FLAK

FLAK: Evading Anti-Aircraft Fire for World War 2 Pilots (Restored 1943)
Good overview of WW2 anti-aircraft gunnery and 'evasive action'. I always thought 'evasive action' meant jinking randomly, give 'em the old dodge and weave. Turns out it is carefully choreographed. The film is for Allied bomber crews attacking Axis targets. The Brits had their own similar anti-aircraft installations all over Great Britain. Previous posts about anti-aircraft.

Update August 2015 replaced missing video.

Books on War

Title to be taken in the same vein as "high on pot" or "high on life", even if doesn't make much sense.

I finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson a couple of weeks ago. It was amazing! One of the myriad things that happens in this book are these these philosophical discussions of the most abstract (abstruse?) nature. I was able to follow at least some of them (I think), but the interesting part was not the discussion, or even the topic, but just that the way they were presented made them very entertaining. Suffice it to say the book had a big impact on me and I will probably have to read it again, maybe even several times.
    Since then I have started reading several other books, but they are not quite in the same league and while they might be very good books, in my current state of mind they are not quite compelling. So I've been bouncing around. Two of the books (Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and The Postmistress by Sarah Blake) both start at the beginning of WW2 and the Blitz on London. A couple of days ago I got confused and wrote that the bit about the girl reporter with anti-aircraft gun crew was from Gravity's Rainbow when in fact it was from The Postmistress.
   Something about these stories tickled my brain and I started researching anti-aircraft guns. If you've  watched any old war movies, you have probably heard anti-aircraft guns referred to as "ack-ack". I've always made the connection between the term and the item and so I never worried about where it came from though I might have thought that it came from the sound the guns made, kind of like little boys yelling bang! bang! Turns out the Brits had their own phonetic alphabet and their term for the letter 'A' was 'ack'. So ack-ack just meant AA, which is short for Anti-Aircraft.

    Then on 12 O'Clock High there was always the problem of flak, which I always took to mean the exploding shells that decorated the sky with puffs of black smoke around our glorious American bomber planes. Turns out flak is German shorthand for the ack-ack guns that fired those shells. I'm still not entirely sure whether it is a descriptive term or a brand name. Those Krauts do funny things with their words.
    Then there's the problem of how to shoot down an airplane that is seven miles above the ground. The mechanical engineering crowd had a field day with this one.

MANPADS are the new Stingers

Egypt seeks to shut economic pipeline to Gaza:

Security forces said Sunday that tens of thousands of forces have pushed into Sinai and its villages near Egypt's volatile border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, seizing vast stockpiles of weapons, including shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, known to the US intelligence community as MANPADS.

MANPADS? What happened to Stingers? Seems MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) is the new catch-all term for Russian and American hand carried, anti-aircraft missles. The FAS (Federation of American Scientists) has a page on the subject. The first 20% of this page gives a brief overview of the existing weapons, the threat they pose, and some blather about what can be done. The remaining 80% is a list of documents that also talk about the subject, which is kind of telling all by itself. Typical bureaucrats, one fact can generate a whole encyclopedia of discussion.
    Talk about a Pandora's box. We give the infantry these weapons to counter the threat from enemy aircraft, but if you let even one slip out of your control, everyone who ever flies is at risk of being shot out of the sky by a crazy person, i.e. a Jihadist. And we were handing these things out to the Taliban back when they were fighting the Russians.
    Even if we could corral all the loose anti-aircraft rockets, that isn't going to eliminate the threat. Terrorists are building their own rockets and bombs and it probably won't be too long before the technology trickles down to the point where amateurs could build these things in the garage.
    Which makes me wonder: what makes a person so crazy that they would want to shoot down a civilian airliner?

The Drones Keep on Coming

Shenyang J-6 Drone

Shenyang J-6

My Daily Kona has a story about how Red China is converting their fleet of aging J-6 fighter aircraft into drones. They are old and obsolete but still serviceable which means they could make excellent attack drones. China has a several airbases that are just a stone's throw from Taiwan and since the J-6 is capable of Mach 1.3 it would take it about 6 minutes to cross the 100 mile wide Taiwan Strait.

