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By now, I’m sure, you’ve heard about the Special Operations Opsec Education Fund, a group of retired military officers trying to swiftboat President Obama. According to them, Obama should have kept the killing of Osama bin Laden a secret. By announcing that US forces had caught and killed bin Laden, they say, Obama compromised classified operational […]
I went to the library earlier today and found the entrance area crowded with parents and small children. I wondered, for a minute, if the library was holding a fire drill, but I was able to squeeze through the kids and get inside, where I checked out a book they were holding for me. By […]
Time for another Air-Minded diary? Sure it is. This time let’s take a look at a Century Series fighter from the 1950s, the McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. There were three distinct variations of the Voodoo — a fighter-bomber, a tactical reconnaissance aircraft, and an air defense interceptor — but I’m going to concentrate on the interceptor, […]
In my day, the only video cameras we could use to film our own air-to-air flying were hand-held devices. USAF pilots weren’t (and aren’t, AFAIK) allowed, for safety reasons, to use cameras or video recorders in single-seat cockpits. If you were flying a two-seater, which you might do once a month or so, and you […]
On April 13th, during a practice flight before a weekend air show, a member of the Thunderbirds aerial demonstration team went supersonic over Tucson. The sonic boom frightened people and broke a lot of windows. Going supersonic over populated areas is a huge USAF “be no” (as in “there shall be no …”) and I […]
After my post about the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, I asked some friends if they wanted me to blog about any aircraft in particular. My niece Rebecca voted for a floatplane, I imagine because she lives in Seattle and sees them all the time … also, of course, floatplanes being so cool. It happens that […]
The end of the week has come again. The world’s most interesting couple doesn’t eat much steak, but when we do we eat it on Friday night … and with that in mind I took a flank steak out of the freezer this morning. This afternoon I’ll put it in a marinade of soy sauce […]
Walking around the outdoor displays at the Pima Air & Space Museum (PASM) the other day, I stopped in front of a dusty relic, a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter. I always think of the P-80 (later redesignated the F-80) as a Korean War-era fighter. It’s true that the P-80 first […]