Leaderboard

My rule of thumb: if I cannot drink the tap water in a country, I won't fly on their national airline.

If you are looking for a way to help I highly recommend the The Mozart Group They are looking for funds AND volunteers. The founder is a good friend and retired Marine O-6 who has been on the ground in Ukraine for some time trying to make a difference. He stood up this group and they are working hard to train Ukrainian forces in a large array of tactics and capabilities as they kick the shit out of the Russians.

The left is EVERYTHING they accuse the right of. It’s a strategy and it’s brilliant when you control the media.

They were very much socialist until they got into power...just like all of the other socialist countries' leadership has done. I'd argue the political spectrum can't be viewed as a tape-measure/line but rather as a loop/circle and the far left and far right meet on the backside at fascism. Small sample but look at the antifa/BLM movements and see how they are fascists in their own right but claim to be on the leftist end of things. Both extremes end with absolute control and tyranny.

This version might be more accurate.

I hope Taiwan is paying attention. If I were them, I would stack the whole island with as many top end air defense and anti ship systems I could get my hands on.

Right. This "disinformation war" is entirely a product of the lefts doing. The want to denounce anything that goes against their narrative. Where were they for the Steel Dossier, the Hunter Biden Laptop, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the 'peaceful BLM' riots. The left is the biggest purveyor of disinformation in the country right now and they go one step further of actively trying to gas light people who bring attention to that.

stolen:

If, however, you have photo evidence of yourself signing 368-DD’s, you may get hired on the spot! This pun game is getting fun!!

O Face nailed it (pun intended?) I think most fighter units don't give a shit about the paperwork side at this point...are you a good dude they want to work with, appear to have the aptitude required to succeed in the fighter track training pipeline, and will contribute to the squadron's mission post-training at an "acceptable" level. Those are all fairly subjective criterion and will ebb and flow depending on current and projected manning. To manage expectations though, you do realistically have a much tougher mountain to climb than a current fighter pilot. That said, every unit is different in desires and needs, so you may find a brick wall at one fighter unit while another is very interested in you. If you're not completely tied to living in a specific location, recommend casting a wide net.

Agreed, but you can't train for every malfunction or contingency. Just like the KC-135 crew that flew depressurized for several hours with pax in the back passed out. At a certain point, you have to have the skill, knowledge, situational awareness, and leadership to safely operate the aircraft as a professional aviator. Should the aircrew have been able to handle a runaway stab trim/MCAS malfunction situation? Yes. Should Boeing have included that system in the pubs? Yes. Foul on both parties. Is Boeing responsible for aircrew not setting the altitude window correctly on takeoff and taking a B777 low level through a city? No...but it is really popular to villainize the company now (for good reason).

It's 99% Boeing's fault. They sell the plane to foreign countries the same way Airbus does. Gear up auto pilot on. It's not the training and proficiency, it's the idiosyncracy of specific pilot groups who hand fly well beyond what is necessary that just happened to apply a software-based malfunction for a system that wasn't even taught to the pilots in a meaningful way. This wasn't just runaway trim, and there was no way prior to the crash to train for an malfunction we weren't taught about. My thoughts only.

So apparently if you want to be in shape, you're a Hitler Youth? Also, how did the left succeed in pulling the switch-a-roo on making the Nazis right wing? Last I checked the official party title was the National Socialist German Workers Party. Only a the modern American liberal could come up with something so absurd as a Socialist Workers party being right wing.

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Was the 1% attributed to the co-pilot who was praying to Allah during the mishap instead of trying to address the issue?

The nose trim switch is override the MCAS, so the MCAS would begin trimming the nose down very quickly, but using the reverse direction would reverse the trim. Once you let go of the switch, it will resume trimming those down. After the fix, this system is now limited in how many times it will try to trim forward. The stab trim cutouts which is always work. However the control column trim cut out, which disables nose up trim when you push the yoke forward and disables nose down trim when you pull the yolk back, did not override the MCAS system. This is because the system was basically designed to prevent you from stalling the aircraft, so it would by necessity need to override the pilot pulling back. The system still does this after the fixes. Correct on the stab pressure locking out the trim wheel. Ironically, I didn't realize that 737 crews aren't trained on how to resolve this because the trim system is similar in the KC135, where I was taught how to deal with it. For runaway nose down trim, if you cut it out while massively out of trim, the solution is to have the pilot flying put their feet up on the console and pull back as hard as they can, with the assistance of the other pilot, and get the plane somewhere around 20° nose up. Then the pilot not flying releases the yoke, while the pilot flying allows the plane to enter a vomit comet Arc, somewhere between -1 and 1G. While the nose tracks down from 20° back to the horizon the other pilot furiously trims the plane nose up, and at the horizon both pilots get back on the yoke and pull it nose high again. Rinse and repeat until the pressure is neutralized and the wheel is once again usable.