Chinese Airbases near Taiwan

China has several thousand of J-6 aircraft. Should they convert them all to drones and use them to attack Taiwan, Taiwan would have its work cut out trying to shoot them all down. Anti-aircraft missiles would be the weapon of choice. Conventional anti-aircraft guns have a hard time against supersonic aircraft.

Of course China has got its work cut out converting these aircraft into drones, and then there's the little matter of making them work. Who knows what kind of problems they are going to run into, especially if they try to get them to fly supersonic. I don't know that anyone is building supersonic drones. Yet.

My Daily Kona lists five Chinese air bases that are near the strait. I couldn't find all of them. Wikipedia has a list of about 170 Chinese air bases. I picked five that sort of matched Kona's list and plotted them on a Google Map.

L-70 anti-aircraft guns

L-70 anti-aircraft gun

Talks between India and China have broken down and two are preparing for a high altitude fight. India has upgraded their L-70 anti-aircraft gun to be able to shoot down drones. The L-70 is basically the same Bofors 40mm gun that has been in use since the 1930s. What got my attention is that it can shoot 300 rounds per minute. Actually it is extremely unlikely that it could keep that up that rate for more than a few seconds. Shells come in clips of five which are loaded by hand. You would need a well trained crew to keep that thing fed if it was firing continuously. And if you did manage to fire for more than a few seconds, overheating the barrel would become a problem. A better measure would be five rounds per second. If you can't hit a drone with five rounds, more is not going to help. I looked for a video, but I did not find a good one. Here's a good pic.

P.S. Google read my mind and served up this video on YouTube. It's pretty good.

 Naval Legends: Bofors | World of Warships
World of Warships Official Channel

Land Of Confusion

 

The Man From IG Farben. by Arnold Trachtman, 1987

Looking through some old posts on Military Photos dot net, I came across this little bit:

All german occupied states had to produce arms and supply the 3rd Reich with ressources. Even the "free" switzerland had to produce and deliver arms, ammunition, cars and even planes, tanks. - Volhv

Well, that certainly upsets my pastoral view of Switzerland. A little checking turns up this incident in the Wikipedia article about Switzerland During World War 2:

Switzerland, surrounded by Axis-controlled territory, also suffered from Allied bombings during the war; most notably from the accidental bombing of Schaffhausen by American planes on April 1, 1944. It was mistaken for Ludwigshafen am Rhein, a German town 284 kilometres away, 40 people were killed and over 50 buildings destroyed, among them a group of small factories producing anti-aircraft shells, ball-bearings, and Bf-109 parts for Germany.

The two places are 120 miles apart. It could have been a mistake, fog of war and all that, but I'm thinking, no, it was too accurate to be an accident. One raid destroyed that small group of factories? I suspect Switzerland's anti-aircraft defenses (guns) were non-existent, so the bombers could come in lower and be more accurate with their bombs. Germany had extensive and powerful anti-aircraft guns, so bombing raids over Germany were done at high altitude, which necessarily impacts your accuracy.

In Switzerland's defense I will say that they were kind of in a bad situation as they were completely surrounded by the Axis.

The allies didn't make that mistake very often. They hit Ludwigshafen considerably harder:

During the Oil Campaign of World War II, the Allies conducted bombing of Ludwigshafen and Oppau. Thirteen thousand Allied bombers hit the city in 121 separate raids during the war, of which 56 succeeded in hitting the Farben plant. . . . By December 1944, so much damage had been done to vital utilities that output dropped to nearly zero. Follow-up raids every week ended production permanently. By war's end most dwellings were destroyed or damaged; 1,800 people had died, and 3,000 were injured.

Now why was the Farben plant targeted?

