Deadly Hand Me Downs

Australia is engaged in modernizing their military in the face of regional Chinese saber rattling, which includes upgrading their military's armor with M1A2 Abrams tanks. As a result, they're shipping 49 of their older M1A1 Abrams to Ukraine to bolster the latter's armored forces.

Also, it looks like an F-16 might have splashed an Su-34 Fullback with a long-range AMRAAM shot. If true, that's probably an ex-Danish F-16A, a Disco Era cold warrior still out there doing work. The Su-34 had only been in real serious series production for half a decade or so and some OSINT types are claiming that Russia has less than a hundred left.

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The Bear and the Dragon...

It's not just up in Alaska where Russian and PLAAF aircraft have been getting frisky and provocative...

Two Russian Tu-95MS strategic bombers conducted a 10-hour flight over the Sea of Japan on Jul. 31, 2024, accompanied by Su-35S and Su-30SM jets as escort fighters, according to the RuMoD (Russian Ministry of Defense). The Japan MoD however added that the Russian aircraft entered the ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) three times, prompting the JASDF (Japan Air Self-Defense Force) to scramble its fighters in response.

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Interception

USAF fighters, usually F-22s out of Elmendorf these days, intercept Russian Tu-95 Bears all the time, but the presence of PLAAF bombers in this story caught my eye:

North American Aerospace Defense Command says it “detected, tracked, and intercepted” four bombers — two Russian and two Chinese — flying near Alaska on Wednesday.

The Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bears and Chinese H-6 strategic bombers were operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone but “did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace,” NORAD announced in a press release after the incident.

The Xi'an H-6 is China's strategic bomber, originating as a license-built Tupolev Tu-16 in the late '50s.

UPDATE: Here's a story from the Beeb on the incident.

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Plane Size

Wow, this photo really gives a good perspective of the relative sizes of these things.

Looks like a Douglas B-18, Boeing B-17 and B-29, and an early Convair B-36.

The maximum takeoff weight of the B-18 Bolo was 27,673 pounds, while a late model B-36J Peacemaker, with its six Wasp Major radials augmented by four GE J47 turbojets, could get off the ground at 410,000 pounds. The bomb load of that B-36J equalled the gross takeoff weight of 3.1 whole B-18s, or a B-17 and a half.

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Tab Clearing...

• Cash & Czechs: Apparently the CSG group has raised the price on their purchase offer for Vista Outdoors.


• Newly expanded NATO base in Romania is even bigger than Ramstein.


• Now we all speak Phone.

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Meme Dump...

Name this band. I'm going with "INcelXS".

Same guts as Sony!

Boeing & Airbus got stuck with some off-brand titanium, it looks like.

“This is about documents that have been falsified, forged and counterfeited,” said Joe Buccino, a Spirit spokesman. “Once we realized the counterfeit titanium made its way into the supply chain, we immediately contained all suspected parts to determine the scope of the issues.”

The titanium in question has been used in a variety of aircraft parts, according to Spirit officials. For the 787 Dreamliner, that includes the passenger entry door, cargo doors and a component that connects the engines to the plane’s airframe. For the 737 Max and the A220, the affected parts include a heat shield that protects a component, which connects a jet’s engine to the frame, from extreme heat.

When you're reading the list of parts that might be suspect, encountering "the bits that hold the engines to the rest of the plane" will really make you sit up and take notice.

The train of events is very modern and international: Titanium International Group in Italy looked at the certification docs of a batch of Chinese titanium it had purchased from Turkish Aerospace Industries and thought they looked hinky, as did the metal itself. The Italians contacted their customers to warn them and now here we are with an FAA investigation.

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Tab Clearing...

• Felon down! (I wonder if you can see the exposed screws on those things from orbit?)


• I was assured this kind of racist crap only happened in the past.


• The Atlantic seems to be worried that cancellation is losing its clout.

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Keeping Ivan Honest

USAF B-52 bombers have been sortieing over the Baltic, letting the Russians know we're keeping an eye on an area where they've been getting increasingly frisky and provocative.

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Tab Clearing...

• An extensive photographic record of a Horten Ho IV flying wing glider in Mississippi in the early post-WWII era.


• A U.S. Navy twin-engined, remotely-piloted kamikaze drone from the Second World War...that could also be flown by an on-board pilot. (For ferrying purposes, not for crashing into stuff.)


• AI isn't "hallucinating", it's just gullible. You know how Facebook's censor bots can't tell the difference between you saying "I'll kill you" jokingly to a friend and a real death threat? Well, Large Language Models have that same issue, only on an industrial scale.

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Short Thoughts

• William of Ockham would like you to know that flying a helicopter in pea soup fog in the mountains is all you need for a crash. Mossad didn't bag Kobe Bryant and they didn't bag Raisi, either. Get-There-itis kills more people than any other factor in general aviation.


