Majestik Møøse

"In June 2014, Airbus tested a quarter-scale demonstrator off the coast of Singapore. The demonstrator flew to 3 km and was piloted from a barge." Holy smokes! 3 kilometers up! Call the Smithsonian. "The vehicle currently in development at Airbus will carry four passengers as high as 100 kilometers, and be able to take off and land at a conventional airport. According to Airbus, the vehicle will operate in between the standard airplane and satellite altitudes, and open up a whole new market segment. The spaceplane could be used as a transfer service or for experiments and work in a part of space not occupied by many other vehicles." It'll be used for pay-for-trophy "space" tourism, and you can bet every flight will be "Certified to have crossed the 100km Kármán Line" no matter how far up it goes.

Meanwhile all the Army helicopter dudes up there are flying around making CTAF calls. The MAF is too smart for its own good. I still say a VFR departure is "legal" and satisfies the "necessary for msn accomplishment" requirement. Was everyone able to reach shelter in time?

Dude, what? No.

Why didn't you all just depart VFR? Surely we're not planning on filing flight plans during nuclear war or a contested airdrop.

NK has 25m people. China has 1389m people. They may care based on principle (One Child and all that), but they'd hardly notice.

...ok, so you know what I'm talking about then. Why bother with filling out a 175 or 1801 just so an airman can enter it? Why not skip the 175 and enter it yourself? Or just file with Foreflight or DUATS? I am a fan of using Baseops to file stereo routes though. Which I think is something that the MAF will never figure out.

So tell me exactly how you file a local or non-IFM flight plan? You write it down on a piece of paper - precisely according to GP with nary a letter out of place - and hand it to an airman who translates it into the FAA system. Usually with a few questions. Why the middle man?

Better question: why do we employ people to input a piece of paper into a "system" rather than just doing it ourselves?

Tell us what you'd have done differently. Start with the brief.

Are you saying that someone asked you to do this? The way most Air Force guys are dual-qualified (B-2, F-22, U-2 and TPS guys flying T-38s) isn't for everyone. It takes solid leadership to stiff arm the queep so guys are current enough in both jets to be safe. I just don't think that's realistic in a lot of wings, even with something safer than a T-38.

Good luck using the Intelink search function. Completely useless, unless you're looking for an unrelated 2009 PowerPoint file that requires registration to view.

Last Navy kill was in 1991.

It's a spoof article, but as a Nevada County resident, it took me about 3/4 of the way through to realize it. People here are a strange breed of secessionist redneck hippie. Which I guess means they're just Libertarians.

Not yet. Nearly every violent revolution in recent history has been a leftist movement to overthrow the rich. Some of them will start to see guns a means to enact their brand of facism.

"It's not T-38-y enough!" Why don't we just build some new T-38s and get it over with. Bigger wings, bigger tires, more efficient motors; whatever it takes to keep Stanley Student from killing himself. No datalinks or any of that bullshit. Then send the old ones to CAF/MAF bases for CPT programs since they're cheaper and harder to fly than every other Air Force jet. Fuel budget down, morale up, and NG gets thrown a bone.

AR for commercial air travel only looks viable for hucksters soliciting startup capital and uninformed BBC hacks. Reasons: - If you're filling up a big jet with a big tanker, you're flying two planes instead of one to do what airlines can already do; fly from somewhere like DFW to Sydney nonstop over 17 hrs. No one wants to fly further than this. - If you're filling up small jets with a big tanker, you're putting all your eggs in one tanker basket. If you like diverting half the fleet to Rekyavik once a week, this may be the option for you. - The one scenario where this is viable: AR for SSTs at halfway points. The super rich will pay a premium to get places fast, and AR can just be rolled into the cost. Now all we need is for someone to build an SST.

Don't you remember when [your favorite website] was down for two weeks because they just unplugged the servers to work on them? Commercial networks have motivation (profit) to stay running 24/7. The military doesn't, we'll never go out of business, we'll just get worse and nobody can ever really tell. Even at the execution level, we're nothing more than a big tech school sandbox. Everyone is inexperienced and no one gets fired for not being good. If we ever want to get serious about being better, all the non-combat jobs should be outsourced to the combat-related guys can spend time getting better.

There is not a doubt in my mind that AMC will know exactly what to do with a damn stealth aircraft flinging MALDS and jamming shit.

Fund was set up by Slam. It's legit.

Well pcola sure top-roped the shit out of that. WayUp, at the risk of piling-on, I'll just throw out there that your arguments lack validity. I'm not going to line-by-line them, you lost me at "carrier pigeon." You're projecting the GH's limitations onto the U-2, and you don't really understand the potential strengths of either.

Hey WayUp, while I appreciate the effort to keep your bro in line (though you're too late to keep his post from getting kinetically posted in the U-2 bar), there are some other issues here: - You want the CAF to wait until the GH is ready to get the party started? What if there's icing? Or weather? Or Satcom jamming? Or an IADS? Or a credible cyber threat? The GH won't be operating for very long in those cases. The CAF fights with or without you because they shouldn't need a handful of "special" jets (including the U-2) to make the mission happen. The job of both our airframes is to enhance their fight (in different ways) without introducing chaff. - While on one hand you believe the CAF needs you, you also don't care if you get shot down. You want to use GHs as SA-XX sponges, go ahead, but at least remove the expensive parts first; the U-2 would be glad to have more spare ASIP bits for test and training. Joking aside, there's a bigger problem here. GH operators really don't seem to care as much about their jets as their manned counterparts, and that's a problem for more than just them. I've watched them on multiple occasions not really GAF about their own buffoonery and equipment malfunctions even when they physically threaten the safety of others. As for why, my personal opinion is that millions of years of human evolution makes people just not care that much when they're not physically co-located with a jet or operation. - "...multiple times in the last year where the RQ-4 was more reliable and capable than the U-2..." I'll go ahead and call bullshit if you're referring to operational missions; if you're referring to how we did with a cobbed together jet in 16-1 I'll acknowledge that our stateside Ops-MX-DGS-CFSR team underperformed. 16-3 was pretty good, though, and I know of at least a couple pretty important Ex events this year where you guys were completely unable due to WX or equipment. - "...it's not a secret that we can replace the U-2 in what it does." Make no mistake, the GH will never be able to replicate what the U-2 can do. The U-2 has twice the thrust and electricity, which means it can haul more powerful sensors (particularly the radar kind) higher and faster that a GH ever will. And it'll do it in kinetically and electromagnetically contested airspace with a co-located pilot and a kickass defensive system. The GH's big programmatic mistake is that it's still trying to be a U-2 replacement. It will always fall short of that due to the above reasons, so the program relies on NG's political donations and book-cooking to get continued funding. Where it could really shine, and make itself much more useful than it currently is, is enhancing and expanding the BACN role. A bunch of networked GHs flying around outside of threat rings relaying IP-data is where the money could really be at. And as SAM sponges.

Adam, just replace the damn pictures with current ones.

They redirect their hate to the booms.

At the risk of making you grouchier, is it the Air Force's fault you're not flying anymore?

We've built so many military and civilian bureaucratic hoops that no one can navigate them.