Some T-33s retained two machine guns for gunnery training, and in some countries, the T-33 was even used in combat: the Cuban Air Force used them during the Bay of Pigs Invasion, scoring several kills including sinking two transport ships.
DARPA's Little Secrets That Changed The World
Curious Droid
Methinks the American defense industry has been going wild for two long. I dunno but I suspect much of that $35 trillion debt we are carrying was incurred to pay for all the wars we've been involved in since WW2.
Went for a walk this afternoon while the airshow was going on and saw a P-38 & F-35 flying together. Pretty cool, don't know that I've every seen a P-38 in person before.
Because of its unique twin boom design, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning was the most easily recognized U.S. Army Air Force fighter in use during the Second World War. It accounted for more Japanese aircraft losses than any other American warplane and was nicknamed "the Fork-Tailed Devil" by the German Luftwaffe in the North Africa Theater. The Lightning was ideal as both a gunnery platform and a photo-reconnaissance airship because everything could be consolidated in the nose. With counter-rotating propellers and no torque, centrally concentrated firepower, twin-engine safety, hydraulically boosted ailerons and range, the P-38 was America’s first truly modern military aircraft. - Erickson Collection
F-16 taking off from Leoš Janáček Airport near the city of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Note the heatwave distortion from the exhaust plume.
Okay, it's an F-16, but whose Air Force does it belong to? Might be kind of important since there has been talk about sending F-16s to Ukraine. Ostrava is only 500 miles from Kiev. There is some kind of round symbol on the tail, but it isn't clear enough in this image to determine just what it is. Have no fear F-16.net knows - it's the Royal Netherlands Air Force*.
The symbol is similar enough that it's likely the same.
On to Ostrava, Ostrava is just northeast of the Moravian Gate, which is a low area between two ranges of mountains. So if you have an army in Czechia and you want to go east into Poland, Ukraine or Russia, you are going to go through Ostrava and the Moravian Gate. I started watching a video the other day about how if Russia really wanted to defend their land against land invasion, they would need to secure several of these passes including the Moravian Gate. Sounds nuts to me, but then I didn't think Russia would invade Ukraine either.
So having F-16s stationed is Ostrava makes a certain amount of sense. Give those unruly Poles something to think about should they start casting covetous glances at Czechia.
* F-16.net calls it the RNIAF which Google translates to RNLAF, not to be confused with RNAF, the Royal Norwegian Air Force. Funny how all those European countries are hanging on to their royalty.
Aerial Visuals Airplane Dossier has a history of this aircraft. It flew in the Berlin Airlift back in 1949. It was converted to a military VIP transport (VC-121) and served for sixteen years before it was handed over to NASA where it served in support of the Apollo missions.
Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.
Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.
Can Russia's Doomsday Weapon Be Stopped? Status-6/Poseidon
Covert Cabal
[The video has an advertisement that runs for one minute starting from the one minute mark.]
Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.
INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)
They were using a torpedo to look for the wreck. They didn't find it, but then the torpedo they were using wasn't nuclear powered, so it had limited range and endurance. But if we had a nuclear powered torpedo, we could set it to searching and it could search the entire ocean. It might take a while, but then we would know what is down there.
There have been nuclear powered submarines cruising the oceans for decades and they probably have been accumulating a great deal of data about the ocean floor, but maybe not. Submarines only go down to about a thousand feet and most of the world's oceans are much deeper than that, so deep that the submarines can't 'see' the bottom.
I've been thinking we need a new political party, one that is not beholden to the established order. I think there are enough people who are appalled by our current regime that a new party might be viable. There are probably just as many as the number of true believers supporting the current regime. (I'm talking about the 3% of the population that actually thinks about these things. The rest of the people have other, better things to do with their time.) Problem is that the current regime is well entrenched. They have established mechanisms for funding their propaganda. If we wanted to push the old regime out and supplant it with our new, improved system, we would need funding on a massive scale. Elon Musk might be a start, but Elon by himself is not going to be able to push Lockheed aside.
Biden the Puppet
There are basically two methods of running a country. One is a meritocracy where a man's success is determined by his ability, effort, clear thinking and luck. The other is the mafia where you have two levels of society, one level that works are tries, and another that siphons off as much as they want off of the top. Most of the world operates under the second system. I like to think that American government used to be a meritocracy but for the last, I dunno, 70 years?, has been turning into their own particular flavor of mafia.
Mencken and the inner soul of the people
If we were going to form a new political party, we would need some kind of manifesto, some guidelines, a list of principles that we are willing to adhere to. One item might be no more catering to special interests. Hammering that out while trying to enlist billionaire supporters might take ten years.
