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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

U2 Spy Plane • Cockpit View At 70,000 Feet

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Air Fete 1992 Air Show

Air Fete 1992.

Raf Mildenhall 1992 filmed from ( Johns field ) .

Posted by Jetnoiseforever on Friday, October 23, 2015

F-4 Phantom Action

A wish i was there NOW moment.

when the phantom was king of A.C.M.I filmed in hi8

Posted by Jetnoiseforever on Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

100 Years of Commercial Aviation

One year ago today I uploaded this video, which honors 100 years of commercial aviation. I think it still is a very powerful video, and if you haven't seen it yet, give it a view, there are a few fun surprises in their. Can you name all the planes?- N899GS | Co-FounderYoutube Mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2-DycqlpkQ

Posted by World of Aviation on Monday, June 8, 2015

UPS Boeing 767 Bad Landing LAX

UPS Boeing 767-300ERF slamming it down at LAX! Notice how the rear part bounces off the runway! This could have ended really bad, luckily the front gear managed to stay put! - Captain K, Co-Founder

Posted by World of Aviation on Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Tug Rips Out The Nose Gear on AA MD-80



New Towing Procedure, Parking Brake ??
Posted by John Starry on Sunday, December 20, 2015

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

AWESOME DC-6 LANDING - MUST TO SEE


AWESOME DC-6 LANDING - MUST TO SEE
IncreĆ­ble Douglas DC-6 aterrizando en tierra :O :O :O www.facebook.com/wannaflypage (Y)
Posted by wannafly on Saturday, March 28, 2015

Monday, December 21, 2015

Insane Future Weapon Concepts

Insane Military Concepts - Stealth Anti-Tank/Bomb pods

The future is a dangerous place indeed! 2mins 40s is insane

Posted by The Forces Feed on Thursday, December 10, 2015

Cuban Drone

Monday, November 30, 2015

Amazon unveils new Prime Air drone prototypes







Amazon unveils new Prime Air drone prototypes
Brett Molina, USA TODAY11:09 p.m. EST November 29, 2015



(Photo: Amazon)
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Amazon revealed the latest prototype of drones it will deploy as part of its Prime Air service using the unmanned aerial devices to deliver packages in under 30 minutes.

According to details released Sunday by the online retailing giant, Amazon says the drones weigh 55 pounds and can carry packages weighing up to 5 pounds. The drones fly under 400 feet and use "sense and avoid" technology to dodge potential obstacles en route to its delivery destination.


"We are testing many different vehicle designs and delivery mechanisms to discover how best to deliver packages in a variety of environments," reads a statement from Amazon. "We have more than a dozen prototypes that we’ve developed in our research and development labs. The look and characteristics of the vehicles will evolve over time."

A video released by Amazon shows the drone scanning an area near the delivery address to find a landing spot, followed by a hatch opening from the bottom to drop the package. Amazon says they are testing drones in "multiple international locations."

The company says the service will launch once the company has "the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision."

In March, the Federal Aviation Administration granted Amazon approval to fly drones for research into the Prime Air service after first revealing plans to work with drones for deliveries two years ago.

Other companies are also exploring drones as a new method of package delivery. Earlier this month, Walmart sought permission from the FAA to start drone testing,while Google reportedly revealed during an air traffic control convention in Washington, D.C., that it wants to launch a drone service in 2017.

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.
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Saturday, November 28, 2015

Toddler loses eye after drone propeller sliced through it


Saturday 28 November 2015 | UK News feed

Toddler loses eye after drone propeller sliced through it
An 18-month-old boy was left blind in one eye when an out-of-control drone hit him in the face




Oscar Webb with his mum, Amy Roberts Photo: BBC




By Eleanor Steafel

12:42PM GMT 28 Nov 2015


An 18-month-old boy lost his left eye when he was hit in the face by an out-of-control drone.

Oscar Webb was left blind in one eye when a propeller sliced through his eyeball while he was playing in the garden.

Doctors fought desperately to save Oscar's eye but they were forced to remove it as the damage was too severe.

Speaking on Watchdog on Thursday, Oscar's mother told of the moment she realised how bad the accident had been, as she raced to hospital with her son.