• Keep an eye on events in New Caledonia. Guarantee that China's stirring shit there.


• E'rrbody talking about the Red Lobster bankruptcy is all "Hurr Durr Endless Shrimp", but you never have to read far into these articles to find the words "private equity": "The following year, Darden sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm, for $2.1 billion. To help fund the deal, Red Lobster spun off its real estate assets in a transaction known as a sale leaseback agreement. Red Lobster had long owned its own real estate but would now be paying rent to lease its restaurants."

The Airport Cultural Index

As a longtime orbital peeper using the GoogleSat, I've found something interesting about airports. In some parts of the world, they're a mess.

Check out this disorganized corner of ramp in El Alto Airport in La Paz...

...or the back forty of Quatro de Fevereiro airport in Luanda, Angola...

You don't see that kind of disorganization at Narita, or Schipol, or Heathrow. Airports in the developed world tend to be pretty organized places. The mothballed aircraft at Davis-Monthan, Kingman Field, or Pinal Airpark tend to be parked in orderly rows. Even the Libyan C-130's quietly decaying in a clearing in the woods on the grounds of the Lockeed plant in Marietta are tucked in neatly among the pines.

So the state of Russian airports often surprises me. The Apathy of Kleptocracy: It's visible from space!

U.S. Aerospace Industry: A Crown Jewel Sullied

The state of our aerospace industry is worrisome.

"In recent years, however, the dangers of resting on our collective laurels and ambling ahead with no real vision have become apparent. Boeing’s ongoing 737 MAX debacle and the chronic manufacturing issues with its 787 Dreamliner show just how far the once-proud commercial aviation giant has fallen—and transformed one of America’s leading aerospace companies into what one journalist took as the exemplar for the current “Dark Age of American Manufacturing.”

The industry’s problems aren’t confined to Boeing and its commercial aviation business, either. Lockheed’s challenges with the F-35 stealth fighter are well-known and ongoing, with software problems delaying the delivery of new jets to the U.S. Air Force as well as NATO allies like Denmark and Belgium. Nor has the company announced plans to expand production to meet increased demand, even after the war in Ukraine revealed production capacity shortfalls across the entire American defense industry and as orders for the older F-16 fighter remain backlogged.

In space, the United States has quickly become far too reliant on just one firm—SpaceX—for its launch and space exploration needs; problems with SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft have already delayed NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon with its Artemis III mission. Worse, NASA’s own famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the brains behind many of the agency’s robotic exploration programs, faces “broader institutional issues” that have delayed missions and forced them over budget. The cost of NASA’s ambitious Mars Sample Return mission has also skyrocketed, leading to significant changes to the planned mission."

Go and RTWT.

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Time flies like a jet fighter...

I was really not ready for all these fighter planes that were the New Hotness in the mid-late Seventies to be celebrating a half century of flight.

This time it's the Tornado, still in service with the Luftwaffe. I was six when the first prototype flew, and in middle school when they went operational with the Jerries.

Strongmen Love Jet Fighters

Recep Teyyip Erdogan changed his "nay" vote on Sweden's admission to NATO to a "yea" after a bit of logrolling that involved Congress approving the transfer of F16 fighters to the Turkish Air Force.

Now we have Orban removing his objections coincidentally after Sweden agreed to sell Hungary four Saab JAS 39C Gripens (the Magyar Légierő currently operates a dozen leased Gripens as its fixed-wing combat strength.)

The moral of the story: If you want a thuggish autocrat to send you nice Christmas cards, get 'em the hookup with some spiffy jet fighters.

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Short Attention Spans, Long Air Campaigns

Every time another round of strikes goes into northwest Yemen, the media acts faintly surprised, as if to say "I thought we blew up the Houthi's missile stuff two news cycles ago?"

While it's not like we're hunting Viet Cong supply columns in triple canopy jungle, or even Serbian tanks and artillery among the forested slopes of the Balkans, we're still trying to knock out a stockpile of mobile cruise missile and drone launch vehicles that are sometimes as small and mobile as a pickup. The Houthis have been stockpiling these over the course of years of shipments, mostly from Iran, and even our most confident estimates were that the initial round of airstrikes only degraded their total missile and drone capability by twenty to thirty percent.

Fortunately that corner of the Arabian peninsula is the armpit of the world and largely devoid of natural overhead cover. At the same time, this isn't like the jump-off of Desert Storm or Iraqi Freedom, where we've been spending a month or more developing targeting data for a mammoth airstrike package. This one is largely happening on the fly.

The Houthis are eager for the shoot 'em up, as you'd expect from a bunch of dudes with "Death to America" right on their flag.