IG Farben was a German chemical industry conglomerate, notorious for its role in the Holocaust. . . . Following the Nazi takeover of Germany, IG Farben became involved in numerous war crimes during World War II. Most notoriously, the firm's pro-Nazi leadership openly and knowingly collaborated with the Nazi government to produce the large quantities of Zyklon B necessary to gas to death millions of Jews and other "undesirables" at various extermination camps during the Holocaust.

Oh. Don't know how much of that was known during the war, and how much came out after the fact, but Farben was a big chemical company and the modern industrial war machine needs all kinds of chemicals, so they were a logical target, regardless of the poison gas issue.

Blind Obedience

Aa post on The Village Hemorrhoid:

Houthi Regime Leadership Demolished In Single Masterful Israeli Attack

references a couple of stories on Red State:

• How Israel Lured Iran's Top Generals to Their Deaths Will Blow Your Mind (June 18)
• Houthi Regime Leadership Demolished in Single Masterful Israeli Attack (August 29)

Somehow Israel got all of enemies generals to all be in the same place at the same time which meant that they could wipe them all out with one blow.

"Still, as impressive as the nuts and bolts of the plot were, it's how thought-out this all was that's truly incredible. It's one thing to place fake calls through Iranian back channels. It's another to have every general who answered the phone fall for the ruse.

"How did that happen? The answer lies in how antiquated and authoritarian Iran's military structure was and remains. When you serve at the behest of an Islamic dictator who tortures and kills people who step out of line, you aren't exactly in a position to question an order. When the calls came in to head to the bunker, wondering if things seemed a little suspicious wasn't an option. So all the generals blindly listened."

Which reminds me of this episode from Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst:

Our hero, Ferrar, is a Spaniard living and working as a lawyer in Paris, France. A civil war is going on in Spain between Franco and the Republic. Ferrar's sympathies lie with the Republic. Somehow he gets roped into working for the Oficia Tecnica in the Spanish Embassy who are charged with buying armaments for the forces of the Republic. This is a little difficult because of the non-intervention treaty that most western countries have signed.

The war is not going well for the Republic. They are preparing for the battle of Ebro which will be their last chance of defeating the Franco. The Fascists have a big advantage - they have aircraft, the Republic doesn't have any. The Republican forces do have a bunch of Soviet anti-aircraft guns, but they don't have any ammunition. The Soviets, as you might expect, have plenty of this ammo, but they won't sell any. They are hoarding it against the prospect of going to war against Hitler, which is likely to happen any day now. Nobody else has any because they are all geared up for making ammo for their own anti-aircraft guns. The machinery could be modified to make the Soviet ammo, but that would take time, time they do not have.

76 mm Air Defense Gun M1938 – Russian Anti-Air Gun

Ferrar is working with Max, and Max comes up with the idea of hiring some gangsters in Odessa to steal the ammo from a Soviet warehouse. The gangsters are very clever. They pose as agents of Stalin's secret police, tell the warehouse manager this is a secret operation and he is not to discuss it with anyone. And since everyone is terrified of the secret police and dare not question anything they say, the manager gladly complies. And then the gangsters show up with a fleet of trucks and haul all 60 tons of this aircraft ammo to a ship waiting at the dock.

The ship sails to Valencia, the ammo is off loaded and delivered to the army of the Republic, so now they have a fighting chance against the Fascists. The battle does not go well, the Republic is defeated and Franco takes over for the next 30 odd years.

Anti-Aircraft Fire

Talking about people shooting at blimps got me to thinking about people shooting at aircraft with small arms. I remember hearing something about how small arms fire was ineffective against aircraft. This always seemed pretty thin to me, but then I've never been in a position to actually try it.

I remember hearing a story about a couple of guys who were goose hunting in Colorado one year. Normally, goose hunting is done with a shotgun. Hunters shoot at low altitude when the geese come in to land. These two guys had been sitting in a blind waiting for geese to come in and land in the field where they had deployed their decoys, but no geese came. They could see the geese flying overhead, but they were too high up to reach with a shotgun. I imagine anything over a couple hundred feet would be too far. So one of them pulled out a rifle and took aim on one of the high flying geese. They pulled their triggers together, one the rifle, the other the shotgun, hoping the sound of the shotgun would mask the crack of the rifle, which was, after all, illegal for goose hunting. And they got their goose. So you can hit flying objects with a rifle.

