A little support and cheer to a fellow blogger from Four Leaf Clover Dairy who is fighting cancer.
Link to Flowers for Leontien to join in.
h/t Brigid
Link to Flowers for Leontien to join in.
Link to Flowers for Leontien to join in.
So, the road trip continues… Worked all day yesterday, then out to dinner last night, which turned into an “adventure” in eating…
Went to my favorite Thai Restaurant in Waikiki last night (Keos) and ordered what I ‘thought’ was just pieces of fish in green curry, instead out comes the whole damn fish!!!
And it took THREE of us to eat all of it…
So, finished dinner, off to the airport, and a battle with TSA over my @#$^& PEN of all things…
Carteach gifted me one of these fantastic pens, and of course the TSA idjits at Honoruru thought it was a weapon… sigh
So they made me put in my backpack and ran it back through the xray… WTF???
So red-eye to SFO (no sleep), rent-a-wreck and off I go with TWO cups of coffee heading up to see my daughters…
An hour later, another cup of coffee and I need to get off 101 before I run over/into something, so I jump off and go via Calistoga and over the Calistoga Grade (FUN road), which woke me up VERY quickly…
So I’m winding over, around and through the hills, when I hear a snarling exhaust coming up behind…
Passing area about 1/2 mile later and a REAL Lotus 7 goes by me like I’m sitting still. Old gent driving, smiling ear to ear, driving gloves and all; the passenger? Not so much… more like PURE terror 🙂
Another couple of miles and an old Triumph TT and a BSA 650 Lightning go squirting by too (and also ridden by old farts)…
At the daughters, so it’s na… zzzzZZZZZ
Oh sorry, must have nodded off there…
Another one from the mil-email chain…
And a comment that pretty much ‘defines’ what the culture NEEDS to be in combat aviation…
YOU ARE DAMNED RIGHT……and I want it to be “inappropriate”.
The military is supposed to be tactically trained KILLERS, not some bullshit PC, group-hugging, dope-smoking liberals in it. Let the military get in, do the damn job trained to do, and get out. Then get ready for the next one. To hell with the liberal politicians that bog us down in their PC world…..that’s not what the military is about (or shouldn’t be, at least). I’m all for OFFENSIVELY-EARNED callsigns……here’s some off the top of my head that I was honored to serve with:
And a comment that pretty much ‘defines’ what the culture NEEDS to be in combat aviation…
YOU ARE DAMNED RIGHT……and I want it to be “inappropriate”.
The military is supposed to be tactically trained KILLERS, not some bullshit PC, group-hugging, dope-smoking liberals in it. Let the military get in, do the damn job trained to do, and get out. Then get ready for the next one. To hell with the liberal politicians that bog us down in their PC world…..that’s not what the military is about (or shouldn’t be, at least). I’m all for OFFENSIVELY-EARNED callsigns……here’s some off the top of my head that I was honored to serve with:
WIMBO – Woman in a Man’s Body (Greatest dude ever, by the way)
FUZZY – Hubbel
AIDS – Axxxx Ixxxx Dxxxx Sxxxx (his name)
TEEFUS
THUMPER
CHUBBER
MONGO
IOWA (Idiot Out Wandering Around)
MOTO (Master Of The Obvious)
NOTSO – Bright
Yep, I think we had some of the best callsigns of any squadron I have been in:
Skirt – CO
Fester – XO
Elvis – OPSO
Beavis – AMO
Mongo – DOSS
Slope (slow antelope)
NASA (no apparent situational awareness)
IKE (I know everything)
Tumbleweed (pro word for no current situational awareness)
TUBA (tight uniform, big a$$)
Princess (self explanatory)
Soapy
Mona (MALE squadron artist – Mona Lisa)
Scuzi
My personal favorites…
Puke
Flake (Snow)
Rat
EMAC Exxxx Mixxxx Anxxxxx Cexxxx (his name)
Avon
Reggie
Snap (BAD tempered guy)
Splat
DA (DumbAss)
Snake
Yo
Wubba (Polack with a 19 letter name)
They all were ‘earned’ not self applied… 🙂
On a related note, DO NOT believe the administration or the JCS when you hear about a 300 ship (1/2 of what Reagan had at 594) Navy… It will never get there…
They are lying through their teeth, and it will be 254 or less for the foreseeable future… Obamallama’s “300” only START building after 2016 and not in enough numbers to overcome the required decommissionings…
A husband had just finished reading a new book entitled, “You Can Be THE Man of Your House.”
