The Victorious Opposition

To me, this is one of those “whoda thunk it?” types of events. Two decades ago, who would have imagined this:

A Gulfstream passenger jet at the center of a U.S.-Russian military exercise was about to cross the International Dateline on Tuesday for the second time in three days, and some of the seven passengers seemed dulled by the dash across the Pacific and back.

But they all perked up and the mood turned jovial when Air Force Tech. Sgt. Paul Shoop called out, “They’re here!”

Two Russian Su-27 fighter jets had come into view behind the chartered Gulfstream and were closing fast. The Gulfstream was playing the role of a hijacked airliner crossing Russian airspace on its way east across the Pacific, and the fighters had been sent aloft to track it.

It was part of a precedent-setting exercise called Vigilant Eagle to see how well Russia and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, once bitter Cold War enemies, could coordinate in an international hijacking.

It’s an intriguing counterpoint to Thrill’s thread about WWIII.

“It reinforces the success (of the first handoff), but it also proves the point that it can occur from the U.S. side to the Russian side and now from the Russian side to the U.S. side,” he said. “So the two-way communication flow has been proven to be successful.”

A full review is planned next month, but Balfe said the exercise has already helped make civilian airline travel safer from terrorist attack.

“I think any time that we increase our cooperation and our coordination, we harden ourselves against further events,” Balfe said.

I recall having a recent discussion about the future of aircraft carriers during one of my own Discourses threads which I bizarrely hijacked.  My argument was that we should stop building the damn things and that ever-improving and less expensive missiles are going to turn them all into grand underwater tombs in the next major international war.  It climaxed with this:

Aircraft carriers were ideal offensive weapons when cheap aircraft could sink highly valuable capital ships with a few cheap torpedoes.  Supercarriers require so much protection and it costs so much money and effort in order to get one aircraft through modern air defenses to drop one bomb on an enemy that it’s getting harder and harder to justify building them.

Today, JE Dyer over at HotAir wrote a great post about the Dong Feng 21-D missile. It is the sort of missile technology that makes it more and more obvious that the supercarrier’s day has passed.  I read the whole thing and kept waiting for him to get to the most important point: that it wasn’t just a matter of whether or not missiles can kill our aircraft carriers but whether or not we spend so much effort just protecting them that they are no longer desirable to deploy for the purpose of dropping explosives onto people.

Mr. Dyer did not disappoint:

It’s the combination of weapons China can increasingly bring to bear that the US Navy is worried about.  If we’ve got one big, honking set of tactical constraints imposed by the Chinese submarine threat, another posed by the Chinese attack aircraft threat, and another posed by supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, adding the DF-21D as a flight-ops harassment problem makes it that much harder for our forces to keep their heads above water:  to use our weapons to actually attack the enemy, rather than just to defend ourselves.

(And yes, George and Meredith Friedman, authors of The Future of War, called this prospect for our carriers “senility,” and predicted it in theory, if not because of the particular threat posed by the DF-21D, back in the mid-1990s.)

The reference to The Future of War was most appealing to me because many of my attitudes on military issues have been shaped by reading that book.  I even specifically cited it in this thread over on that other blog over two years ago.  The development of the Dong Feng-21D does not mark the end of aircraft carriers on the high seas.  Chances are that we won’t get rid of them until it’s too late (See: USS Arizona, et al).  Still, this is a good dialogue to begin now while the US insists on still building the outdated things.

More than a year and a half ago, SpaceX was the first private company to orbit a satellite with a ground-launched booster (Orbital Sciences has been doing it for years, but with an air-dropped booster). On Friday, they had the first test launch of their new Falcon 9 medium-lift booster, which successfully orbited a test model of their Dragon capsule (which is intended to provide unmanned resupply to the International Space Station):

SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of PayPal (and also CEO of Tesla, the electric-car company). As I wrote on my Facebook status, “See what a few hundred million $$$ from a dot-com startup can accomplish?”

They had a four hour launch window on Friday; the launch was delayed by over two hours, first because of telemetry confirmations with the NASA range-safety people, and then, it appears, because they had to get a sailboat out of the downrange exclusion area. They finally got the countdown started at T-15min, and it went perfectly. Then at T-1sec, the rocket aborted launch, after the engines had fired. I haven’t seen a definitive report on what caused the shutdown; some out-of-range parameter from some sensor, it appears. With ~1 hr left in the launch window, they recycled the countdown to T-15min, and with ~30 minutes left, restarted the countdown, leading to the launch shown in the video.