I was just reading a book about Iraq and they are flying a C-130 Hercules from Kuwait to Baghdad at altitude of 200 feet. They are flying that low so as to avoid small arms fire. Just before they land they go up to 500 feet to deploy flaps and landing gear. This would seem to be the most vulnerable portion of the flight, but as it is near the airport, possibly also the most secure. The flying at 200 feet doesn't make sense to me. Anyone with a gun who was ready should have been able to hit the plane. If they were flying at even 10,000 feet of altitude I would think they would be out of reach of small arms. Perhaps high speed and low altitude does not give people on the ground enough time to get ready. You hear the plane coming and think, "it's American Imperialists, where's my gun?" and zoom, the plane has come and gone. Also, if you were flying at a high altitude, it would take time to descend and you would be doing that over the Baghdad, in full sight of a city full of people with guns.

So I'm looking on the web for information and I come across this document:

THE TEST TECHNICAL RESEARCH OF SHOOTING PRECISION
ON ANTI-AIRCRAFT MACHINE GUN

from the:

23RD INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON BALLISTICS
TARRAGONA, SPAIN 16-20 APRIL 2007

It's written by a couple of guys from China. The Chinese may not have stinger missiles, but they do have rifles and machine guns. Who said: "you don't go to war with the army you want, you go to war with the army you have"? (It was Rumsfeld.)

Inflatables

I was talking to a blimp guy the other day and he mentioned that the blimps they built use a special low-permeability skin, and I thought that's what we need in inner tubes for bicycle tires, especially for road bikes. I mean, how many times should you have to pump up a tire? You need to inflate car tires maybe once or twice a year, if that. High pressure (100 PSI) road bike tires have to be pumped up durn near every day, or at least once a week. So maybe this blimp material would be good for bicycle tires.

Probably not, blimps don't run high pressure, they have enormous volume relative to surface area, and the skin doesn't need to be flexible. Actually, the less flexible the better. Still, you would think someone would have come up with a better material for bicycle inner tubes. This is one of the big bug-a-boos of high technology. We can build carbon fiber frames that weigh next to nothing, but we cannot build an inner tube that will hold it's pressure. I put this in the same category as shoe laces: places where high technology has fallen on it's big fat face.

The blimp guy also mentioned that the military had been looking at using blimps for aerial reconnaissance. Wouldn't they be easy to shoot down? Well, yes, if you have a weapon that can reach them, like anti-aircraft missiles or fighter aircraft, but regular small arms are not much of a threat. You don't have to be too high up to be out of reach of even a high powered rifle. WWII Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun was effective up to about a mile and a half of altitude. Using our old reliable physics formulas, a bullet fired with a muzzle velocity of 2500 FPS (feet per second), could theoretically reach an altitude of 18 miles , but that's without considering air resistance. And air resistance is crucial. A high velocity bullet traveling horizontally initially loses one FPS of velocity for each foot traveled . So being a mile high should put you out of the reach of small arms, and still put you close enough to the ground to be able to see what's going, especially with most any kind of optics.

Bullet holes by themselves are not a big problem. The holes they make are small, the volume of the blimp is so large, and the pressure so low, that a single bullet hole poses no real threat. The promotional blimps you see flying around sporting events seem to act as bullet magnets for any yahoos in the neighborhood, so the blimp people are very familiar bullet holes.

The big problem with blimps is not with flying them, but landing and launching. A steady breeze they can handle, but when it gets really windy, you also tend to get gusts and changes of wind direction, and those kind of things make a blimp's life miserable. So small unmanned aircraft seem to be the military's preferred method.