Amy and Anita Roberts talking to the BBC's Watchdog programme Photo: BBC


Amy Roberts, from Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, said: "What I saw, I can still see it now, it was the bottom half of his eye and it's the worst thing I've ever seen.

"I just hoped and prayed all the way there that what I saw wasn't true and wasn't real.

"I can't really even remember what I was thinking at the time. I just remember waiting for someone to come and say it was OK.

"They (the doctors) did say that it was one of the worst eye incidents they'd seen. It was hard, I cried that much that even the consultant, it brought tears to her face."

Surgeons performed several emergency operations to try to save Oscar's eye but the drone had damaged it beyond repair and Oscar now faces having a series of further operations before he can have a prosthetic eye fitted.

The accident, which happened seven weeks ago, occurred when a drone being flown by family friend Simon Evans spiralled out of control.

One of Mr Evans' drones Photo: BBC

Mr Evans, who was an experienced drone operator before the accident, described the moment it hit Oscar.

He said: "It was up for about 60 seconds. As I brought it back down to land it just clipped the tree and span round.

"The next thing I know I've just heard my friend shriek and say 'Oh God no' and I turned around and just saw blood and his baby on the floor crying."

Mr Evans said he has not flown the gadget since the accident as the sight of one makes him feel "physically sick".

Oscar's mother said she wanted to warn others how dangerous drones can be.

"You don't realise the dangers, you don't expect something so severe to happen from what people call toys, I wouldn't class them as toys," she said.

Oscar's grandmother, Anita Roberts, who contacted the BBC after seeing a programme about the devices said it had been very upsetting.

"You can't take it in, the shock of it all, it's too much really," she said.

"You wish you could have been there instead of him, he's a baby."

The Civil Aviation Authority has released guidelines for how to fly drones safely and there will be a public consultation before a government strategy is published in 2016.



© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2015

Monday, August 03, 2015

Building Boeing 747-8 Full Documentary - Worlds Longest Airliner

The DC-3 The Plane That Changed The World

Jumbo - The Plane that Changed the World (2014)

Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet Documentary - 1990

Challenger, Columbia wreckage on public display for 1st time

Challenger, Columbia wreckage on public display for 1st time

Mon, 08/03/2015 - 9:55am
MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
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This Tuesday, July 21, 2015 photo shows a side body panel of space shuttle Challenger, left, and the cockpit widows of Columbia, right, displayed at the Forever Remembered exhibit and memorial for the astronauts that perished on the two shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA is offering up wreckage from the Challenger and Columbia for public view after hiding it from the world for decades.



A new exhibit at Kennedy Space Center features two pieces of debris, one from each lost shuttle, as well as poignant, personal reminders of the 14 astronauts killed in flight.

It is an unprecedented collection of artifacts — the first time, in fact, that any Challenger or Columbia remains have been openly displayed.

NASA's intent is to show how the astronauts lived, rather than how they died. As such, there are no pictures in the "Forever Remembered" exhibit of Challenger breaking apart in the Florida sky nearly 30 years ago or Columbia debris raining down on Texas 12 years ago.

Since the tragic re-entry, Columbia's scorched remains have been stashed in off-limits offices at the space center. But NASA had to pry open the underground tomb housing Challenger's pieces — a pair of abandoned missile silos at neighboring Cape Canaveral Air Force Station — to retrieve the section of fuselage now on display.

The exhumation was conducted in secrecy. Everything about the exhibit, in fact, was kept hush-hush during the four years it took to complete the project, out of respect to the dead astronauts' families.

June Scobee Rodgers had never seen an actual remnant of her husband's destroyed shuttle, Challenger, until previewing the exhibit just before its low-key opening at the end of June.

Displayed in a dimly lit room: a 12-foot section of the left side body panel of Challenger, standing vertically and bearing the gouged and scraped but still brilliantly colorful U.S. flag, and the charred frames for Columbia's cockpit windows, seemingly floating at eye level.

"Sad, yes," to see the wreckage but it is "a wonderful memorial" to the shuttles, Scobee Rodgers said. The items representing the astronauts, on the other hand, are a "truly fitting" reminder of who they were as individuals.