Finding new courage that he never knew he had, he stormed into the kitchen and announced to his wife, “From now on, you need to know that I am the man of this house, and my word is the Law.”
You will prepare me a gourmet meal tonight, bring it to me, and when I am done eating my meal, you will clear the dishes and serve me a scrumptious dessert.
After dinner, you are going to go upstairs with me and we will make love the way I want! Afterwards, you are going to draw me a bath so I can relax. You will put on soothing music, wash my back and towel me dry and bring me my robe.
You will massage my feet and hands to relieve any last bit of tension so that I can sleep like a baby.
Then tomorrow, guess who’s going to dress me, and comb my hair?”
The wife replied, “The funeral director would be my first guess, unless I have your ass cremated.”
A ‘Maxine’ worth reading…
Minorities
We need to show more sympathy for these people.
They travel miles in the heat.
They risk their lives crossing a border.
They don’t get paid enough wages.
They do jobs that others won’t do or are afraid to do.
They live in crowded conditions among a people who speak a different language.
They rarely see their families, and they face adversity all day ~ every day.
I’m not talking about illegal Mexicans
~
I’m talking about our troops!
Doesn’t it seem strange that so many are willing to lavish all kinds of social benefits on illegals, but don’t support our troops?
Wouldn’t it be great if we took the $360,000,000,000 (that’s billion) we spend on illegals every year, and spend it on our troops???
What a ‘novel’ concept… actually FUND the military to get new equipment, rather than CUT $450 Billion and face another $500 Billion cut when sequestration happens this fall…
And contrary to an email, NO this was NOT taken of my gun safe, but I’m workin on it… 🙂
h/t JP for the Maxine
The Battle of Palmdale
On the morning of 16 August 1956, Navy personnel at Point Mugu prepared an F6F-5K for its final mission. The aircraft had been painted overall high-visibility red. Red and yellow camera pods were mounted on the wingtips. Radio remote control systems were checked, and the Hellcat took off at 11:34 a.m., climbing out over the Pacific Ocean. As ground controllers attempted to maneuver the drone toward the target area, it became apparent that it was not responding to radio commands.
They had a runaway.
Ahead of the unguided drone lay thousands of square miles of ocean into which it could crash. Instead, the old Hellcat made a graceful climbing turn to the southeast, toward the city of Los Angeles. With the threat of a runaway aircraft approaching a major metropolitan area, the Navy called for help.
Five miles north of NAS Point Mugu, two F-89D Scorpion twin-jet interceptors of the 437th Fighter Interceptor Squadron were scrambled from Oxnard Air Force Base. The crews were ordered to shoot down the rogue drone before it could cause any harm. Armed with wingtip-mounted rocket pods and no cannon, the Scorpion was typical of the Cold War approach to countering the “Red Menace.”
Each pod contained 52 Mighty Mouse 2.75-inch rockets. Salvo-launched, the Mighty Mouse did not have to have precision guidance. Large numbers of rockets would be fired into approaching Soviet bomber formations to overwhelm them with sheer numbers. Today, they would be used against a different kind of Red Menace.
At Oxnard AFB, 1Lt. Hans Einstein and his radar observer, 1Lt. C. D. Murray, leapt into their sleek F-89D. Simultaneously, 1Lt. Richard Hurliman and 1Lt. Walter Hale climbed into a second aircraft. The interceptors roared south after their target. The hunt was on.
