Smokin

Pretty much the entire west coast of Korea is a military training area surface to 50k if I recall correctly. Going direct would have flown through almost the entire thing.

They have been untouchable (STS) for the last 4 years and thought that immunity would continue indefinitely.

@SurelySerious Dude, up to this post you have 7 of the 9 posts on this page. I suggest an internet break. And with that suggestion, I'm done with this thread. Memes and movie quotes are great in the WTF and Boobs and beer threads but are absurdly shallow and usually grossly inaccurate for actual conversations. Now, I'm off to go buy more stocks since the sale keeps getting better.

This whole "no taxation without representation" thing seems to be extraordinarily poorly thought through. The President is an elected official representing the entire US, so if he decides to implement tariffs, what part of that is "without representation"? There are plenty of things to complain about with tariffs, but trying to claim that it is taxation without representation seems to me to be willful ignorance of the worst type. I'm very much on the fence with the tariffs overall. The automatic reciprocal tariffs seem to be a no brainier and I'm mildly surprised that isn't a continual policy regardless of who is in power. One interesting take I read that I think is very possible, is that this is attempt to reign in our national debt. A significant amount of our debt comes up for payment or refinance next year and with interest rates higher than they've been since our debt skyrocketed, it is only going to get worse. One way the President can influence interest rates is economic stability. Instability drives more investors to hedge their money in T-bills, which will drive down their rate, which will drive down interest rates. At the same time the tariffs will likely increase production at home which will eventually drive economic growth which will increase the tax collected. Certainly a gamble if that is the play but not out of line with Trump's past actions. The flip side of the coin is we must find ways to reduce our spending and very few seem to be genuinely interested in that. DOGE has fixed some leaky faucets that needed to be fixed, but meanwhile we have a couple spigots out back that are on full blast.

Stocks are on sale, time to buy!

Yes, but the emergency exit lights switch is guarded and we turn that on and off every flight. While important, I'd say that switch is less important in flight than some others that are not guarded.

Yikes. It is interesting and surprising what switches are guarded and what are not. Makes me wonder at Boeing's (and Airbus') logic for the guards. For example on the Boeing plane I fly, the engine fuel cutoff switches are not guarded. You have to lift them to go to shutoff, but otherwise no red guard. The stab trim cutoff switches? Yep, those are guarded. Makes perfect sense.

Or I'll install it faster and better than some random guy that shows up four hours late for an appointment that took three weeks to schedule. All while getting paid to sit at home and simply have my phone somewhere I can either hear it or look at it once in a while.

Much of this is self-induced by absurd over-classification. I did a TSP and everyone was told the location was classified. Finance accidentally typed the location into our travel orders and that resulted in their network being isolated for a day while comm went through and did whatever they do to fix that. Obviously finance was even less useful than normal during that time. We were told that we could tell our wives where we were going once we arrived in country. Meanwhile, the local national travel agents on base with zero clearance for anything booked ADVON on commercial flights and emailed us our tickets to the 'classified' location. Then we arrived to a reception of a dozen host country reporters to cover our arrival who had been told a month prior. We had to jump through all sorts of hoops pretending the location was a secret, but everyone knew where we were going and there was no real reason for it to be secret in the first place. Things like this make people desensitized to classified.

That's bad. Worst part is that it was the person that should have known the best about what was ok and not ok to talk about in an unclassified environment. And let all the anti-Trumpers here take note that we are calling a spade a spade even when it hurts 'our team'.

Yes and no. Those same debates are being done in the public sphere by those same individuals in the signal chat to the press at official press conferences and no one has claimed that those were somehow leaks. Trump has repeatedly said that Europe needs to take a bigger role in their own security and defense, so that can hardly be classified. If they had gone into detail like 'country A is a more important partner than B because of XYZ and this action is only going to help country B and country A doesn't want us to do it, so let's not' then I could see that being classified. But simply saying that 'I don't know if we should do this because Europe needs to step up' is nothing different than they have said to the public repeatedly. Did anything they said really reveal any capabilities, decision making processes, or really anything that would hurt us or our allies? I didn't see anything that did. Will our adversaries benefit from the 'leak'? Not directly, but I would argue that they are benefiting from the circus that has erupted afterwards, but that is only due to the absurd reactions and is 100% on the media and the left. I'm fully open to changing my mind if more info comes to light, but the screenshots shared so far are a big nothing.

So far the only screen shots I've seen are solidly in the policy debate sphere and would hardly be considered classified. Sloppy, but hardly worth the attention it has received. If a "journalist" that clearly hates Trump and everything he does was really sent actual war plans (not debates), there is zero chance that he wouldn't have taken screen shots of all of it, let alone the most damaging sections. If someone has reputable sources of actual plans being shared, I'd be interested. Until then, I'll consider this simply the continued ravings of a person infected with TDS posing as a journalist.

Interesting. A pilot has no business being in the back of the plane interacting with passengers once boarding is complete. Can only lead to trouble. Obviously taking this with a huge grain of salt as the lock doesn't need to be broken for the door to be opened. Airplane bathroom door locks make home bathroom privacy locks look secure.

Didn't see any link, but it very well could have been the first class bathroom next to the cockpit. Can't do a crew changeover with someone in that bathroom so if a dude was hanging out in there for an extended period of time, that can mess up the FAA required crew rest breaks for an augmented flight.

All those are problems that should be fixed, but let's not forget that they were within 100' of their assigned altitude while hand flying at night on NVGs and crossing bridges. Anyone that's flown low level at night on NVGs and always been exactly on altitude, raise your hand..... yeah, that's what I thought. Zero people, ever. Yes, they should have been at their assigned altitude, but the real problem here was the FAA allowing helos to fly directly under landing aircraft. No reasonable person should have looked at that procedure for five seconds and thought that was ok. Maybe that's not what the procedure was designed for, but that is apparently how it was used. Procedures need to be developed with a buffer under the assumption that aircraft will be a little off airspeed/altitude/position without causing a safety of flight issue.