A couple of things I noted that I’m interested in hearing clarification on. First, the rocket appeared to me to leave the ground at T-2sec, which seems like a significant range-safety issue. Second, the roll rate of the 2nd stage near the end of the burn seems awfully high, but I don’t really know. Maybe that’s normal.

There’s a 2nd test-flight scheduled in a few months, which I believe will launch with a real Dragon capsule. The first Space Station resupply test is scheduled for early next year. SpaceX is competing with Orbital Sciences (which has yet to launch its first booster of this class) for a fairly massive contract from NASA for Space Station resupply (currently all of those missions will be via Russian Soyuz, once the Space Shuttle stops flying at the end of the year).

They are also talking about a man-rated version of Falcon 9/Dragon for Space Station crew missions. The Obama administration is basically counting on industry to take over the Low Earth Orbit manned space mission, something I agree with.

Anyhow, this was very cool to watch.

Boeing has put up a site with information on the first flight of its new 787 airliner, tentatively scheduled for 10AM PST on Tuesday 12/15. There will be a live webcast starting one hour before the flight. Final taxi tests are going on today. I’ll try to look in on this over lunch tomorrow, I guess.

You can learn more about the 787 here.

Sometimes fans and drivers complain that all the safety innovations put into NASCAR (and other series) over the last few years mess with the excitement of the racing.

Watch this crash from this afternoon:

He walked away from that. Without injury.

Holy crap.

I assume by now you all know about Air Force One buzzing lower Manhatten:

Today, the carefully choreographed flight of the presidential aircraft, accompanied by a single Air Force F-16, set off a panic on both sides of New York Harbor, as thousands of workers—still haunted by the memories of 9/11—fled their high-rise office buildings at the unexpected sight of the huge, low-flying passenger jet over the Hudson River. Trailed closely by a military fighter, the plane could be seen turning tightly over the Statue of Liberty for what was later described as a “photo op.”

An Obama administration official told the Associated Press late today the flyover was done because the White House Military Office wanted to update its file photo of the president’s plane near the Statue of Liberty.

Needless to say, this freaked a couple of people out:

What a colossal clusterfuck. The White House has issued a mea culpa:

“Last week, I approved a mission over New York. I take responsibility for that decision,” said Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office. “While federal authorities took the proper steps to notify state and local authorities in New York and New Jersey, it’s clear that the mission created confusion and disruption.”

It seems they didn’t bother to tell the President they were doing this:

Two officials told CNN the White House Military Office was trying to update its file photos of Air Force One. The officials said the president was angry when he learned Monday afternoon about the flight, which sparked fear in the New York-New Jersey area.

“The president was furious about it,” one of the officials said.

But they did notify NYC officials - who apparently didn’t bother to tell Bloomberg about it either:

The FAA also alerted an official in the mayor’s office, but he didn’t tell Bloomberg, who said he first learned about it when his “BlackBerry went off crazy with people complaining about it.”

The Bloomberg official who was notified was Marc Mugnos, director of operations for the Office of Citywide Event Coordination and Management. Mugnos didn’t immediately respond to questions about why he didn’t tell the mayor; Bloomberg’s spokesman Stu Loeser issued a statement saying: “He has been reprimanded and a disciplinary letter will be placed in his file.”

It’s always good to see that Robert Gibbs is on the ball:

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Monday afternoon that he was unaware of the flyover. At his daily press briefing, Mr. Gibbs initially referred questions to the F.A.A. and the Air Force. When told that those government offices were referring questions to the White House, Mr. Gibbs said: “I have no information on this other than what I saw.”

Mr. Gibbs, pressed by reporters, said he had seen news reports of the flyover, but declared: “I was working on other things. You might be surprised to know that I don’t know every movement of Air Force One.” Later, he added that he would look into the matter.

At least he didn’t belittle anyone for daring to ask.

Good grief. There’s a ton of blame to go around here. At least one WH staffer and one NYC official should be fired for terminal stupidy.

For a long time, policy in dealing with aviation accidents has been to not treat them as criminal investigations, in order to obtain full and complete cooperation in the investigation, on the premise that finding and fixing the root cause of an incident is more important to aviation safety than prosecution. There have been a few exceptions, in cases of deliberate action, and civil liability has been found a number of times. But generally, world governments agree to keep their criminal investigative forces out of the accident investigation, unless called in.

But that’s been changing in the last couple of years, and the recent conviction of 7 airline executives, pilots and maintenance workers in Italy has spurred some real concerns in the aviation industry:

Seven Tuninter crewmembers and managers, including two pilots, have been convicted by an Italian tribunal for a crash in which 23 passengers survived and 16 were killed in August 2005.

The crash involved an ATR-72 that took off from Bari, Italy, and was headed to Djerba, Tunisia, and was forced to ditch in the sea close to the Sicilian coast.