Einstein and Hurliman caught up with the Hellcat at 30,000 feet, northeast of Los Angeles. It turned southwest, crossing over the city, then headed northwest. As the Hellcat circled lazily over Santa Paula, the interceptor crews waited impatiently. As soon as it passed over an unpopulated area, they would fire their rockets.
The interceptor crews discussed their options. There were two methods of attack using the fire control system, from a wings level attitude or while in a turn. Since the drone was almost continuously turning, they selected the second mode of attack. In repeated attempts, the rockets failed to fire during these maneuvers. This was later traced to a design fault.
The drone turned northeast, passing Fillmore and Frazier Park. It appeared to be heading toward the sparsely populated western end of the Antelope Valley. Suddenly, it turned southeast toward Los Angeles again. Time seemed to be running out. Einstein and Hurliman decided to abandon the automatic modes, and fire manually. Although the aircraft had been delivered with gun sights, they had been removed a month earlier. After all, why would a pilot need a gun sight to fire unguided rockets with an automatic fire control system?
The interceptors made their first attack run as the Hellcat crossed the mountains near Castaic. Murray and Hale set their intervalometers to “ripple fire” the rockets in three salvos. The first crew lined up their target and fired, missing their target completely. The second interceptor unleashed a salvo that passed just below the drone. Rockets blazed through the sky and then plunged earthward to spark brush fires seven miles north of Castaic. They decimated 150 acres above the old Ridge Route near Bouquet Canyon .
A second salvo from the two jets also missed the drone, raining rockets near the town of Newhall . One bounced across the ground, leaving a string of fires in its wake between the Oak of the Golden Dream Park and the Placerita Canyon oilfield. The fires ignited several oil sumps and burned 100 acres of brush. For a while the blazes raged out of control, threatening the nearby Bermite Powder Company explosives plant. The rockets also ignited a fire in the vicinity of Soledad Canyon, west of Mt. Gleason, burning over 350 acres of heavy brush.
Meanwhile, the errant drone meandered north toward Palmdale. The Scorpion crews readjusted their intervalometers and each fired a final salvo, expending their remaining rockets. Again, the obsolete, unpiloted, unguided, unarmed, propeller-driven drone evaded the state-of-the-art jet interceptors. In all, the jet crews fired 208 rockets without scoring a single hit.
The afternoon calm was shattered as Mighty Mouse rockets fell on downtown Palmdale. Edna Carlson was at home with her six-year-old son William when a chunk of shrapnel burst through her front window, bounced off the ceiling, pierced a wall, and finally came to rest in a pantry cupboard. Another fragment passed through J. R. Hingle’s garage and home, nearly hitting Mrs. Lilly Willingham as she sat on the couch. A Leona Valley teenager, Larry Kempton, was driving west on Palmdale Boulevard with his mother in the passenger seat when a rocket exploded on the street in front of him. Fragments blew out his left front tire, and put numerous holes in the radiator, hood, windshield, and even the firewall.
Miraculously, no one was injured by any of the falling rockets. Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams later recovered 13 duds in the vicinity of Palmdale. It took 500 firefighters two days to bring the brushfires under control.
Oblivious to the destruction in its wake, the drone passed over the town. Its engine sputtered and died as the fuel supply dwindled.
The red Hellcat descended in a loose spiral toward an unpopulated patch of desert eight miles east of Palmdale Airport. Just before impact, the drone sliced through a set of three Southern California Edison power lines along an unpaved section of Avenue P. The camera pod on the airplane’s right wingtip dug into the sand while the Hellcat cart-wheeled and disintegrated. There was no fire.
Yep, that qualifies as an Oopsie… and a pretty damn BIG ONE!!!
h/t JP
Sigh…
Once again reality overcame modeling and simulations… Big surprise… NOT!!!
