If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
What’s even worse then flying to Boston? Having to sit in an Air Tran seat soaked in someone’s urine. From WCVB TV
“I was sitting maybe 30 seconds to minute and realized that my pants were soaked,” Jennifer Castellano said.
Castellano said she went to the lavatory to check her jeans and long sweater.
“I then realized I was saturated in urine from the smell,” she said.
Castellano said a flight attendant told her someone had gone to the bathroom in the seat during the previous flight.
Jennifer Castellano told WCVB that she had to take off her urine soaked clothing and wrap herself in a blanket. She then sat in a different seat.
Upon arriving in Boston, Air Tran staff refused to retrieve her luggage. She was forced to walk through the airport wearing her blanket so she could retrieve her luggage and change into clean, urine-free clothing. The Air Tran personal claimed that it was against federal regulations for airline personnel to retrieve passenger luggage. Really? How about a federal regulation against allowing a passenger to sit in a pee soaked seat?
Last April 9th, at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, two soldiers were driving a rented SUV about five kilometers from the part of the range used for live firing. It was at night, and an F-16 that thought it was firing at something in the live fire area, lit up the SUV instead. Only 70 20mm rounds were fired. Fortunately, the two people in the SUV were only injured (both from flying glass, the passenger got a dislocated shoulder as he rapidly exited the vehicle when it quickly turned off the road and stopped.) The investigation of how this happen has not been completed.
I guess it’s a good thing that the 20mm rounds were obviously training rounds and not the standard incendiary rounds used on actual missions.
I wonder if whoever rented the SUV got rental insurance on it?
Back in February a B-2 bomber crashed on take off from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both crew members were able to eject safely.
In case you are wondering, a B-2 Stealth Bomber costs $1.2 billion.
I was stationed on Guam from the late 80’s to the early 90’s. The B-2 was built back home in Palmdale, California. Some of my relatives worked at Northrop and helped manufacture the B-2.
Look many of the cool pictures I find online, I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon this photo of an A-10 Thunderbolt II. I like this pic for two reasons - it shows the aircraft dropping a anti-heat seeking missile flare from an ALE-40 chaff and flare system, and the Westinghouse ALQ-119 ECM pod hanging on the port wing. Though I never got to work on the A-10, I worked with the ALE-40 and the ALQ-119.
The A-10 is a remarkable aircraft. It was one of the few combat planes ever designed with ease of maintenance incorporated right in the design. Everything is easy to get to and easy to remove and replace.
I took the original large image and cropped it down to 1680 x 1050 so I could use it as a desktop background. Though I’m a tree hugging liberal, I love combat aircraft.
Cool YouTube video of a Russian MiG shooting down a Georgian drone. Evidently the two countries are fighting over the Abkhazia region. I’m not sure why anyone would fight over an area that most people have never heard of.
Not to give ending away, but the MiG takes out the drone with a missile. That seems kind of expensive when the pilot could have just used the gun. Missiles are expensive.
I blogged the other day about an Australian F-111 taking pelican damage. While discussing the F-111 in the comment section with Schooly, I remembered seeing an Australian F-111 do a flyover on Guam where the aircrew dumped fuel out the aft end and then ignited it with the afterburners. Schooly mentioned that this is referred to as a “dump and burn”.
I found this video on YouTube of a Australian F-111 doing a “dump and burn” at an air show at the Amberly airshow. Check it out.
This is what happens when an Australian General Dynamics F-111 hits a 30 lb pelican at 340 mph. Ouch!
When I was stationed in the Philippines and assigned to the 3rd Tac Fighter Wing and on a deployment to Korea, we had one of our F-4E’s hit by a goose. Maybe it was a duck. I don’t remember. I’m supporised there was even enough of it afterwards to make any kind of identification. It hit the aircraft between the port intake and the fuselage. It ripped a hole right through the aircraft. The aircrew was able to bring the F-4 back, but I don’t think it ever flew again. Maybe it did. I don’t remember. I just remember the carnage.
Make sure to check out this site where there are more pics of this F-111.
I stumbled upon this photo while looking for a photo of something else. Isn’t it great? It was taken flying over Edwards Air Force Base on December 2, 2004. Click on the photo to see a much larger version. I grew up near Edwards Air Force base and I love the B-52.
I found this photo on flickr. It’s of the Arc Light memorial located at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. The photographer, flicker user harogi, writes:
This is a 3 Exposure hand held HDR of the B-52 Bomber Stratofortress at the Arc Light Memorial on Andersen Air Force Base Guam, USA. I just had to stop by here before leaving back to Hawaii. Oversaturated.
I know this memorial quite well. I was stationed on Andersen Air Force Base. I used to run a lot back then and I had a route that took me around this memorial. I also spent a couple of days scrapping rust off it when it was being refurbished. At one time it was in very bad shape. The wet, salty air isn’t very kind to a B-52. For that reason planes were always swapped out after 12 months with a B-52 from the states. Maine to be exact.
This old D model sat in the corrosive Guam air for decades.
I love this photo. Click on the above photo to go to the flickr page where it’s located. Also check out the photographer’s other similarly stunning photos.
To read about what Arc Light was, you can check out this Wikipedia article.
Update (9 Jan 08) - Bob Deasy, the Radar Nav on board this aircraft the night it took a missile was kind enough to stop buy and correct me on some some of the things I got wrong about this story in the comment section. Specifically, that the gunner had locked onto the Wild Weasel. He had not. I apologize for the mistake.
I was going through some old pictures of my Air Force days and found this. It’s of aircraft B-52G 0248. It’s probably too small to see, but the nose art shows that this aircraft had the nickname of “In Harms Way”. There is a story that goes along with the nickname. Then again, don’t most nicknames have a story? This is the B-52G that was accidentally hit with an AGM-88 HARM anti-radiation missile fired from an F-4G Wild Weasel on the first night of operation DESERT STORM. The B-52’s tail gunner mistakenly locked his anti-aircraft radar on the Wild Weasel thinking it was an Iraqi MIG. The Wild Weasel immediately detected the B-52 tail gun radar locking on to him and misidentified the radar signature as that of an Iraqi anti aircraft artillery (AAA) site. The Wild Weasel crew fired a HARM missile and watched in horror as it headed not towards the non existent Iraqi AAA site, but to the very B-52 is was trying to protect.
Luckily the missile failed to hit the plane, but instead detonated directly behind the bomber. These missiles are designed to hit nonmoving ground targets, not moving airplanes. The resulting shrapnel and missile debris caused an excessive amount of damage to the tail section of the B-52. It ripped off everything aft of the vertical stabilizer. This included much of the tail gun system, the aft electronic warfare suite, and the drag chute. The B-52 was able to land safely on the island of Diego Garcia at Jedda, Saudi Arabia.
It was then sent from Diego Garcia to Anderson Air Force Base on Guam for repair. I was in on the repair of this aircraft shortly after is was damaged. During the first Iraqi war, I was assigned to a squadron that was responsible for repairing B-52’s being used in Iraq being flown from Diego Garcia. I spent four months back on Guam. I had been stationed there prior for almost three years. I could have been sent to places far worse then Guam. I could have gone to Saudi. I could have spent four months on Diego Garcia. I spent two weeks there once and that was long enough for me. As it was, I loved Guam.
