November 18, 2021
Payments from local governments will keep Casper's Delta flights operating for the time being
November 18, 2021
Payments from local governments will keep Casper's Delta flights operating for the time being
Hot off of the Government Printing Office's Press:
Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
Okay, I've said it once, and I'll say it again. The UAP's, or UFO's if you prefer in this instance, have a more mundane original. They're ours.
Let's start with the first sentence of the very short (seven page) report:
The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.
Uh huh. That probably tells you about all you really need to know, right there. It's not high quality, as the source of it, doesn't want it to be.
Well, let's take a look at the rest of the non tome.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP. The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) considered a range of information on UAP described in U.S. military and IC (Intelligence Community) reporting, but because the reporting lacked sufficient specificity, ultimately recognized that a unique, tailored reporting process was required to provide sufficient data for analysis of UAP events.
In a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics. These observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis. There are probably multiple types of UAP requiring different explanations based on the range of appearances and behaviors described in the available reporting. Our analysis of the data supports the construct that if and when individual UAP incidents are resolved they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall “other” bin.
UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security. Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain. UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.
Consistent consolidation of reports from across the federal government, standardized reporting, increased collection and analysis, and a streamlined process for screening all such reports against a broad range of relevant USG data will allow for a more sophisticated analysis of UAP that is likely to deepen our understanding. Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment.
AVAILABLE REPORTING LARGELY INCONCLUSIVE
Limited Data Leaves Most UAP Unexplained… Limited data and inconsistency in reporting are key challenges to evaluating UAP. No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019. The Air Force subsequently adopted that mechanism in November 2020, but it remains limited to USG reporting. The UAPTF regularly heard anecdotally during its research about other observations that occurred but which were never captured in formal or informal reporting by those observers.
After carefully considering this information, the UAPTF focused on reports that involved UAP largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators and that were collected from systems we considered to be reliable. These reports describe incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2021, with the majority coming in the last two years as the new reporting mechanism became better known to the military aviation community. We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained.
Problems with passengers have become so prevalent since air travel started to resume as the pandemic eases the US due to the increase in vaccination that United Airlines and Southwest Airlines have banned the serving of alcohol on their flights.
I've frankly always thought this a bit odd in the first place. Most modern airline flights are comparatively short and I don't know why you'd want to drink. . . anything. I've actually posted about this on one of our companion blogs, but what I've learned over the years is that if you offer people something, for the most part people will take it.
"Would you like a big steaming bowl of walrus blubber?"
"Yes, please".
I've been on flights so short that there would be really no way to consume any beverage without a dedicated effort. None the less, I've seen, even on those, and even if they're in the morning, people take a drink. One one memorable flight a gentleman in his late 60s or 70s took a beer and immediately needed to go to the restroom, which he couldn't as the flight was too short and there wasn't time. Why do that to yourself?
Alcoholism may be one reason. I once was on a flight that took off and the shaky man next to me ordered a beer as soon as he could. This was no later than 10:00 a.m. Either he was scared to death or he had dependency on alcohol that was pronounced. Indeed, serving customers in that condition may be the one thing that justified booze on flights.
I should note that I don't even take water, soda or coffee on flights. They're not that long. The current American "I must constantly be drinking" cultural trait that causes people to pack around 55 gallon drums of water all the time predates me, and I don't need to be constantly sucking down fluids and I don't want to on something that can be pretty bouncy. Indeed, its inevitably the case that if I'm on a flight with mild turbulence the passenger next to me will order coffee and sit it on the seat tray, so I can then watch it bounce around and threaten to drench me.
Allow me to have a large element of skepticism.
If you follow the news at all, you've been reading of "leaked" Navy videos of UFOs, followed by official confirmation from Navy pilots along the lines "gosh, we don't know what the heck those things are".
Yeah. . . well. . .
What we know for sure is that in recent years, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena have been interacting with ships of the U.S. Navy as well as Navy aircraft. Video of them has been steadily "leaked" for several years, and the service, which normally likes to keep the most mundane things secret, has been pretty active in babbling about it.
Oh. . . and not just that.
The Navy also has applied for a patent for technology that appears to offer impossible high speed drives for aircraft, and acting to force through the patents when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office looked like it was going to say "oh bull". The patenting Navy agent, moreover, a mysteriously named and mysterious scientist, has written babbly papers that are out there, but not well circulated.
So, what's going on?
Gaslighting, most likely.
To those who follow international developments, the US and the Peoples Republic of China are, quite frankly, sliding towards war in a way that reminiscent of Imperial Japan and the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s. China acts like a late 19th Century imperial power and is building up its naval forces in an alarming way. China is a land power and has no real need whatsoever for a defensive navy. The only real use of a navy for China is offensive, or to pose a threat as it could be offensive.
