A place for the discussion of all things not closely related to the sport and its competitive side. (Locked down several times a year during the major championships)
JRM wrote:[ I've heard interesting stories about "flight crews" who leave home and go to work, fly a bunch of missions in the ME (some deadly), and go home after their shifts for dinner with their families! Puts a new spin on the idea of 21st century warfare.
A marked improvement over the days when wives and families accompanied the men to war.
I guess the powers that be want to stay a step or two ahead of potential enemies. Anyway, it sounds like fun to travel at mach 5, and it is only a few tens of millions of bucks... less than the bonus that a manager at a failed investment bank might get !
Meanwhile people have gotten so far removed from the good ole Cold War realities that they don't recognize sonic booms when they happen anymore:
http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/ ... nty/20853/
The Raptor unit production cost is around $140m for the most recent batch. ... The USAF estimates the JSF's unit production cost at roughly $85m. ... The Raptor / JSF choice represents the US military's clearest programmatic contrast between 'Cold War' and 'new war' technology.
jhc68 wrote:I had two favorite planes: the Corsair fighter/bomber and the B-58 Hustler.
I stopped having new favorite planes about the time I lost the ability to identify the exact make, model and year every car I saw.
Hey Joe...one of my favorites too...the Corsair. In fifth grade my friend's Dad flew Corsair's out of El Toro Marine Base. He arranged for all us starry eyed fifth graders to see one in person. We walked up this ladder and looked into the cockpit...wow, all those cool gauges and stuff!
The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show. ... While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged this week. The F-22 has never been flown over Iraq or Afghanistan. ... Its troubles have been detailed in dozens of Government Accountability Office reports and Pentagon audits. But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof." ... John Hamre, the Pentagon's comptroller from 1993 to 1997, says the department approved the plane with a budget it knew was too low because projecting the real costs would have been politically unpalatable on Capitol Hill. ...
Got to see an F-22 in action yesterday (well, "action"=air show flite, that is!). What a mind-boggling piece of machinery. Still not worth the money, but high on the all-time toys list.
In a nice little fillip to the whole thing, during the Blue Angels portion of them got a little heavy on the throttle during a dive over the Bay and apparently did a teeny slip through the sound barrier. Rattled the big boat we were on nicely, set people a-shrieking.
"The military promises it's the best fighter jet available, but some critics are saying it's a turkey hatched from a bad idea: a do-it-all plane that might not do anything well-at-all."