Pic of the Day

Formosa Training Camp, Brazil. Oct. 29, 2014.  Brazilian Marines shoot an anti-aircraft gun during military training in the state of Goias, north of Brasilia. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

I'm trying to read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It's not really my style, but the story line has promise. Anyway, somewhere early in the book we are in London during the blitz (WW2) and an American girl reporter spends the evening with an anti-aircraft battery. Then I saw this picture with multiple shell casings in the air so just had to post it. I don't think you can really understand the experience unless you are there when the gun is firing a thousand rounds, and you probably can't truly understand it unless you have enemy aircraft trying to stop you from doing that.

Lots of girls and guys interacting in this book, to put it mildly.

Bomarc

Dad worked on the Bomarc anti-aircraft missile when I was a kid and we were living in Seattle. Recently I discovered the it carried a nuclear warhead. Manfred (one of the guys that I worked with at Stevens) was an electronics technician in the military working on Nike anti-aircraft missile systems. While he was in the military he took a course in thermonuclear warfare, and the Bomarc was one of the weapons they covered. Seems that the Bomarc was to be used against a group of enemy bombers. The Bomarc would be set to detonate above the squadron of enemy bombers. The explosion would knock the wings off the planes and they would fall into the sea.

Airplanes

Left to right: A Convair F-106 Delta Dart, a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, 
a Nike anti-aircraft missile and a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

We have large aircraft and a small aircraft. They look like jet fighters, but one is so much larger than the other. Are they really all jet fighters? The smaller airplane looks like it might be some kind of toy, like a Bede Jet. After closer examination I am pretty sure it is an F-104. The larger ones are a Convair Delta Dart and a Convair Delta Dagger.

All three of these jets were developed during the 1950's. The F-104 started a couple of years before the F-106, but they were basically contemporaries. The Delta Dart is roughly 50% larger in all dimensions than the Starfighter. They both had the same top speed of 1500 mph and they both carried 20mm gatling guns. The Dagger was considerable less capable than the other two and retired around 1980. The other two were in use up till the year 2000.

Via daily timewaster

Update the next day via information from a comment.

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Great story about the adventures of a tramp steamer and her captain sailing around Europe in 1941.

Captain DeHaan and his ship, the Dutch tramp steamer Noordendam, are co-opted by British intelligence to carry a load of commandos to a headland on the north coast of Tunisia in the Mediterranean. The object of the commando raid is to take out a German post that is watching ship traffic using Bolometers, a new, high tech, whiz bang  infra-red detector gizmo. They drop anchor just offshore in the middle of the night, the commandos take small boats into shore and do what commandos do. Naturally, there are complications, but they mostly get away, raise anchor and steam away without anyone being the wiser. Just another tramp steamer sailing east in the Mediterranean.

Thermal Imaging Sensor

I didn't find any good pictures of WW2 German Infrared Detectors, but I did find this very cool image in a story about current infrared research. 

Breguet 730 Flying Boat
Page 55. Never flew during the war.

As they are sailing away from the commando raid, they see a couple of enemy patrol aircraft but nothing comes of it.

Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero
Page 55.

Browning GP35  Automatic
The captain's gun

They dock in Alexandria, Egypt, where all is chaos as the Germans have launched an invasion of Crete. Our ship gets loaded with munitions along with a couple of tanks and a couple of airplanes. They convoy to Crete. No sooner are they docked than the harbor is attacked by a squadron of Stuka dive bombers. The anti-aircraft guns on the British warships dispose of most of them, but they do some damage. Our ship and crew escape with only minor damage.

Nothing like a little success to get you assigned more of the same. Now it's back to the west end of the Mediterranean where they pick up a cargo of black-ops radio gear which includes some largish antennae masts and trucks to haul them. They have to sail north around England and Ireland, across the North Sea and into the Baltic, passing between German occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden.  Somehow they manage to arrive at their rendezvous at the southern tip of Sweden, in the middle of the night again, and manage to unload their cargo onto a fishing trawler that makes several trips carrying the gear the mile to shore. It is well after dawn when they finish, but they are underway by the time the regular Nazi patrol aircraft comes by. 