The incident was caused because the aircraft fuel gauges and indicators had been incorrectly replaced by the maintenance personnel with those of the ATR-42. The instruments indicated there was enough fuel on board when the aircraft took off, while there was not actually enough fuel to carry out the intended flight.

The two pilots have been charged with multiple counts of manslaughter and air disaster, and sentenced to a term of 10 years because, in theory, they had the opportunity to reach the Palermo Airport for an emergency landing if they had followed proper procedure. Another five technicians and managers have been found guilty, with the chief operating officer and the maintenance chief sentenced to nine years each, while three technicians have been sentenced to eight years each. Two others defendants were not found guilty. None of those indicted were present at the tribunal, and Tuninter lawyers have announced they will appeal the verdict.

(that’s the entire Aviation Week Online article; the print edition has much more)

Boeing got waxed on the ATF and JSF competitions (which resulted in the F-22 and F-35, respectively). While Boeing is doing some work for the F-22 as a subcontractor to Lockheed-Martin, the only fighter programs they have going are evolutions of the decades-old F-15 and F-18. Both programs have evolved astronomically since their inception (e.g. the ground-attack versions of the F-15, the 1/3 upsized F-18E/F programs), and are still quite competitive with 4th-generation fighters such as the Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen. Along with the Lockheed-Martin F-16 of the same generation (which has also been radically evolved), Boeing offers both fighters into a number of international competitions.

But time is running out on the F-15. The US Air Force will be replacing it with the F-22, and the export market is becoming saturated. Most international competitions are looking for newer-generation fighters.

Late last month, Boeing came out with an interesting proposal - “stealthifying” the venerable F-15:

Boeing unveiled the prototype of a new variant of the F-15 Strike Eagle aimed at the Asian and Middle East markets that will incorporate stealthy coatings and structure here on Mar. 17.

Company officials hope the new aircraft will garner up to 190 orders, extending the F-15 line beyond the current backlog of 38 aircraft for South Korea and Singapore. Since the company lost the Joint Strike Fighter contest to Lockheed Martin, the future of its St. Louis manufacturing facility has been uncertain. Continued F-15 sales, as well as additional orders for F/A-18E/Fs and EA-18Gs, are the only work in the foreseeable future for the plant.

Major design changes in the new “Silent Eagle” version include internal bays within the existing conformal fuel tanks that can carry a variety of air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons. Each tank will be configured to hold two air-to-air missiles, including the AIM-9 and AIM-120 or a combination of the two.For the air-to-ground mission, 1,000- and 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions can be carried or four 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs per tank. Weapons loadout can also be split between the AIM-120 and JDAM for a multirole mission.The Silent Eagle configuration includes 15-degree outward-canted V-tails - a shift away from the characteristic vertical fins of the F-15 that reduces the radar cross-section.

Check out the internal weapons storage:

Since we’re losing all of our rights, I am going to invest in one of the only one’s I have left. I’m buying a gun. “Why would you?” I am sure you’re asking yourself. There are several excuses I could use to sway anyone who thinks it’s a bad idea (for example when my friend was visiting here from London, some teenager brandished one around him) but the single most compelling reason is because it’s my right to do so.

My family has a sordid history with firearms, with my mother’s father an avid collector, and her stepfather (the one who was around more) a real gun hater and Vietnam veteran. I ride the fence, wherein I never really desired one, but I could always understand how most gun owners are the most responsible people in our society. However, given the blustering by the Obama administration, and his subsequent fulfillment of his campaign rhetoric, I count the days until there is some Draconian crush on gun ownership rights.

I’m giving Obama his weight in salt, he’s been very true to his word, and I’m obliged to take him seriously wrt his attitudes toward gun ownership. I’ve contemplate what I might purchase, but I think for my first one and two, I will purchase a .22 and a 12 gauge. These are both firearms i am familiar with, and have fired in my life. I choose them because they are easy enough for a beginner, and both can be very powerful and versatile should I ever need to actually use them for anything other than a paper target.

I’ve discussed the issue with the VO’s weapons expert, HARLEY, and I’ll probably add in a GLOC before the sun has set, but I’ll start here first. The more I’ve been researching into the issue, the more fun i think it would be to buy one, for no other explicit reason than to piss liberals here in CA off. To them, it’s okay to coddle Cholos who own them illegally, and bleed for little punks to use them to cross other teenagers out, but if I practice my constitutional right to own one, I am some cretin with a hard on for violence. Well, there will be a new statistic to bitch about on the “Liberal Screech” tomorrow, as I will add to a statistic that is sure to have their Obama thongs in a bunch.

