in control of the laser technology when it was used this week around El Paso to shoot down balloons.

I'm having flashbacks to that time they shut down the entire city of Boston for a guerilla Aqua Teen Hunger Force ad campaign featuring Lite Brites.

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Incompetence or Malice?

In today's episode of "Government: Incompetent or Malicious?", the FAA announced late yesterday that it would be shutting down El Paso airport and the surrounding airspace below 18,000 feet for ten days due to unspecified national security reasons.

There was no advance warning, nobody seems to know why (as of this writing), and even Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss is affected.

The restriction encompasses a 10-mile area around El Paso, and includes the neighboring community of Santa Teresa, N.M., but does not apply to aircraft flying above 18,000 feet, the F.A.A. notices said. They did not detail the security reasons that prompted the restriction.

The airport issued a travel advisory on social media saying that all flights to and from the airport had been grounded, including commercial, cargo and general aviation. It told travelers to contact their airlines for the latest flight information.

Of course everybody's engaged in wild speculation on social media, but anyone who claims they know anything for sure at this point is talking out their ass.

The only thing I do know for sure that it means is that the airlines are going to be burning cubic yards of money with ELP idled for over a week, and a lot of execs for Fortune 500 companies with offices in El Paso, the 22nd most populous city in the United States, are going to be scrambling to rebook flights via Albuquerque*.

Amazon’s probably not happy either, nor will any manufacturing companies located there who use just-in-time supply chains.

UPDATE: Santa Teresa, NM airport, too. Also, gosh, I hope nobody needs to get airlifted to University Medical Center in El Paso, which is the only Level 1 trauma center in the region, in the next ten days.

UPDATE 2: And now the FAA has lifted the closure.

*I mean, ABQ is a pleasant little airport, but you literally have to traverse the Jornada del Muerto to get there from El Paso.

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Tab Clearing...

• Keeping people mad all the time in order to keep them staying tuned through the commercials to sell Trumpy Bear, commemorative coins, and dick pills has some negative side effects.


• More Epstein Files squickery. (Related: "Russiagate" and the Epstein Files are the same story.)


• Spanish Hornets operating out of Lithuania intercept Russian SU-30 over the Baltic.

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Tab Clearing...

• The Bundeswehr has apparently chosen the CZ P-10 C in Tactical Dirt Color as their next service pistol to replace the HK P8 (aka the HK USP). It will be designated the P13.


• Trade wars have apparently dinged American bourbon sales in foreign countries pretty badly. Jim Beam will be idling one of its distilleries in Kentucky for 2026 as a result.


• A company calling itself Starfighter Space is planning on using surplus Lockheed F-104 Starfighters for suborbital launch services.

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It was almost inevitable...

With the discovery that the number one engine and pylon assembly had departed the aircraft just before the aircraft departed the runway, UPS grounded their MD-11 fleet, followed shortly by FedEx, who is the other big operator of the type.

The last passenger flights of the MD-11 occurred in the mid-'00s, with the remaining flying aircraft converted to cargo haulers. The USAF retired its McDonnell-Douglas KC-10 Extender fleet, also based on the DC-10, last year, replacing it with the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus.

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Air Disaster Repeat

So it turns out that the cause of the disastrous crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky was that the number one engine... the one on the left wing ...fell off the plane on takeoff.

The UPS aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, a cargo variant of the old three-engined widebody Douglas DC-10 airliner. In fact, this one was originally delivered to Thai Airways International as a passenger DC-10 back in 1991 before being bought by UPS and converted to a cargo hauler in 2006.

If you're old enough to remember 1979 and are any kind of aviation geek, then the first thing this should remind you of is American Airlines Flight 191, which was a DC-10 that had its left engine fall off while departing Chicago for Los Angeles in October of that year. To this day it remains the deadliest commercial aviation accident ever in the continental US.

I still vividly remember that the cause of the crash was traced to the procedures used by American Airlines to remove and replace the engines. The Wikipedia article goes into a lot of detail on it. 

I wonder if the cause of this crash will be the same?

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Tab Clearing...

• The River Kills When Angry


• Drone swarms plague Danish airports.


• "SIM farms" are a spam plague.

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Tab Clearing...

• Fed law enforcement surge is burning unmarked vehicles normally used by the FBI for counterespionage and surveillance. Agents unamused.


• No, the F35 and F16 flyover was not done to drown out the press conference held by the Epstein victims.


• Absolutely clownshoes.

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Tab Clearing...

• Swiss politicians push to cancel order of three dozen Lockheed-Martin F-35 fighters in response to tariffs.


• US government easing criticism of foreign nations for human rights abuses.


• Pepperidge Farm remembers when the GOP was big on states rights.

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Mole Holes, Widebodies, and Head-Ons...

• If you use Google Satellite View to look at airbases that used to be used by Strategic Air Command back in the Cold War, you can spot the area known as a "Christmas Tree" where the Ready Alert bombers stood parked, prepared to do nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies. Look around the Christmas Tree, and you'll find the Mole Hole.


• While Colt has been selling 9mm 1911-pattern pistols since cars had tail fins (the 9mm Colt Commander debuted in 1950, IIRC), they were all single-stacks. It wasn't until Szabo and Polyzos at Para-Ordnance came up with the wide-body frame that you could get a double-stack with a Government Model slide assembly and lockwork. In fact, the earliest Paras were sold as frame kits; you were expected to use the slide and most of the lockwork from your own Colt. Jeremiah Knapp at American Rifleman wrote a good explainer on the difference between wide-body 1911s, the later chassis-style 2011 by Strayer and Tripp, and the latest Wilson X-style guns.


• Back in the days of the Model T, a lot of paved state highways were one-lane. Oncoming cars would have to put two wheels off the pavement to get past each other. As vehicle speeds and traffic volume increased, something needed to be done to fix that situation.

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