Now they are home free, all they have to do is navigate the minefield between Denmark and Sweden, the same one they had to navigate on the way in, but a German patrol boat spots them and decides to inquire. Well the jigs up now, sailing under false colors, looks like they are heading for a German prison or worse. Well, except the mess boy and the cook deliver coffee to the bridge, and boy do they deliver. The guard gets a coffee pot to the head and the Nazi lieutenant gets a knife in the back. Their ship is faster than the German boat by maybe two knots, but with a thick cloud of black smoke, night falling and confusing radio messages indicating chaos onboard the ship, they manage to evade the patrol boat.

With the Germans alerted to their presence, the way west seems closed, so they head East to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania). They arrive just as Germany has forgotten their pact with Russia and has mounted an attack. The port is under attack, so they pick up a load of refugees and head north toward Finland. Their ship is part of a rag tag convoy that gets attacked by German airplanes. Their ship is damaged, damaged, damaged, but it keeps limping along well enough to carry them aground on a Finnish island.

On page 38, Captain DeHaan reviews the 40 book library he keeps in his cabin.

• Multatuli  Max Havelaar
• Louis Couperus
• William Shakespeare Henry V
• Joseph Conrad  The Mirror of the Sea
• Joseph Conrad  Nostromo
• Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness
• Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer
• Joseph Conrad  Lord Jim
• T. E. Lawrence The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• Malraux Man's Fate
• Malraux  Man's Hope
• Stendhal The Red and the Black
• Stendhal  The Charterhouse of Parma
• Tolstoy  War and Peace
• Bowditch The American Practical Navigator
• Nicholl's Deviation Questions and Law of Storms
• Baedeker for France
• Colette My Mother's House
• Colette  The Vagabond
• Colette Claudine in Paris
• Colette  Claudine at School

On page 184 Furst mentions Captain Claude Farrere of the French minesweeper Lieutenant Borri
Serebin. Kind of weird just throwing in a couple of specific names like that since they don't seem to have any bearing on the story, so I do some checking. Found nothing about the French minesweeper, but Captain Claude, well that's another story. 

J. P. Sauer & Sohn, Suhl CAL 7,65
Page 222 - The Nazi lieutenant's gun

Map of Noordendam's Travels

Russians get Right to Bear Arms

Pischal Counter-UAV Gun

Not really for the average slob, it essentially enables private armies, as long as they are loyal to the regime. Of course they are going to be loyal. You aren't going to let a rebel force raise an army, are you?

From Meduza, 

Russia has authorized private companies to purchase heavy weapons and equipment to defend against drone attacks, including anti-aircraft artillery systems, gun turrets, radar systems, and electronic warfare systems, the Russian business outlet RBC reported, citing sources.

Previously, businesses were limited to what were described as “passive safeguards for facilities” for their security personnel, including small arms.

Authorities expect the policy, adopted under new regulations, to speed up the supply of weapons and equipment to mobile fire groups — units formed from reservists, volunteers, and employees of private enterprises to protect civilian infrastructure from drones.

One of RBC’s sources said such groups “demonstrate high effectiveness in intercepting fixed-wing drones.”

Ratt Anti-UAV System Exterior

Ratt Anti-UAV System Interior

About Meduza:

Meduza is the world’s largest independent Russian media outlet. Completely outlawed by the Russian state, we operate from abroad to deliver news that censors can’t stop to millions of readers inside Russia and around the globe. You can read our reporting in both Russian and English. 

Anti-Drone Gun Systems

U.S. Soldiers training with M-LIDS
(Mobile Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Integrated Defense System)

With the proliferation of drones as weapons, it's not surprising that the military has come up with a method to combat them, and since it's the US Military, it's not surprising that we've got a system that looks like massive overkill for the gnats that are commonly used. While a shotgun can be effective against hobby shop drones, they only hold a few rounds and have limited range so can easily be overwhelmed by a small number of drones flying at high speed. Also, people are building bigger and faster drones that fly at higher altitudes, so basically you need an anti-aircraft gun for a range of small stuff, attackers that don't warrant sending a missile.

