Senate The Weekly Discussion of Military Technology

A lot of those "old" warbirds aren't nearly as old as they look. Many of them are what is known as dataplate restorations. The dataplate is kind of like a car's VIN, a unique metal plate stamped with the aircraft's designation and serial number. There are professional airplane mechanics who take old planes apart, carefully inspect each and every piece (including x-rays, florescent dye penetrants, and magnetic flux checks for internal cracks and flaws), replace and rebuild everything that's not up to spec, and in the end the plane comes out better than it ever was when it was new. The (semi-serious) joke is that there's nothing left of the original plane but the dataplate. Those planes are as safe as anything else in the skies; they've flown for many decades and all the bugs have been long since worked out. I've gone up in a 1944 B-17 and a 1929 Ford Trimotor, both of which have been rebuilt more than once, and felt perfectly safe.

That B-17 that crashed recently was not maintained well at all. I've read the accident reports from the NTSB and it was scary the way those operators were cutting corners to save money at the expense of safety and reliability. The pilot, who was also responsible for the maintenance program, died in the crash, which saved him from well-deserved lawsuits. I'll be amazed if that outfit gets to carry passengers ever again.

 

So where are they getting spare parts from? Do they have a store of them lying around that somehow hasn't run out yet? Are they 3-D printing them?

 

There are still collections of left-overs from WW2; at the end of the war we had enormous stocks of unneeded equipment and it was sold as surplus for dirt-cheap prices, so there were people who grabbed what they could to save for a rainy day. But some parts just can't be found, so machinists have learned to make their own. It's not cheap, but there are people with money who love old planes and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them up. Peter Jackson is one, he has multiple replicas and restorations of WW1 biplanes.

 

Targeting pods tested on board C-130s, supposed to improve airdrop accuracy. Harrumph. In my day, we didn't need no stinking laser pods, we turned off the targeting computer and used the Force, Luke.

Targeting Pods Are Being Tested On Air National Guard C-130 Hercules Transports (thedrive.com)

I just heard from an old Air Force buddy, an electrician who works on one of the test planes. As you'd expect, there's an awful lot of rewiring involved in the project.

 

Air Force Plans to Cut 45 Planes from Its Workhorse C-130 Fleet, Upgrade Others | Military.com

They're talking about replacing it with some alleged "high-speed vertical take off and landing" aircraft, which doesn't exist and I doubt it can in less than a decade. Folks, if you're going to replace the Herk, first get its replacement up and running, all the bugs worked out, funded and in production, then you can start downsizing the Herk force. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.

 

B-52 Engine Replacement Could Keep the Bomber Flying Past its 100th Birthday | Flying (flyingmag.com)

Oh, look, they're extending the service life of the BUFF. Again.

 

C-130s are hard at work fighting wild fires. I lost a friend when they crashed doing that.

Early Fire Season Pushes Ops Tempo For C-130s - Air Force Magazine

 

And Bell's entry is pretty much if the Blackhawk and An Osprey had a baby.



The tilt rotor design is cool and all but those big twirly bois on each side just seem like easy targets to me. I'm pretty sure that's the reason they never actually use the Osprey for Marine One, they just have them in the decoy fleet decked out in the M1 colors for the pageantry.

 

Unmanned air-to-air refueling planes. What could possibly go wrong with a plane packed full of all the jet fuel it can hold, and no pilot?

Boeing conducts first manned-unmanned teaming event with MQ-25 tanker (defensenews.com)

 

I read "Dream Machine" by Richard Whittle, and I came away really, really disliking the V-22...and the Marine Corp as well. It seems to me like the original XV-15 tiltrotor was worthwhile and had potential, and maybe if that had worked out then we could've incrementally worked up to more sophisticated designs. But then the Marines wanted more immediately, so they overengineered the crap out of it, poured huge amounts of money down the drain, and killed a whole bunch of test pilots as well.

 

Air Force captain honored for cleaning KC-10 aircraft toilet (taskandpurpose.com)

 

McClellan Air Attack Base MAFFS C-130 TOUR! - YouTube

Firefighting C-130s. Put me in, Coach, I'm ready.

Well, no, it's been 12 years, I'd probably need a couple months to get back up to speed on the old Flight Engineer job.

 

Our Best Look Yet At 'Rapid Dragon' Cargo Plane-Launched Stealth Cruise Missiles In Action (thedrive.com)

 

seems that we still have at least 2 of these left. Iconic. Obviously the F-35 has better electronic countermeasures, being the more modern product, but I wonder which aircraft is actually stealthier to radar. This one, i'd imagine.

 

I noticed all the Eagles were carrying 2 AMRAAMs and 2 Sidewinders per plane. That seems excessive for a stateside flight. Makes me wonder if they were loaded with 20mm ammo too. One of them also had some kind of sensor pod on the centerline, maybe FLIR Forward Looking InfraRed, or LANTIRN, Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting InfraRed for Night. It could have been a laser designator, but that wouldn't make much sense for an air-to-air platform like the F-15C.

 

Those Nighthawks have been utilized as Aggressors the last several years. Simulating J-20s most likely (or some other foreign 5th gen) and training up Eagle and Raptor pilots to deal with stealth adversaries. My guess is the FLIR pod (if that's what it was) was being used to see at what range that Eagle could use it to pick up an IR signature from the stealth fighter.

 

I would dearly hope the F-35 is stealthier, considering what we paid for it...

 

U.S. Air Force to test Airborne High Energy Laser on AC-130J gunship - Inceptive Mind

All I want is some frikkin' Herks with frikkin' lasers!

 

old news but super cool. This is the purported successor to the SR-21


America’s New Stealth Drone Appears To Be Operational Near China




A new picture of the highly secret spy aircraft is surfacing photographed over The Philippines

 

There's an RQ-180 now? Man, I really haven't been paying attention to this stuff for some time.

 

Special Operations Command to Test Fire Sneaky Laser Weapon on AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship | The National Interest

Apparently, the experimental laser for the AC-130 will be silent and invisible.

 

What Is the U.S. Air Force's Secret New Space Weapon? (popularmechanics.com)

 

When they say "blind" enemy satellites, is this only a temporary effect? You wouldn't need kinetic anti-satellite weapons if you could blind them permanently, right?

 

That's a good question. I'm guessing it's some kind of laser/directed energy beam that jams the wavelength the spy satellites scan. But as the Israeli Air Force says, the best jammer ever is a bomb dropped on the radar site.