And China has been busy posing a threat. It's using its navy to muscle in on anything it can in the region. It's constantly at odds with Vietnam off the latter's coast. It's threatening the Philippines, whose erratic president shows no signs of backing down to China, and its been so concerning to Japan that Japan is now revising its defense posture. Most of all, it's been threatening to Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province which it sort of is.
The problem with a nation flexing its naval muscle is that sooner or later, it goes from flexing to "I wonder how this stuff really works?" Almost all totalitarian powers with big navies get to that point and there's no reason to believe that China won't. Given that, the US (and as noted Japan) have been planning to fight China.
This has resulted in a plan to overhaul the Marine Corps with a Chinese war specifically in mind, and the Navy, upon whom the brunt of any Chinese action would fall, at least initially, has been planning for that as well. And the Navy is worried.
As it should be.
The United States Navy has been a aircraft carrier centric navy ever since December 7, 1941 when it became one by default. And its been the world's most power navy as a carrier based navy. Carries have allowed the United States to project power around the world in a way that no other country can. But in the age of missiles, a real question now exists and is being debated on whether the age of carriers is ending.
Plenty of defense analysts say no, but plenty say yes. Truth is, we just don't know, and absent a major naval contest with a major naval power, which right now there isn't, we won't know. But China is attempting to become that power and it has the ability to act pretty stoutly in its own region right now.
So how does this relate to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?
The U.S. military has a long history of using the UFO phenomena/fandom for disinformation. It notoriously did this in a pretty cruel way in at least one instance in the 60s/70s in which it completely wrecked the psychological health of a victim of a disinformation campaign that it got rolling, even planting a bogus crashed UFO to keep it rolling. Beyond that, it's been pretty willing to use the stories of "weird alien craft" to cover its own developments, with plenty of the weird alien craft simply being developments in the US aerospace industry.
Given that, and the fact that at the same time the service purports to be taking this really seriously, it continually leaks information about it, and it doesn't seem really all that bothered, the best evidence here is something else is going on, of which there are a lot of possibilities. These range from the service developing some really high tech drones and testing them against the same Navy units (they're usually the same ones) again and again to just having the ability to make this stuff all up.
So why the leaks?
If the service is experimenting with high tech drones, and if the experiment is going well, leaking the information may serve as a warning to potential enemies, notably the PRC, that "look, we have something so nifty our own Navy can't do squat about it. . .let alone yours". Being vague about it probably serves the US interest better than simply coming out with "Nanner, nanner. . surface fleets are obsolete . . .". After all, once we admit we have them, at that point the race to figure them out is really on.
On the other hand, maybe we're just making the whole thing up. We have been worried in the past about other nations development super high tech aircraft, notably the Soviet Union, then Russia post USSR, and now China. Running around patenting mysterious things and having weird things going on may be a disinformation campaign designed to make a potential enemy a little hesitant. And they'd hesitate, because. . . .
Maybe we really have developed some super high tech craft, either manned or unmanned, that are now so advanced that we feel pretty comfortable testing them against a control set, that being, at first, the same U.S. Navy units again and again. A recent report indicates that other navies are now experiencing the same thing, and we might frankly be doing the same thing with them. There's no reason to believe that a nation that would do U2 overflights over hostile nations in the 60s, and then SR71 flights the same way, which tested the spread of biological weapons by actually spreading biological agents off of the coast of California, and which tested the intelligence use of LSD by giving it to unsuspecting CIA employees, might not do this.
Indeed, it'd make for a pretty good test.
United Airlines, looking at rebounding air travel, has put out the news that it's hiring hundreds of pilots.
Boeing announced that it's aircraft will be 100% capable of flying on biofuel by the end of the decade. For reasons that I don't grasp, biofuel would reduce aviation's carbon emissions.
This follows Airbus announcing some months ago that it intends to be 100% emission free by 2035, with hydrogen as the eyed fuel.
Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager died yesterday at age 97.
Yeager entered the United States Army Air Force in 1941 as a private. He was an aircraft mechanic at first but volunteered for flight training and was promoted to Flight Officer, a rank more or less equivalent to warrant officer. He flew P51s during World War Two and was stationed in the ETO. He became a test pilot following World War Two and famously broke the sound barrier in that role flying the X1 "Glamourous Glennis", which was named after his wife.
Yeager had a long Air Force career which was likely somewhat arrested, as famous as he was, by the fact that he was not a college graduate, having entered the Air Force at a time in which it was still possible to become a pilot without a college degree. The movie The Right Stuff, in which Yeager was played by Sam Shepard (and in which Yeager had a cameo role as a bar tender), based on the book by Tom Wolfe, asserted that he was ineligible to become an astronaut for that reason. Whether or not that is true, he certainly was a justifiably famous character and in some ways his passing on December 7 was oddly symbolic.