Aerodynamic assumptions and extrapolations from known flight regimes proved inadequate when preparing for HTV-2 inaugural flight test. The data from second flight revealed that extrapolating from known flight regimes and relying solely on advanced thermal modeling and ground testing could not successfully predict the harsh realities of Mach 20 atmospheric flight.
In other words, Falcon came apart because holes were burned in the aerostructure…
You can read the entire article HERE
In other news, the Navy is going back to ‘real’ training, rather than simulations, as they’ve finally admitted the only way to train full crews is the old BIS (Butts In Seats) and underway or airborne…
Reality doesn’t have a reset button, and that is what folks in the gamer world tend to forget. Instaneous turns aren’t real, unending ammo isn’t real, G-forces cannot be simulated effectively, and the real world isn’t air conditioned to 72 degrees, brightly lit and/or Day VFR all the time…
Costs will go up, and realistically, we will lose some folks if we actually train like we’re going to fight; but overall the skill levels will have a definite uptick!
Just like shooting, trigger time/range time is needed to maintain one’s skills…
Which reminds me, I need to go to the range… 🙂
Yea… FINALLY…
@#$&*# NICS…
Anyhoo, here’s the new addition- MT6700, but with a twist… Let’s see if the experts can spot the two differences… 🙂
@#$&*# NICS…
Anyhoo, here’s the new addition- MT6700, but with a twist… Let’s see if the experts can spot the two differences… 🙂
Left Profile
Screwed together 🙂 and no model number…
Right Profile, and my guess is less than 200 rounds through it…
The case deflector is not even scuffed!
And even though the markings are .223, here’s the barrel that’s in it
Ohhh… Gotta relearn how to shoot these… Now WHERE did I stick my glasses…
Glad now that I didn’t sell that case of FGMM .223 in 62 grains… At least I will have something to shoot in it, and dry fire confirms this rifle hasn’t had a lot of rounds through it… Trigger needs a bit of smoothing, but I’ll take it, enjoy it, and WILL shoot it!!!
So there we were, myself and three classmates from AOCS sitting on the beach in Hawaii having a cocktail, and the next thing, we’re at HNL in full uniform getting on an airplane with no security at all… As we walk aboard, I notice it’s Connie, and as we step through the door, the Stewardess points us to the cockpit and says it’s about time y’all got here…
I look back and it’s full of military personnel…
As we step into the cockpit, Fuzz (my old FE) is sitting at the FE panel, mug of coffee in hand, and he is also in full uniform. Splatt and Snap get in the pilots seats, and Avon bumps me out of the Nav table, so I’m reduced to being the radio operator…
So we fly across the Pacific and I keep trying to get a cup of coffee, but all the Stewardess will bring is Martinis for the cockpit, but Fuzz keeps getting coffee, and I have a hellva time talking to Oakland, and keep having to tune the HF with a florescent bulb for every report. As we descend into SFO, the nose gear won’t fall, and I have to put on a parachute, climb down to the lower crawlway and as I open the door into the nose wheel well…
I wake up…
And I’ve been draggin ass all day!
No more Vindaloo for a while!!!
I look back and it’s full of military personnel…
As we step into the cockpit, Fuzz (my old FE) is sitting at the FE panel, mug of coffee in hand, and he is also in full uniform. Splatt and Snap get in the pilots seats, and Avon bumps me out of the Nav table, so I’m reduced to being the radio operator…
So we fly across the Pacific and I keep trying to get a cup of coffee, but all the Stewardess will bring is Martinis for the cockpit, but Fuzz keeps getting coffee, and I have a hellva time talking to Oakland, and keep having to tune the HF with a florescent bulb for every report. As we descend into SFO, the nose gear won’t fall, and I have to put on a parachute, climb down to the lower crawlway and as I open the door into the nose wheel well…
I wake up…
And I’ve been draggin ass all day!
No more Vindaloo for a while!!!