Challenger commander Francis "Dick" Scobee's display case, on the left side of the exhibit's main corridor, contains the leather helmet from the Starduster biplane he and June used to fly, and his blue "TFNG" T-shirt from the Astronaut Class of 1978, nicknamed the Thirty-Five New Guys.

Across the hall on the right are Columbia commander Rick Husband's scuffed cowboy boots and well-worn Bible opened to Proverbs. There's a display case for each astronaut, filled with personal items, although not all families contributed, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe's.

"Forever Remembered" is a permanent exhibit, part of a larger display centered on the retired space shuttle Atlantis. NASA opted to keep Atlantis at Kennedy, the shuttle launch site, after Atlantis closed the program with the final mission in 2011.

The entrance to the new exhibit is directly beneath the nose of Atlantis, which is suspended with its payload bay doors wide open as though perpetually orbiting Earth.

One recent afternoon in July, tourists filled the predominantly blue hallway, pausing in front of the astronaut display cases. One woman wondered aloud which shuttle burned up and which one blew up. A few young children scampered about, their parents shushing them given the solemnity of the place.

A few weeks after visiting the exhibit, Scobee Rodgers noted in a phone interview that much of the world's population wasn't even born yet when Challenger went down in 1986.

"It's mostly history for the general public. It's very personal for us," she said.

Amber DiSalvatore — an Apopka, Florida, resident touring the space center with her husband and two children — was 4 years old at the time of Challenger. Seeing the actual wreckage — along with Husband's Bible — brought tears to her eyes.

The astronauts sacrificed their lives for exploration, said DiSalvatore, "so it's something that everybody — every human being — should know."

In the aftermath of the Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia accident, NASA meticulously stored the 42 tons of debris in Kennedy's iconic Vehicle Assembly Building and made them available for research. The space agency displayed a remnant or two of Columbia in a restricted area of the space center and, for the fifth anniversary, organized a traveling in-house exhibit. The relics were intended as safety reminders for the workforce. The three surviving shuttles — Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, Challenger's replacement — still were flying then.

After Challenger's accident, NASA wanted it out of sight and out of mind. The Jan. 28, 1986, launch disaster unfolded on live TV before countless schoolchildren eager to see an everyday teacher rocketing toward space. And so Challenger's wreckage — all 118 tons of it, salvaged from the Atlantic — was buried in the pair of former missile silos, 90 feet deep.

The chamber containing this particular fuselage section, in fact, had never been opened — until the "Forever Remembered" exhibit began to take shape.

Determined to avoid any hint of commercialism or sensationalism, NASA took charge of the memorial effort at the visitor complex, which is run by an outside company. The job fell to Michael Ciannilli, a shuttle engineer and test director who had become responsible for the Challenger and Columbia debris.

"Our biggest concern the whole time was doing the right thing," Ciannilli said. "Is this the right time? Is this the right thing?"

As the conversations unfolded over the months then years, Ciannilli entered the underground storage silos to find the proper display piece to represent Challenger.

"I was hoping to find something that would show the beauty of Challenger, the dignity of Challenger, the strength of Challenger, and these are words I don't use lightly," Ciannilli said.

The 12-foot section of fuselage with the flag fit the bill. For Columbia, he chose the cockpit window frames. He said it's like gazing into the eyes of Columbia and thus its soul.

Ciannilli tapped the same preservation company that had worked on the Titanic, for the Challenger and Columbia relics. He sought out soothing, uplifting music for the exhibit.

And, yes, he deliberately kept out real-time scenes of the shuttles disintegrating.

"There's more to this story" than those awful final moments, he said. "Great pains were taken not to have anything sensationalized or exploited."

Above all else, Ciannilli wanted the end result to be respectful.

"I can't stop thinking about it," Evelyn Husband-Thompson, the widow of Columbia's commander, confided in a NASA interview. "As you walk in, you know that you're in a special place."

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

A drone is going to bring down an airliner: why are we waiting for that to happen?