Any of you all packin’?

In the late 1940s, American’s main form of power projection was its fleet of intercontinental bombers as part of the Strategic Air Command. Initially the B-29 Superfortress (of WWII vintage) and the turboprop version of the Superfortress, the B-50. Under development was the Consolidated Vultee (Convair) B-36 Peacemaker (gotta love those plane names):

The original version was powered by six pusher turboprop engines, and was sufficiently slow that modern jet fighters of the day could easily intercept it (SAMs weren’t around yet; fighter interception was the only way to intercept bombers). So fighter cover was a prime concern. But fighters of the day had incredibly short ranges (in the low hundreds of miles) - not appropriate for intercontinental power projection, even with forward basing. Air-to-air refueling wasn’t yet practical (which is part of why the B-36 was so blasted big - flying fuel tank). So the folk at McDonnell Aircraft came up with a novel solution - the XF-85 Goblin. A plane designed to fold up and be completely contained within one of the bomb bays of the B-36. Check out this video:

The XF-85 was a failure, but the B-36 did go into service with SAC, with the addition of 4 podded jet engines (referred to as “six turning and four burning”):

But the B-52 Stratofortress (introduced in 1952 and still in service today) along with air-to-air refueling replaced the Peacemaker.

Good grief. Who need Skerry Brown Terrists when we have homegrown nutjobs like this:

James G. Cummings, a neo-Nazi who was shot to death by his wife last December, possessed a cache of radioactive materials suitable for building a “dirty bomb,” according to a leaked FBI intelligence report. A dirty bomb uses conventional explosives to disperse harmful radioactive material over a large area.

During a search of the Belfast, Maine, house where Cummings lived with his wife, Amber, investigators reportedly discovered instructions for making a dirty bomb, along with four 1-gallon containers filled with a mix of uranium, thorium and beryllium powder, all of which are radioactive. The containers also held a hydrogen peroxide-based solution needed for making peroxide-based explosives, along with lithium metal, thermite, magnesium ribbon, black iron oxide and other substances that are used to amplify the effects of homemade explosives.

...

Amber Cummings reportedly told police that her husband was “very upset” over Barack Obama being elected president, had been in contact with white supremacist groups, and that he’d been mixing chemicals in their kitchen sink while talking about dirty bombs. Authorities say she claimed that she killed her husband after years of mental, physical, and sexual abuse. Police are terming his death a “domestic violence homicide” but, at this point, no charges have been filed.

You can read the FBI report (PDF file) for yourself. Unclear how close he was to doing something, but sounds like a whole lot more than idle redneck boasting.

We probably need a “Home Grown Whackjobs” category for this kinda stuff…

Science fiction is again becoming scientific fact:

A research scientist is studying whether intelligent robots can behave more ethically than human beings on the battlefield, according to the International Herald Tribune.

Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology is under contract to design software for battlefield robots for the U.S. Army.  He’s looking into whether autonomous robots and drones not controlled by Army personnel can make better battlefield decisions than humans.

In a report to the army last year, Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built to show no anger or recklessness, Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,” which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.

A survey done in 2006 by the Office of the Surgeon Multi-National Force in Iraq and the Office of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army Medical Command found that troops “who were stressed, angry, anxious or mourning lost colleagues or who had handled the dead were more likely to say they had mistreated civilian noncombatants.”

The article quotes Arkin as saying: “It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of.”  Arkin said the robots would first have to be programmed on such topics as when to fire on a tank and how to distinguish civilians.

As an example, Arkin cited a robot pilot who spots a tank at the entrance to a cemetery where civilians are gathered.  The robot decides not to fire, but later fires at another tank in a more remote location.  “In another case, attacking an important terrorist leader in a taxi in front of an apartment building, for example, might be regarded as ethical if the target is important and the risk of civilian casualties low.”  Arkin is testing his hypothesis on computers.

They had a show on History Channel the other day about the science of Star Wars that included some theories about why the droids all exhibited emotions—such as C-3P0 acting like a total ‘mo—and whether such a feature would be useful for artificial intelligence so that the droid could set priorities and behave as needed in particular situations.  It’s an intriguing thought.

Although I have always been a sci-fi fan and am familiar with the danger of Skynet and the Matrix and all that, I believe that robot warriors are inevitable and I like the idea.  They will never totally replace human beings in combat, of course, but this is something that should be pursued.

Anyway, feel free to fill the thread with some of your favorite film clips of combat droids going apeshit.  Here’s one of mine:

Obviously, the proponents of “ethical” robots never met Megatron’s boys…

Security Management

SpaceX made history earlier this week, successfully orbiting a payload via their ground-launched Falcon 1 2-stage liquid-propelled rocket:

Read more about the launch.