Could we have drone shooting competitions? Not necessarily real drones, but skeet flying at 100 MPH, 20 feet off the deck and headed right for you. Here's an opportunity for shotgun enthusiasts to come up with a shotgun with longer range. A punt gun might be just the ticket, if it didn't weigh 100 pounds.

You might ask why we need a zillion dollar anti-drone system when drones can be had for petty cash. Well, a little drone equipped with an explosive payload can do a heck of a lot of damage if it finds the right target. So the question is, how much are you and yours worth? That's how we figure out how much to spend on defense.

Via Defense Blog

Blast From The Past

Scott sent me a link to a site about Nike anti-aircraft missile sites. Back during the cold war, we (the USA) set up a bunch of these, many times the number of BOMARC sites. Some Nike missiles used a conventional explosive, some used a nuclear warhead.

 

Incredible Footage of B17 Bomber Destroyed by Nike Missle (1954) | British Pathé
War Archives
This video shows a four engine, propeller driven bomber being destroyed by a Nike missile. I wonder how they were able to record this. I imagine this was a test and the bomber was unmanned. The bomber could have been on autopilot, I mean autopilots have been around forever, but how did they get the plane far enough off the ground to engage the autopilot? And who was filming this? Another unmanned drone? And how far away would you have to be to ensure that the aircraft with the camera wasn't the one targeted by the missile? This is another fine example of the Cold War mentality gone wild.

Update: Clyde & IGOR got the shot.

Update March 2022 replaced missing video.

The Night Manager by John LeCarre

Once I got about 3/4 of the way through, I started having a lot of trouble with this book. I could only read a page or two, or sometimes less, before I would have to put it down for a bit. I am not sure why. Perhaps because the situation was getting tense. It was really kind of odd.
The story had some similarities to the Bond movie Never Say Never Again: big wheeler dealer, big yacht, beautiful girl. I suppose the yacht was the key point. Most of the book revolves around internal political struggles between the various British spy agencies, in particular one run by the nefarious Darker and the other run by the straight arrow Goodhew. Goodhew's agency is concerned with enforcement, Darker's interest is "pure" intelligence. The villain is trying to broker a deal to swap modern weapons to Columbia in exchange for a boatload of cocaine. Darker's agency sees no problem with letting the deal go down, after all they're getting a cut, which is going straight to their offshore accounts. They throw up a smoke screen of reasons for not interfering, not our jurisdiction, can't expect any real cooperation from Columbia ("it's propping up the governments of Columbia and Peru"), it's bringing money into the country - they're buying weapons from our manufacturers.
One of weapons they are selling is the Stinger anti-aircraft missile. Raytheon charges the US Government $40,000 for each one. These are the weapons that convinced the Soviets to leave Afghanistan (Charlie Wilson's War). After the Soviets left, the Americans tried to buy back any left over Stingers. They were offering a hundred thousand dollar premium. No telling how many they got back, or more importantly, how many they didn't get back. All this makes me wonder what they are worth on the black market. I mean, if you were under attack by modern military aircraft, how much would it be worth to you to be able to knock one of out the sky? I suppose it would depend on how much damage they could do to you. If they are shooting at you in particular it might be worth all you have to stop them. In a battle like this though, one is unlikely to be sufficient.

E-mail Subscriptions

IAman pointed out that the e-mail subscription service I had setup a zillion years ago wasn't working. Until then I didn't know anyone was using it. I got a notice a couple of weeks ago from a different e-mail service letting me know that feedburner had expired, expired as in died, not just that my subscription had run out. Evidently the email widget I stuck in the sidebar umpteen years ago (using Blogger's edior) was tied into feedburner. 

Well, now that he has mentioned it I suppose I ought to go fix it, I mean, how else are my pearls of wisdom going to be disseminated?

I also thought about adding the little toolbar that allows you to 'share' a post on any number of ways.

I'm starting to break out of my old haunts, looking around to see what's out there, like Twitter. I don't follow Twitter, but I notice that some of the news stories I come across quote from Twitter, and some of those quotes notable. So I got to thinking maybe I should cast some loaves upon the water and see if anything comes up from out of the deep and snatches one. Kind of like virtual catch and release of marlin.