Home > Blogs > ATW Editor's Blog > A drone is going to bring down an airliner: why are we waiting for that to happen?

A drone is going to bring down an airliner: why are we waiting for that to happen?
Jul 21, 2015 by Karen Walker in ATW Editor's Blog RSS


Sooner or later – and I personally believe it will be sooner – an airliner full of passengers and crew is going to be brought down after colliding with a drone.

There – I’ve said it, though most in the industry won’t. That’s understandable, but it’s still not right.

We must have an urgent, honest discussion about what is happening in the skies today. Even more urgent, we must do something about the rapidly escalating danger that drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – pose to commercial air transport.

If further evidence of the critical situation were needed, look at what happened yesterday close to Warsaw airport. A Lufthansa Embraer E-195 with 108 passengers aboard narrowly missed a collision with a so-far unidentified drone. We now sit just 330 feet away from a different story entirely – one that would have been an instant global newsflash and would have dominated the headlines for weeks; “Airliner brought down by drone: at least 100 dead”.

That’s not hyperbole. It’s true. This incident, which follows an alarming increase in the number of reported near-misses between airliners and drones close to major commercial airports – requires immediate attention. I would argue the issue of drone oversight and control should take priority over airliner tracking (post MH370’s disappearance), military/intelligence agency communications with commercial air transport authorities (post MH17’s missile shootdown), and psychological monitoring of pilots (post Germanwings 9525 crash). Why? Because the threat to airliners from drones is more likely and more imminent than the scenarios that led to any of these tragedies.

If (when) an airliner is brought down by a drone, there will be outrage, there will be calls for immediate action, there will be task forces, there will be finger-pointing, and there will be hundreds – likely thousands – of reported near-miss incidents to point to. There will be new legislation restricting the use of drones near airports, requiring drone users to be registered, certified, and take some level of training. And there will be stiff penalties for non-compliance. My question is, why are we waiting?

Regulating and monitoring drone use, especially small UAVs, is not easy and won’t be cheap. But that’s the case with most safety practices in commercial air transportation. It won’t be popular with drone enthusiasts and the UAV industry. But popularity surely does not trump an industry that will be responsible for safeguarding almost 4 billion passengers by 2017 and which generates trillions of dollars of economic benefits to countries everywhere?

So why aren’t we – by which I mean FAA, ICAO, IATA, aircraft manufacturers, the airlines, law enforcement agencies and governments everywhere - not making UAV regulation and control their top priority?

I have an awful suspicion, and one best illustrated by comparing the drone threat to that of the German threat in World War II. Germany had its Enigma encryption machine for encoding and communicating top-secret messages. Famously, British cryptologists created a machine that cracked the Enigma code and allowed intelligence services to read those German communications and hence know about planned strikes. But they often didn’t act on that knowledge because to do so would have given away the fact that they had cracked Enigma, potentially extending the war if Germany then changed the code. The costs of an extended war were deemed higher than those of individual losses, such as planned allied city bombings or warship strikes, which were known about thanks to the decryption machine but could not be acted upon.

With today’s UAV problem, as complex and expensive as it will be to resolve, I wonder whether another cost calculation is being considered? Getting sufficient funds, resources and commitment to implement an effective, global drone-control regime in place will be very challenging and likely a slow process. Unless. Unless an airliner, let’s say a western airliner with some 300 people onboard, is brought down by a drone. Whether that act by the UAV operator is unintended or deliberate, the game changes overnight and the path to drone regulation and legislation becomes much easier to fund and implement. Three hundred lives is a very high cost, but perhaps worth the greater good of thousands of lives saved by an expedited UAV-control system?

I don’t want to wait for the “enigma solution”. The question is, what are we going to do about it?



Friday, June 19, 2015

Boeing Ditches Drag Reduction System For 777X

AVIATION WEEK newsletter

June 18, 2015

Production Rates: Are Airbus And Boeing Aiming Too High?

Airbus and Boeing need to increase output of narrowbody jets to burn off massive backlogs, but lofty production rates the two airframers are talking about probably cannot be sustained over the long run, says the CEO of GKN Aerospace.