Psychopaths
And pushing out the old guard would take a long time. We could start small with representatives from out of the way states and work our way up.
Who am I kidding? There have been upstart political parties since the dawn of time and none have made any headway against the established order. Evidently building a new political party with enough power to change things is dang near impossible.
In the early Fifties, our nation's first line of defense against Rooskie nukyular bombers was "all-weather" fighters with on-board radar for finding the incoming targets.
The weaponry needed to destroy jet bombers once the radar-toting fighter had located them was the sticking point. Guided missiles were still in their infancy, machine guns lacked the power required to bring down a big bomber, and even cannon weren't a sure thing since a head-on pass by a 600mph Lockheed F-94 Starfire at a formation of Soviet M-4 Bisons doing 500mph would be over in an eyeblink. A 20mm autocannon might only chug out a few rounds in that blink.
Stealing an idea from late-WW2 German jet interceptors, the USAF turned to unguided rockets. The Northrop F-89 Scorpion carried a hundred and four of the things, split between two wingtip pods.
"Pentagon’s No.1 weapons supplier Lockheed Martin". Seems to me I've heard that expression before. Checking my old posts, there are a bunch about Lockheed, but that particular expression only showed up recently.
Watched this video the other day. Lockheed had been knocking around the airplane business since 1912, but the P-38 and WW2 really made their bones. They built 9,000 P-38s.
Pentagon’s No.1 weapons supplier Lockheed Martin Corp. says it has terminated its agreement to acquire rocket engine and missile maker Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc.
Don't know how accurate the caption is. The International Ice Patrolhas been operating in the North Atlantic Ocean ever since the Titanic sank, and the Navy operated Neptunes all over the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing their own ice patrols while looking for enemy submarines.
P.S. April 2022. I just noticed that the propellers on this airplane are not turning. Normally photographs of this vintage show the propellers as a blur. It's only since the advent of digital cameras that we have been getting psychedelic images of props. Since it looks like they are not turning it means either: the engines have stopped and the airplane is gliding, on its way to its doom, or they used special high speed film and camera to stop the propeller, or the date is a lie. If the engine is turning at 1200 RPM, then the tip speed of this 15 foot diameter prop is around 1,000 fps. Typical exposure time for a 35 mm camera is 1/100th of a second which is 10 milliseconds. In ten milliseconds, the tip of the prop would have moved 10 feet, or about a quarter of a rotation and we would not be seeing the individual blades. Of course, this is a military aircraft and they would have had access to high speed film and cameras, so that's likely the explanation.
Came across this photo or the Lockheed S-3B Viking and thought that's kind of a cool airplane, something different anyway. Then I read the blurb and find the photo was taken at Vraciu Field, which took me aback. I thought I knew the names of all the US air bases, or at least I was familiar with them, but I've never heard of this one.
Aerolíneas Peruanas flag carrier of Peru from 1956 to 1971. The tug in the foreground belongs to Braniff International, obviously. Who else would paint an airline tug in such garish colors?
This engine powered the last generation of piston engine transports, including the Douglas DC-7 and Lockheed Super Constellation. It represents the end of engine-development that began with the famous Wright Whirlwind, and included an entire family of military and commercial piston power plants. The somewhat unique feature of this engine was a turbo compound device, consisting of an exhaust-driven turbine geared to the crankshaft, generating 20 percent additional take-off power without increasing fuel consumption. - Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
I've heard of turbo-compound engines before. I remember Mack Trucks was experimenting with them an eon ago, and now Mack and Volvo are trying again. They are kind of problematic. You are basically trying to join two forms of incompatible technology that just do not want to cooperate. The first problem is that turbos spin about ten times faster than conventional gas engines, so need gears that can handle the speed and load. A bigger problem might be matching the power output curves. Theoretically, you should get more power and higher efficiency, but as been well established, theory and practice are not the same.
P.S. My dad made a little money off of Braniff stock. I remember mom telling me the "stock split and split and split". Sounds kind of like what Intel stock was doing in the 1980s & 90s.
Lockheed F-104 Starfighter | The worlds first Mach 2 fighter
The Atomic Cafe
I am starting to develop a feel for the development of aircraft over the course of the 20th century, but I think my feelings could do with some structure. People invested enormous amounts of time and money developing these machines and it seems like every one exceeded the capabilities of previous aircraft in some manner: bigger, heavier, faster, flying higher or father, carrying more people or cargo. I might have to put together a spreadsheet. The early Cold War era is particularly intriguing because it seems like great advances were made and they all kind of pointed to the Apollo mission to the moon. After that, it all seemed to be polish and refinement and computers.
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