Meanwhile we are in the throus of finishing the new house, my back is being a pain and I haven't made any progress on my space travel computations. I did get distracted by a 35 mm German anti-aircraft gun. Self-propelled, it might be called the Geperd. It shoots a zillion shells a minute, but it only carries enough ammo to shoot for a few seconds, so whenever it does fire it needs to be dead certain about where it's pointing. That certainty is composed of two parts - aiming and pointing. The first involves figuring out where you want the gun to be pointed, which means knowing where the target aircraft is, its speed and where it's headed, and the ballistics of the gun. The second part means moving the gun barrel around so it's pointing where the first part says we should be pointing.That doesn't sound so hard, just some gears and an electric motor, until you consider the high degree of accuracy you will need. A zillionth of a degree at 5,000 yards is the difference between a hit and a miss. I suppose that's what the high rate of fire is all about - make your best guess about where your target will be, and make your best guess as where your barrel is pointing, throw a dozen rounds downrange and pray.

Guns

World War II German 8.8 cm Flak 18/36/37 anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun

Italian Army personnel recovery operation using Agusta A129 Mangusta attack helicopter

Nose Gun

Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk

10th Cav trooper with Apache Scouts, 1885

Smoke & Mirrors

SMOKE & MIRRORS by Alberto Rodriguez - TRAILER
Smoke & Mirrors is a 2016 Spanish film based on the 2006 non-fiction book Paesa, el espía de las mil caras (The Spy with a Thousand Faces) by Manuel Cerdán. The film tells the story of Francisco Paesa, a former agent of the Spanish secret service who faked his own death after an infamous corruption scandal. On Netflix in Spanish with English subtitles.

This isn't a great movie. We see a bunch of people wandering around, going to meetings, having drinks, passing envelopes back and forth, but I never got a feel for what was going on. I mean, are these good guys or bad guys? We have some corrupt government officials who are also doing some good things. Should we be upset that they are corrupt, or upset because they are getting screwed over? Or should be happy that they are getting away with the money? It's all very wishy-washy.

Spoilers follow.

Paco (Francisco Paesa) starts out as the head of the government's anti-terrorist squad. He buys a couple of SAM's (Surface to Air Missiles, i.e. anti-aircraft missiles), plants some homing beacons in the missiles and then sells them to the Basque terrorist group ETA. This bit of skulduggery allows him to track the missles and so bust the ETA. We only get a couple of lines in passing that elude to this whole operation. It's kind of typical of the whole film. There are big things going on, but they are all happening somewhere else. All we get is a couple of clues dropped in the middle of a conversation. Anyway, the government had promised him a big reward for busting the ETA, but they reneged on their promise and then tried to prosecute him for something.

Luis Roldán was the director general of the Spanish Civil Guard. He embezzled about $12 million. He didn't feel guilty about this as everyone else was doing it too, and he wasn't too worried about getting caught because he had evidence about the criminal activities of other officials. That didn't save him though. He spent 15 years in prison.

Supposedly, Luis gave the $12 million to Paco to hold for him while he dealt with the government's prosecution, but Paco 'died' and the money disappeared. Who knows what happened to the 'evidence'?

There were a couple of bits con-artistry. One was where Paco recruits a couple of bums to pose as big wheels for some bogus real estate transactions. That was kind of a standard scam. There was another that was kind of impressive for it's complexity, but baffling because why would you go to all the bother?

Paco negotiates Luis' surrender to the Spanish authorities. Luis has been hiding in Paris for a year, but for some reason Paco wants to make it look like Luis has been in Laos, so he generates some fake documents and hires a couple of guys to pose as Laotian policemen for the handoff to the Spanish cops at the airport in Bangkok, Thailand.

All this makes Spanish politics look awful, but I don't know if it's any worse than what we have here. The ETA seems to have been dissolved so maybe things are getting better.