FULL ARTICLE


Boeing Ditches Drag Reduction System For 777X

Boeing has decided to drop the hybrid laminar flow control drag reduction system from the 777X and may even review its future use on the stretched 787 derivatives.

FULL ARTICLE

Mitsubishi Evaluates Further MRJ Stretch

Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation is conducting market research to evaluate the feasibility of a longer stretch of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet.

FULL ARTICLE


Airbus Relaunches A320/321 PTF Conversion

Airbus is teaming up with Singapore-based MRO provider ST Aerospace and Elbe Flugzeugwerke to give the passenger-to-freighter conversion of its A320/A321 aircraft a second try.

FULL ARTICLE

Interest In Scorpion Picks Up

Textron AirLand’s $20 million Scorpion Light Attack Armed Reconnaissance gains momentum with possible landing of a launch customer.

FULL ARTICLE


MBDA Could Deliver Weapon To Destroy Small UAVs By End Of Decade

The next step in MBDA’s development of a practical laser weapon, with a power output as high as 120 kW, is to develop a “deployable” demonstrator.

FULL ARTICLE

Video: Air Display Highlights At The Paris Air Show

See what's flying in the air over Le Bourget at the Paris air show.

Watch video

Video: Business Jets At The Paris Air Show

Speed is all what business aviation is all about, and the Paris air show is an important venue for business jet makers to display their long-range aircraft. Fred George takes a look at the aircraft on display at Le Bourget, including Dassault’s new Falcon 8X which is making its air show debut.

Watch video
Video: Thi


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Sunday, June 14, 2015

U.S. Navy Blue Angels

Video from the Slot position during the Diamond Half Squirrel Cage maneuver on take-off. Like the video??? Please share and like the page!

Posted by U.S. Navy Blue Angels on Saturday, June 6, 2015

Boeing Prepares the 787-9 Dreamliner for the 2015 Paris Air Show

Sunday, April 05, 2015

Amazing airliner cockpit footage - MD-11

Friday, March 27, 2015

Pilot-Proofing Cockpits Takes Center Stage



Pilot-Proofing Cockpits Takes Center Stage

John Croft

Aviation Week & Space Technology

The Germanwings crash could spur a revival of technology solutions to scuttle deliberate pilot, passenger actions to down an aircraft.

FULL ARTICLE

Image result for a320 cockpit door

Germanwings Crash Spurs Debate About Cockpit Procedures

Jens Flottau

Aviation Week & Space Technology

The industry could be facing a debate as to whether introduction of secure cockpit doors, initiated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., has created a safety issue in and of itself.

FULL ARTICLE


Monday, March 23, 2015

Who needs a tractor? Not Northwest ;)

MD80 Powerback

Reverse Thrust Pushback

Jet Blast Demo

Thursday, March 19, 2015

B-1 Bomber Low Pass

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Red Flag 2015 - B-52 and B-1


Tuesday, March 03, 2015

C-130 Flight Crew - I Wanna Rock!

Monday, February 02, 2015

FAA's Proposed Drone Rules May Address Toy Drones

credits-4.bp.blogspot.com
WASHINGTON 1/29/2015 @ 11:26AM 10,068 views
FAA's Proposed Drone Rules May Address Toy Drones

The FAA’s proposed rules to govern the use of drones (technically referred to as small unmanned aircraft systems) will may include rules for model aircraft and toys. According to the Office of Management and Budget’s most recent update regarding the status of the proposed rule:


The NPRM also proposes regulations for all sUAS, including operating standards for model aircraft and low performance (e.g., toy) operations, to increase the safety and efficiency of the NAS. The FAA and sUAS community lack sufficient formal safety data regarding unmanned operations to support granting traditional, routine access to the NAS. This proposed rule would result in the regular collection of safety data from the user community and help the FAA develop new regulations and expand sUAS access to the NAS.

That’s right, according to the White House, the FAA through their NPRM is now seeking to regulate the operation of toys. It is unclear whether the rule will regulate just the operation of drones, or as the second bolded clause indicates, will also mandate certain information reporting standards for toy/hobbyist drones.

