Harrier Night Landing

Harrier Jet Vertical Landing At Night On Amphibious Assault Ship
AiirSource Military
U.S. Navy video by Craig Z. Rodarte

The red color disappears as soon as the aircraft touches down. Must not be much residual heat in the nozzles. And what's with the green light from the flashlight the deckhand is carrying? It used to be that red light was what you used for instruments for night flying, and then they started using blue lights to illuminate the interior of armored personnel carriers during night operations, and now they are using green lights on the flight deck at night. I'm getting a little confused.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.

Update September 2022 replaced missing video.

FLIR at Work

Cloud flying with UK Coastguard SAR helicopter
My friend Jack is working on the FLIR infrared camera system that was used to make this video. Via Bayou Renaissance Man.

Hooper Heliport

Hooper Heliport Los Angeles. Downtown in the background. Click to embiggenate. The concrete slab on the top of the building just above the helicopter is heliport. It's a big place, large enough for a dozen helicopters easily.

The New York Times has a story by Geoff Manaugh about the Los Angeles Police helicopter squad.  Looking for pictures, I turn up this one which I thought was real until I looked at the page and realized that it was a screen shot from a video game.

Google Earth view of downtown Los Angeles, Hooper Heliport in the foreground.

Here is a similar view from Google Earth. The difference in apparent composition is presumably due to the radically different perspective derived from different viewpoints.

Inside the cockpit of an LAPD helicopter at night.

Black as Night

What is it with people that causes them to dress all in black before they set out to cross a busy, poorly illuminated, four lane city street when it is pitch black outside? Do they think they are Ninjas? Or maybe Charles Bronson?

1946 - Caterpillar Diesel D7 tractor with loading attachment loading debris for a project pulling up street car rails on Market Street in San Francisco, California. The 660 volt trolley wires overhead mean extra care must be taken in handling rails. This tractor is obviously a hazard to navigation, but at least it is being dangerous in full daylight, where you can see what is going on.

     Driving to the train station early one morning a couple of months ago I noticed a big black blob in the middle of the road. Early morning, poor visibility, I couldn't tell what it was. There was something up ahead in the middle of the road. I slowed way down and eventually I could see that it was a medium-small track hoe crawling across the street. It had one work light shining and it may have been painted orange, but the only clue I had to its being there was that it was blocking the light from the businesses father down the street.
   Since then it seems that most every day on my early morning, five mile urban jaunt, I see at least one person  that is walking along the street, or crossing in the middle of the block, dressed all in dark clothes. I want a paint ball gun that shoots balls of fluorescent dye so I can tag these morons.
   This morning (7:30AM) I am on the return leg of my trip, sitting at a stop light, and I notice the sky is gray, not black. That's weird. It's been totally black for the last two months. How could it be gray? Winter solstice hasn't gotten here yet, the days are not getting longer. Could it be that we have been blanketed with clouds for the last two months, clouds so thick no sunlight could get through them?

Girls with Cameras

U.S. Air Force Airman Taft checks her night vision equipment.
North Auxiliary Airfield, S.C., Feb. 9, 2015.
U.S. Air Force photo by Jordan Castelan.

Yes, I know, there isn't a camera in this picture either, but original caption talks about 'combat camera Airmen' so there is a thin connection. But mostly it's here because Terminator Girl!

Night Flight

Cockpit of some evil Russian war plane.

Aliens

Soldiers 'prepare for a mission' (kill time making wisecracks) aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington somewhere on the far side of the world. U.S. Navy photo by Everett Allen.

Who knows what they are actually doing. The red light and their gear makes it look like a set from a new science fiction movie.

Colored Lights

Boeing B-52 Cockpit

At night the military uses red light to illuminate instruments on all kinds of equipment: aircraft, ships, vehicles, radar, what-have-you, the reason being that it has the least effect on your night vision. When we got our 2006 Mitsubishi Endeavor, I was disappointed to find that it had blue indicator lights on the dash. I suppose that was the fashion back then, and I guess it doesn't matter so much in a car, after all you've nice bright halogen bulbs to illuminate the road, so your night vision's probably worth shit anyway, so the color of the indicator lights isn't going to make any difference.

Audi S4 Cockpit

    Tonight I got a ride in a new Audi S4 and it had red marker lights all over the dash. They were not the kind of subdued red you see in military equipment, it was more of a a candy-apple, in-your-face, high fashion kind of red. Can't really tell from the difference from these pictures since they have been translated to bits and then reconstituted using the RGB pixels in your monitor. The original colors in the Audi are probably not even really red, probably made of ultraviolet crossed with infrared to give the illusion of red. The fashion in dashboard lights has changed. Imagine that.
    Recently someone was trying to justify using blue lights in the instruments. Our eyes have two kinds of cells that detect light: rods and cones. Cones are used for normal, daylight color vision. Rods are used for black and white, low light (nighttime) vision. Rods are sensitive to blue light, but insensitive to red light. So blue will work at night, and you should be able to get by with much dimmer blue lights than if you used red, but using red lights will not impact your night vision.