Nobody Asked Me…

George Orwell — mastermind of dystopian fiction or enlightened prophet?

It seems the latter may be the truer answer.

If you haven’t read the classic “1984,” the novel is a cautionary tale that follows a futuristic society dominated by a surveillance state that aims to redefine truth through rigid thought control.

Sound familiar?

While Orwell’s “1984” is technically categorized as fiction, a recent article, HERE, from The Federalist by Monroe Harless poses the argument that the book contains a disturbingly high number of “descriptors of reality.”

1. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
2. “They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”
3. “Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution … children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.”
4. “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
5. “… one knows the news is all lies anyway.”
6. “The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.”
7. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.”
8. “Power is not a means; it is an end … The object of persecution is persecution.”
9. “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“ Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said. “Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?”
10. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
11. “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”
12. “DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
13. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”
14. “We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.”
15. “The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies — more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.”

Once again the Navy is having training jet problems…

The Navy lifted an operational pause on the its T-45C Goshawk jet trainer fleet last week, after grounding the entire fleet on July 10 following an engine malfunction.

The grounding marked at least the second such pause the fleet has implemented this year, and the third since October 2022, according to a tally by Navy Times.

Full article, HERE from Navy Times.

This is NOT a new issue, and it comes down to the Adour engines from Rolls-Royce, provided by BAE. It’s also NOT a new issue for the Brits either.

In written evidence to the UK government’s Defence Select Committee on January 11, the firm said the problem meant the Hawk T2 training aircraft fleet would only be able to fly half of the hours contracted to train Royal Air Force (RAF) fast-jet pilots. In its written evidence, BAE Systems said: “On March 25, 2022, Rolls-Royce reported that significant technical issues had been found in the Low Pressure Compressor (Module 01) of the Adour Mk 951 engine. The result was that the 4,000-hour planned design life of each engine was reduced to a clearance of 1,700 hours. 

Full article, HERE from Key Aero in 2023.

I can’t help but wonder how much the salt water corrosion has played into these problems, especially for the Navy. Training aircraft are crucial to the student aviator pipeline, and loss of aircraft and/or training cycles due to operational groundings aren’t good either for progress, morale, or peace of mind in a new aviator.

As good as simulators are these days, they still do not replace butt in the seat, flying the aircraft, pulling Gs and watching the world spin around you.

When you’re already sweating out a hop, the last thing you want is to be worried about the engine quitting, or not being able to fly for a month. Once you get in a ‘flow’, you want to keep going.

And cutting engine availability in half is going to hurt, not only in costs, but in availability of flyable aircraft. This could also back the ‘pipeline’ up, causing students to spend months in what are called ‘pools’ doing effectively nothing but sitting around waiting.

Not good, especially in the austere budget cycle all the services are in right now!