UPDATE: Some bloggers have incorrectly tied the information in this post and the reported rule change to the crash of a hobbyist/toy drone onto White House grounds earlier this week. If only the government worked that quickly! In fact, while the changes to the website are recent, the change to the NPRM has been in the Federal Register since December 22, 2014. See image below for evidence. [END UPDATE]


The image on the left shows the old sUAS proposed rule, the image on the right shows the updated description of the proposed sUAS rule. The change predated the crash of a drone into the White House lawn.

Either way, this is a significant development — the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 made an explicit carve out for model aircraft usage, in that law Congress wrote:



Notwithstanding any other provision of law relating to the incorporation of unmanned aircraft systems into Federal Aviation Administration plans and policies, including this subtitle, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft, or an aircraft being developed as a model aircraft…


The FAA seems to believe that the “Notwithstanding any other provision…” clause does all of the heavy lifting in this statute, relegating the “may not promulgate any rule” provision to mere surplusage. The FAA pins their argument to the other language in the statute which states “nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the authority of the Administrator to pursue enforcement action against persons operating model aircraft who endanger the safety of the national airspace system.” (That’s part of the reasoning they’ve relied on to enforce FAA rules against reckless operators).

UPDATE 2: The folks over at the law firm, McKenna Long and Aldridge (who work on aviation law related issues) got a comment from the FAA. While their post suggests that the FAA won’t be regulating toys, the FAA statement doesn’t seem to squarely address the issue. Here is their post with the FAA statement excerpted below:


It has come to our attention that in December 2014, the www.reginfo.gov site was updated with incorrect information stemming from the 2014 Fall Unified Agenda and Regulatory Plan regarding the scope of the FAA’s small unmanned aircraft systems rulemaking action. The FAA is working to correct these errors. For up to date information regarding the scope and timing of this rulemaking, please refer to the DOT Significant Rulemaking Report available at www.dot.gov/regulations/report-on-significant-rulemakings. All model aircraft operators are required to operate in accordance with the statutory requirements for model aircraft operations set forth in section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012. For more information on these requirements, please review the do’s and don’ts for model aircraft operations.

The FAA statement is careful to segment the notion of “model aircraft” operations from the “toy” operations that were referenced in the Federal Register. We can take this new statement at face value and assume the FAA has no plans to regulate small toy/hobbyist drones (at least through the NPRM). Or, if we read the statement like a lawyer, concerned about overly restrictive regulations, we can read it to suggest that any toy flights that are not within the model aircraft guidelines would be subject to the sUAS NPRM (in the past, FAA officials have said that the only allowable recreational operation of unmanned aircraft are those that take place at a model aircraft field associated with an officially recognized group). While the FAA refers readers to the DOT’s January 2015 Report on Significant Rulemaking, the record reveals that the FAA was considering regulating model aircraft and toys as recently December of 2014. In any case, while the FAA may claim that the information on the OIRA website is “incorrect” at best it is merely out of date. [END UPDATE 2]

WHAT TO EXPECT

As I pointed out on November 30, 2014, the rule has been under executive review at the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (a subordinate department within the Office of Management and Budget). This review is the last opportunity for individuals outside of the FAA to correct the FAA’s proposed rule. (Full disclosure, I offered my thoughts on what I believed to be appropriate regulation in a meeting with the White House held in December 2014). The FAA cannot publish the NPRM until the White House review is complete, and that review is supposed to focus on costs vs. benefits. Under the White House’s standard procedures, the rule will be under review for 90 days, which means we should expect the rule before the end of January. However if significant changes are mandated by the White House, an additional 30 days can be tacked onto the deadline, which would push the rule’s publication date back to the end of February.

With that said, I’ve been arguing that we will likely see the NPRM by the end of January (so today or tomorrow), but so many deadlines have been missed in this process that predicting when the rule will be published is becoming a losing game. When the NPRM is published, we should also expect the President’s Executive Order on privacy.

As I mentioned in previous posts, the Executive Order will segment the privacy issues related to drones into two categories — public and private. For public drones (that is, drones purchased with federal dollars), the President’s order will establish a series of privacy and transparency guidelines. The order will include some operational guidelines, and will require that agencies operating drones reveal information about their use and surveillance capabilities. (For some possible guidelines regarding drones and privacy, see this white paper “Drones and Aerial Surveillance: Considerations for Legislators“).