Problem is it's now well established that the CDC withheld data from analysis. Complaining that the people are poorly informed while ensuring they remained poorly informed. There's only one reason you do that... To perpetuate a lie.

Bill Maher on Rogan is a good podcast.

"Russia says flagship of Black Sea fleet badly damaged by blast | Reuters" This story just hit the news about 45 minutes ago. There are two versions of what happened (TBD) but either way it sounds like this Russian Flagship is probably toast/artificial reef material. "The Neptune (Ukrainian: Р-360 «Нептун», romanized: R-360 "Neptun") is a Ukrainian anti-ship cruise missile. The system entered service with the Ukrainian Navy in March 2021 and has a 330lb Warhead" "Russia on Thursday said the flagship of its Black Sea fleet was seriously damaged and its crew evacuated following a fire that caused an explosion, as a Ukrainian official said the vessel had been hit by missiles." "The incident on the Moskva missile cruiser occurred after ammunition on board blew up, Interfax news agency quoted the Russian defence ministry as saying." "Maksym Marchenko, governor of the region around the Black Sea port of Odesa, said in an online post that the 12,500 tonne ship was hit by two missiles, without providing evidence. "Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage," he said in an online post." etc: Russia says flagship of Black Sea fleet badly damaged by blast | Reuters

You realize there is a difference between a major passenger station and a marshaling yard where war related material and equipment are being prepared for movement to the front, right? While I agree the latter is a legitimate military target, it’s kind of hard to argue that a station full of fleeing civilians is a legitimate target or one that has any military value other than attempting to terrorize a population into submission.

Woke stupidity should hurt (or at least be expensive): https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/04/09/the-cost-of-woke-appeals-court-rules-oberlin-must-pay-gibsons-bakery-32-million-n461248

I thought a lot about your question last night and to be honest I don't have a good answer or even know if there is one. I've said it before but I personally felt that Milley and McKenzie should've resigned for the way the Afghan withdrawal was conducted. That isn't really an answer to your question though, because they just happened to be the guys in charge when everything came crashing down; tough to blame them for at least 18+ years of official fallacies we (both State and DoD) were telling ourselves and the American public about how the war in Afghanistan was going. My thoughts in no particular order. 1. Part of this is cultural, both in our military and in our political leadership. We (in the officer ranks) all should bear some responsibility for this. On the military side, we rarely (almost never) want to or will actually say "no". It's in our DNA that if we're given a task or mission, we'll figure out a way to get it done. And nobody gets promoted for saying they can't accomplish something (see the Navy's destroyer mishaps as the latest example of severe consequences of this mentality). We've grown and groomed our leadership this way. Almost no one from the top generals/SESs down to probably the at least the FGO level wanted to admit that things weren't going well and that the goal of an independent, democratic Afghanistan free from most Taliban/VEO interference (if that was the goal) wasn't attainable (at least not in any reasonable timeframe). 2. We (talking the royal we, USA at large) tend to have a belief that the US is capable of accomplishing anything if we set our minds to it. And in the late 90s-early 2000s we were still coming off of the rapid, smashing success of Desert Storm. The American public was willing to keep things going so long as the casualties were relatively low and they didn't have to personally pay anything for it. Our public is also as separated from the military as it's ever been and our political class hasn't voted for "military action since the AUMF back in '01. A lot of us also mistakenly hold the belief that everyone in the world wants our version of democracy. 3. "Sometimes you have to let things fail". Don't know how many times I've heard senior leaders say this one in my career but I've rarely seen it actually utilized. I get that "failure" with something as large as the entire Afghan campaign is orders of magnitude different than some new process at the squadron level but it feeds back to point #1. Nobody in our senior leadership wanted to be the guys holding the bag when things ended in the Stan. They would have rather kept the war going indefinitely than admit our ever shifting goals were unattainable. Honesty was less acceptable than the static quo because no one could admit that we were going to fail. 4. Tactical success vs. Operational/Strategic failure. This one goes without saying. If our Operational/Strategic goals were unattainable from the get go, 20 years of killing people and spending money was never going to translate into a win. To answer your original question about who to hold accountable, I honestly think it's probably the bulk of the DoD and State leadership chain for the last 18 years (from at least O-6s all the way to the top, maybe lower). I don't believe the US military was able to be honest with either itself or our civilian leadership about the war. I understand that's probably not a popular opinion. I know a lot of vets were having trouble (a lot probably still are) processing what happened two months ago. The bulk of the rhetoric/messaging has been aimed at us doing our duty, no more attacks on the homeland, etc. That's all well and good, and probably appropriate for the time, but we lost, and I think we need to figure out how to avoid these sort of mistakes/failures going forward. I don't think anyone is going to get fired over this, so to your question over accountability, it'll probably be hashed out in the history books versus public hearings, resignations, some GO/FO or retired GO/FO actually saying "I'm responsible". Not a very satisfying answer I'm afraid.