Despite efforts to deter them, the Houthis have refused to back down, vowing to retaliate and welcoming the prospect of war with the United States with open delight.

“Yemen is not an easy military opponent that can be subdued quickly,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi official, said in a post on the social media platform X after the American-led strikes.

Thing is, we have no intention (or desire) to fight the Houthis in Yemen. We're all regime-changed-out over here. The Yemenis are just going to have to sort out their problems on their own.

We're just going to hang back and blow up anything the Houthis have that can be used to attack shipping. Of course, this also requires interdicting incoming replacement armaments, and we need to do that, too.

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Rocket the Kasbah

So, last month I wondered...

...whether the west is going to keep shooting down $20k RPVs from Ali's House of Discount Drones with multi-million dollar SM-2 and Sea Viper missiles, or are we going to try a strike using carrier aircraft and cruise missiles to knock out Houthi launch sites and storage facilities.

Well, we have the answer to that question, as yesterday saw airstrikes by Navy Super Hornets and RAF Typhoons, as well as a barrage of sub-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles on Houthi launch and weapons storage facilities in Yemen.

The Houthis, of course, immediately protested and resorted to argumentum ad Israelium.

"A Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdul Salam, said on social media that the group would remain by Gaza’s side. He said there was no justification for the strikes on Yemen because its actions do not threaten international shipping, and vowed that the group would continue to target Israeli ships and those heading to Israel."

Which seems like a weird thing to say when you've been launching drones and missiles at random ships which have nothing to do with the Israelis, but the Houthis don't exactly strike me as a very organized bunch.  Also, "I blame the Jooooos!" focus groups well, especially in that corner of the world, so I guess it's worth a try.

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Rugged

There's a certain attractive quality to rugged, reliable gear. Think of the adulation heaped on Glocks for their durability:

A saying I remember from being in camera stores where my dad worked when I was a child was "If you have a Leica and a Nikon and have to take a photograph over a wall, stand on the Nikon and shoot with the Leica, because it won't hurt the Nikon."*

Jim Grey was just out and about with a new-to-him 1963-vintage Nikon F, which was the company's first pro-grade single lens reflex camera:

"The F is nigh onto indestructible. It would surely survive a drop from your hands to the ground, it would probably survive a drop off the roof of your house, and it might just survive a drop from an airplane."

It still works great for a sixty-year-old tool! No wonder survivors are bringing good money.

Do you know what else a Nikon will survive? Fifty years of being buried in a mountaintop glacier near the summit of Aconcagua, with twenty four frames of potential evidence of foul play sitting exposed inside it, waiting to be developed...

"FOR NEARLY 50 years, a Nikomat camera, carried by an American woman, sat frozen in a high-altitude time capsule. But it was not frozen in place.

Where the camera was dropped may not be where it was found. The Polish Glacier has been shrinking and shifting, cracking and moving downhill by the pull of gravity and with the change of seasons.

And on a sunny day in February 2020, the heart of the Argentine summer, the camera sat on a stocky penitente, like a museum piece on a pedestal.

[SNIP]

The camera was intact; the only crack was inside the lens. The mechanisms worked. The leather holster screwed to the camera bottom had probably protected it from leaks."

*The only exception might be if your Leica is a Leicaflex, aka "The Diesel Leica", which was their baroquely overbuilt attempt at an SLR. One survived plummeting to the floor of the Mojave Desert from a crashing F4 Phantom II.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• A head-on view of a McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. The Voodoo is interesting as being one of the last planes whose design started out intended as a long-range bomber escort.


• The internet is made of people. Still. (Beware of the links on that sixteen year old VFTP post.)


• A heartwarming Christmas tree tale...

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I did not know that.

"In 1942, Norman Lear signed up to fight the fascists. He served as a radio operator and gunner in a B-17 bomber named “Umbriago” by its crew, after a catchphrase of the comedian Jimmy Durante. As Lear watched bombs spill out of the plane’s belly over Germany, he said in a 2021 interview with the Yiddish Book Center, his attitude was “Screw ’em.” But there was also a complicating empathy: “I remember thinking, imagining a table of family, of Germans, sitting around the table as the bombs dropped.”"

I did not know that Norman Lear was a veteran of 52 missions over Germany.

See the window just ahead of the "KK" letters, and the two windows in the top of the fuselage above them? Those are the windows Norman Lear would have looked out of from the radio room of "Umbriago". If you want to know the duties of a B-17 radio operator, they're enumerated at this site, along with some good shots of the radio room.

I was too young to really get All in the Family. I was not quite three years old when it premiered and eleven when it ended.

MeTV has been airing four episodes every Sunday evening, and I watched the first several seasons' worth here recently and it was really exceptionally good television. I can see why it was considered so novel for its era, and surprisingly relevant even today.

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