Gregory S. McNeal is a professor specializing in law and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter @GregoryMcNeal or on Facebook.


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Lockheed C-130 Hercules - Wheel Replacement

Sunday, February 01, 2015

Personal Jetpack

Saturday, January 31, 2015

25 most DANGEROUS and STRANGEST AIRPORTS in the WORLD! Most amazing & cr...

The World's Biggest Miniature Airport

F-18 Low Level

C-130 Extreme Flying

C-5 Galaxy Landing Gear Retraction

Thursday, January 29, 2015

THE PENTAGON IMAGINES A POST-F35 FUTURE


THE PENTAGON IMAGINES A POST-F35 FUTURE
By Kelsey D. Atherton Posted 4 hours ago



Boeing Concept For 6th Generation Fighter

Boeing Image

Since the dawn of the jet age, military planners and industrialists have grouped the fighters borne forth from their iron loins into generations. Borrowing the term from biology, each generation is grouped by a series of improvements that make the successor distinct from the predecessor. Now, as the fifth generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter slowly eases its way into American military service, and the fourth generation A-10s and F-16s that preceded it are phased out, the Pentagon is looking further into the future, ready to start the long and pricey conception of a sixth generation.


The gestational period of a fighter is sometimes decades. The F-35, which is expected to enter service in 2019, first started development in 1997. Airplane generations don’t always take as long as human ones. The F-18, a major success by Pentagon acquisition standards, took just a decade to go from an existing prototype in the 1970s to a working fighter in the 1980s, but that’s an outlier. For the sixth generation, the Department of Defense hopes to split the difference and get them flying and ready to go by the 2030s.

DARPA is already working on this future. Sixth-generation fighters could include the planned hunting packs of drones that may very well fight alongside manned fighters. But in their “Air Dominance Initiative,” the agency notes that it's looking not just at specific technologies, like stealth or vectored engines, but at systems that work together to make a better fighter. "Systems", of course, is a super vague term. Here's how DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar described it in 2013:


We're seeking, as well, ideas that can invert the cost equation, ways to use innovation not just to nibble at the cost of systems, but really to fundamentally change the cost equation and to inflict much more costs on our adversaries to respond to the solutions that we come up with.

Here's something more concrete: One of those systems might be onboardartificial intelligence.

America is hardly alone in deciding the shape of future warplanes. For decades, Russian and American innovation competed, first in the skies above Korea and then later Vietnam. Straight-wing first-generation fighters were outmaneuvered by swept-wing competitors. The early gunfighting second-generation jets manufactured right after the Korean war found themselves in missile fights against the more advanced third generation. While air-to-air combat is increasingly rare, the same cycle of design and competition continues. In future aerial battlefields, America’s F-22s and F-35s might have to contend with China’s own fifth-generation J31 fighter or Russia’s T-50. These planes are all expected to serve for decades until the sixth generation arrives, screaming and kicking afterburner, to dominate the skies.


Sunday, January 18, 2015

C-130J Production Line (Lockheed Martin)

Two C-130's landing simultaneously on the same strip......

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Pan Am: The Golden Age of Aviation



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Pan Am: The Golden Age of Aviation
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The name, Pan American Clipper, conjures up exotic, far-away places in every corner of the world, including Istanbul, Caracas, London, Paris, The South Pacific, South America and the Far East. By viewing these ten half-hour restored Pan Am films, you will discover the exciting world of air travel on-board the Pan Am Clipper fleet. So pack your bags, and join us on a journey back to a time when air travel was new and exciting. All aboard the Clipper Ships of Pan Am!

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Amazon Sales Rank: #93815 in DVD
Brand: PBS
Released on: 2008-01-29
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 2
Formats: Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC
Original language: English
Number of discs: 2
Dimensions: .53" h x 5.75" w x 7.75" l, .45 pounds
Running time: 293 minutes

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TSR2 The Untold Story Full Documentary