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| LIFE magazine, 1965. Photographer Larry Burrows accompanied helicopter flight Yankee Papa 13, witnessing the aftereffects of a co-pilot of the helo Yankee Papa 3, 1st Lt. James Magel, being rescued by and dying in the helicopter. The subject of these photos is crew chief Lance Cpl. James C. Farley. Burrows died in February 1971 in a helicopter crash. |
Friends,Wow. Just wow.
I have a brain tumor.
It appears to be a Glioblastoma, the most common but also the most aggressive kind.
I'm still able to talk, including talking on the phone, but the tumor is near the speech center and my ability to speak, to type, and to add and subtract is deteriorating rapidly. Check it out.
I'm in good spirits amidst these gorgeous autumn days with wonderful support from family, friends, and readers.
Well, okay, not every reader. One reader mailed me a package of Preparation H. That's genuinely thoughtful but maybe not the work of an adoring fan.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has confirmed that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has executed a Chinese national in the Middle East. The ministry has vowed to bring the perpetrators “to justice.”RT buried the lead.
China has confirmed the identity of the victim as Fan Jinghui. He had been previously identified by the terrorists as a 50-year-old freelance consultant from Beijing.
The man was apparently featured in the terrorist group’s magazine back in September, where he was mockingly put up for“sale” along with a Norwegian hostage. Both China and Norway refused to pay the ransom that the terrorists had demanded. Beijing is now saying that it had attempted to rescue the “cruelly murdered” Chinese national.
Senior ISIL Border Chief Abu-Muhammad al-Shimali has been associated with ISIL, formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq, since 2005. He now serves as a key leader in ISIL’s Immigration and Logistics Committee, and is responsible for facilitating the travel of foreign terrorist fighters primarily through Gaziantep, Turkey, and onward to the ISIL-controlled border town of Jarabulus, Syria. Al-Shimali and the ISIL Immigration and Logistics Committee coordinate smuggling activities, financial transfers, and the movement of supplies into Syria and Iraq from Europe, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. In 2014, al-Shimali facilitated the travel from Turkey to Syria of prospective ISIL fighters from Australia, Europe, and the Middle East, and managed ISIL’s processing center for new recruits in Azaz, Syria.Interesting isn't it?
IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly said the F-35C variant is distinguished by larger wings and more robust landing gear. It is designed for catapult launches and arrestments aboard naval aircraft carriers. Its wingtips also fold to allow for easier storage aboard a carrier.I popped this out as a topic because its being underplayed in my opinion. Think about it like this.
The Lockheed Martin-made F-35 Lightning II fighter jets are for use on US Navy aircraft carriers. The news won’t affect the Navy’s ability to meet its planned operating date of August 2018. The discovery has prompted engineering contractors to develop a solution, but the cost of a retrofit is not yet known.
“Initial estimates indicate a modification of approximately a half a pound to the aircraft will fix it,” DellaVedova told IHS Jane's. “Modifications to planes flying today will be incorporated to ensure full life operation.”
The adjustments made to the cracked test plane will be applied to the rest of the fleet. The damage is not expected to affect current flight operations for any of the variants of the jet currently in service, according to UPI.
All of the F-35s flying today combined have logged fewer than 250 flight hours, according to Pentagon officials.
Inside Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth, Texas facilities, a squad of 550 engineers was formed to do the liposuction. Most of the weight was in the airframe, but with thousands of extra pounds to account for, the innards of the JSF also had to be redesigned. It was everybody’s problem. Directed by about a dozen team leaders, each plucked from his or her area of expertise (airframe, mission systems, engines, and so on), the engineers called themselves the STOVL Weight Attack Team, or SWAT.That was in 2006 and that was about the STOVL version but the same applies across the board. Issues abound and its past time to stop this concurrency nonsense and do this right. Production should stop. Flight testing should proceed and not another dime spent on mistake jets that will cost millions if not billions to repair.
Before the team was formed, the SWAT engineers had been watching the penalties imposed by the extra pounds. The F-35B was busting specs on landing speeds, especially in cases where a pilot returned with a full load of unexpended ordnance.
“There was a lot of agreement that the program was in a critical stage,” says Art Sheridan, the current director of F-35 affordability at Lockheed. With SWAT, “the company was putting its money where its mouth was,” he says.
Honduran authorities have detained five Syrian nationals who were trying to reach the United States using stolen Greek passports, but there are no signs of any links to last week's attacks in Paris, police said.What I highlighted should shock anyone with the ability to comprehend what they're reading.
The Syrian men were held late on Tuesday in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on arrival from Costa Rica, and had been planning to head to the border with neighboring Guatemala. The passports had been doctored to replace the photographs with those of the Syrians, police said.
"We received information from (fellow) police services that these five Syrians left Greece and passed through Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and San Jose in Costa Rica before finally reaching Tegucigalpa," said Anibal Baca, spokesman for Honduras' police. "They are normal Syrians."
The Army is looking to procure a new scout vehicle for infantry units. But funding constraints and other priorities could hold the project back as the service pushes forward with its modernization plans.And then this...
The Army is undertaking an effort to restore “tactical mobility” to its infantry brigade combat teams, according to service officials. This includes equipping air assault forces with all-terrain “ground mobility vehicles,” or GMVs. But the unarmored trucks would create operational concerns.
Lt. Col. Scott Coulson, chief of the maneuver branch at the Army Capabilities Integration Center, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), said the GMV would not have much survivability.
If there’s a bad guy “with a machine gun and here comes 12 GMVs, that’s going to be a very bad day” for us, he said.
To prevent infantry units from unknowingly moving into the enemy’s crosshairs, the Army hopes to equip cavalry squadrons with light recon vehicles, also known as LRVs.
“LRV is intended to fill the capability gap right now inside the reconnaissance squadron,” Coulson said. “In the infantry brigade combat team, we do not have a dedicated platform that is capable of rapid mobile reconnaissance and fighting … to support expeditionary missions.”
“We’re looking for something that has better mobility than the current Humvee has right now,” Maciuba said. “We’re looking for something that has a significantly improved lethality, perhaps to the point of a medium-caliber weapon, [and] we’re looking for something that has the protection necessary so that it can survive” when it encounters the enemy.I was a bit impressed by this US Army program. It seemed that they dumped the protection at all costs paradigm and finally globbed onto the idea that maneuver is a type of armor all its own. Obviously it wasn't IED proof but again. Mobility, mobility, mobility would help defeat that threat.
The Army wants a six-person vehicle that can be sling-loaded or, ideally, carried internally on a CH-47 Chinook troop transport helicopter. It also wants something that can store a suite of command-and-control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems, officials said.
