Air-Minded: End of the Road (Updated)
People keep asking me what I think of the Pentagon’s plan to retire the A-10.
Global Replace
I plead guilty to blogging too much about my upcoming F-15 presentation at the air museum. You’re surely tired of reading about it. The presentation is this Saturday. I’ll tell you how it went in a blog post afterward, and that’ll be the end of it. Yesterday, though, as I made a final run-through at […]
Air-Minded: the Fog of War
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 […]
Air-Minded: Air-to-Air in the F-15 Eagle
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 […]
Air-Minded: Tail Numbers
Last week I noticed they’d moved several outdoor aircraft at the Pima Air & Space Museum, opening up a big empty area behind Hangar One. When I showed up for my tour yesterday there was our F-15A, once hidden in the back reaches of the museum’s 300 acres, newly on display alongside the path between […]
Air-Minded: Guns or Butter? (Updated 1/10/17)
Or . . . stealthy and expensive mega-guns? I’ve been trying to think of something intelligent to contribute to the ongoing debate over future production of the F-22 Raptor. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates want to cap production at 187 aircraft, the number currently funded. Congressmen and senators from F-22 producing districts […]