SpaceX follows Orbital Sciences into the privately-funded commercial space-launch business. Orbital Sciences started the privately-funded commercial space launch business in 1990 with their Pegasus. The fundamental difference between what SpaceX did and what Orbital did is that Orbital’s system uses air-dropped launch vehicles, which essentially use an airliner as their first stage - sort of like the old X-1/X-15 model. This limits the size & weight of the payloads Orbital can launch.

SpaceX has gone with a traditional ballistic rocket model, starting from the smaller Falcon 1, and including the heavy-lift Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy. Their heavy-lift booster will put them in full competition with the Boeing Delta IV, the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V, Arianespace Ariane 5, and the Russian Proton & Soyuz. They expect to achieve breakthrough cost models; we shall see, as all these others got their R&D funding from government involvement (i.e. they’ve only been privatized after decades of public-sector funding).

SpaceX is also proposing the Dragon orbital vehicle, which can carry cargo or a crew of 7 in its pressurized capsule. NASA will be buying Dragon launches as part of its COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) purchasing of launch services for the International Space Station, since the Space Shuttle is planned to be retired in 2010.

Falcon 9 is scheduled for a first test launch next year, along with 2 test launches with the Dragon (the second of which will dock with the ISS). Commercial ISS resupply via Falcon 9 + Dragon is scheduled for 2010.

SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal. When eBay bought PayPal, he took that money and went and created SpaceX. Computer geek becomes space geek.

Interesting times.

Fifty years ago today the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) opened its doors, replacing the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). While most people think of NASA in terms of its accomplishments in the manned space program, probably the greater contributions to science have come from the aeronautics research, and particularly the unmanned space exploration program. I was going to put together a big presentation, but NASA has a pretty awesome 50th anniversary site up which you should take a look at. The interactive explorer is neat.

I’m going to limit my input to one image and one video. For the image, I selected Mission Control at the end of the Apollo 13 mission (courtesy of the NASA site). I think this speaks more to what NASA and all of us are about than the moon landing, the space shuttle, and all the other more famous pictures. Bringing them home captured the world’s attention, and these guys helped achieve the impossible.

For the video, I selected Rush’s “Countdown”. This song was written after the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981, and again demonstrates how the space program captures the world’s attention.

With all that’s going on with the US budget, it will be interesting to see if the next-generation launcher/lander program, Constellation, survives the budget axe. My fiscal conservative side says we can’t afford it, but the science and sci-fi fan in me hopes it keeps going anyhow.

Update: Trivia question time - even without knowing the history of the video, you can tell from watching the video that these clips are from one of the first two shuttle launches. How?

I have no idea what made me think of this place today. I haven’t been there in a dozen years or more. But today’s installment of “dwex’s world of irrelevent aviation stories” is about Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York (about half way between NYC and Albany). They have a large collection of historic, restored, golden-era airplanes, most in flying condition. They have weekend airshows with recreations of World War I dogfights, complete with costumes and all sorts of fun. You can buy a ride in a classic 2-seater biplane. In their words:

The Saturday Shows chronicle the History of Flight with Pioneer, World War I and Lindbergh era aircraft taking to the skies. If the winds are calm you’ll even see our 1909 Bleriot (the oldest flying aircraft in the United States) take to the air.

The Sunday Shows feature a World War I dogfight plus Barnstorming Aircraft. Marvel at world-renowned pilot, Stan Segalla, The Flying Farmer, one of the greatest acts on the air show circuit! You won’t believe what Stan can make an airplane do! We promise this is an act you will never forget! - For Admission Rates click here.

Pre-show activity includes a vintage fashion show with audience participation, an old-time automobile parade and early aviation engine run-ups. You can experience the thrill of early aviation yourself with rides in our open-cockpit 1929 New Standard biplane and one of our wonderful old antique automobiles.

Barnstorming flights over the scenic Hudson Valley are available before and after the shows. Biplane rides are $65.00/person - Rides take you over the beautiful Hudson River, the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge and back again. Flights are of course, ” weather permitting” and the decision to fly is always left to the discretion of the pilot. Flights book quickly on a ” first-come/ first-serve” basis, so sign up early!

If you’re ever in the area, check them out. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon.

Update: “I have no idea what made me think of this place today”, I said… I just submitted this to Digg, and came across this news post from today:

Riverhead High School art teacher Vincent Nasta was killed in a plane crash Sunday afternoon during an air show at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in upstate New York.

I swear I hadn’t read or heard about this. Welcome to the Twilight Zone!