November 23, 2020
The United States has withdrawn from the Open Skies Treaty. The 2002 treaty allows for unmanned areal flights over member nations territories, a concept first proposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. The treaty allows such flights under controlled conditions. Interestingly member nations avail themselves of them much less than might be supposed, and each flight is extremely expensive. Both the US and the USSR have accused each other of cheating on the treaty.
As a practical matter, the treaty matters less and less every year as intelligence satellites get better and better. Indeed, it's notable that it was drafted in 2002 at which point intelligence satellites were already excellent. Therefore the treaty is really of more value to the less advanced nations that are part of it.
FAA
Informational Letter to Pilots
The FAA recognizes that there is a trend in the
industry towards using computer and cell phone applications to facilitate air
transportation by connecting potential passengers to aircraft owners and
pilots willing to provide professional services. Some of these applications
enable the provision – directly or indirectly – of both an aircraft and one
or more crewmembers to customers seeking air transportation.
This letter serves as a reminder to all pilots that, as
a general rule, pursuant to 14 CFR (commonly known by industry as the Federal
Aviation Regulations FARs) private pilots may neither act as pilot-in-command
(PIC) of an aircraft for compensation or hire nor act as a PIC of an aircraft
carrying persons or property for compensation or hire. Furthermore, to engage
in air transportation a pilot must hold a commercial or airline transport
pilot license and must operate the flights in accordance with the
requirements that apply to the specific operation conducted (e.g., Part 135).
To meet the operational requirements, the pilots must be employed (as a
direct employee or agent) by the certificate holder with operational control
of the flight (e.g., a Part 135 certificate holder) or must herself or
himself hold a certificate issued under 14 C.F.R. Part 119.
Another common pitfall to be aware of is the “sham dry
lease” or the “wet lease in disguise.” This situation occurs when one or more
parties act in concert to provide an aircraft and at least one crewmember to
a potential passenger. One could see this, for example, when the passenger
enters into two independent contracts with the party that provides the
aircraft and the pilot. One could also see this when two or more parties
agree to provide a bundle (e.g., when the lessor of the aircraft conditions
the lease – whether directly or indirectly – to entering into a professional
services agreement with a specific pilot or group of pilots. This type of
scenario is further discussed in Advisory Circular (AC) 91-37B,
Truth in Leasing.
An additional caution to consider is flight-sharing. Section 61.113(c) of Title 14 of the CFR
allows for private pilots to share certain expenses. Pilots may share
operating expenses with passengers on a pro rata basis when those
expenses involve only fuel, oil, airport expenditures, or rental fees.
To properly conduct an expense sharing flight under 61.113(c), the pilot
and passengers must have a common purpose and the pilot cannot hold out
as offering services to the public. The “common-purpose test”
anticipates that the pilot and expense-sharing passengers share a “bona
fide common purpose” for their travel and the pilot has chosen the
destination.
Communications with passengers for a common-purpose
flight are restricted to a defined and limited audience to avoid the “holding
out” element of common carriage. For example, advertising in any form (word
of mouth, website, reputation, etc.) raises the question of “holding-out.”
Note that, while a pilot exercising private pilot privileges may share
expenses with passengers within the constraints of § 61.113(c), the pilot
cannot conduct any commercial operation under Part 119 or the less stringent
operating rules of Part 91 (e.g., aerial work operations, crop dusting,
banner towing, ferry or training flights, or other commercial operations
excluded from the certification requirements of Part 119).
For more information on sharing flight expenses, common
purpose, and holding out see:
Unauthorized 135 operations continue to be a problem
nationwide, putting the flying public in danger, diluting safety in the
national airspace system, and undercutting the business of legitimate
operators. If you have questions regarding dry-lease agreements or sharing
expenses, please review the FARs and ACs. Additionally, you may contact your
local Flight Standards District Office
for assistance or seek the advice of a qualified aviation attorney.
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Collings must document and record all ground and flight training and testing. The documentation and records must contain, at minimum, the following information:
a. Date of each training or testing session;
b. The amount of time spent for each session of training given;
c. Location where each session of training was given;
d. The airplane identification number(s) in which training was received;
e. The name and certificate number (when applicable) of the instructor who provided each session of training;
f. The name and certificate number of the pilot who provided each session of testing; and g. For verification purposes, the signature and printed name of the person who received the training or testing.
Section 91.9, which prohibits operations of a civil aircraft without complying with the operating limitations specified in the approved Airplane or Rotorcraft Flight Manual, markings, and placards, or as otherwise prescribed by the certificating authority of the country of registry.Section 91.315, which prescribes, in pertinent part, “No person may operate a limited category civil aircraft carrying persons or property for compensation or hire.”
A cost-saving shift by the Federal Aeronautics Commission to GPS-guided landings at airports around the Mountain West has elicited the concern of a number of airplane pilots based in Casper, who fear the proposed elimination of more than a dozen analog routes could cause significant problems for air transportation around the state.Eh, what's that mean? Well, I wasn't too sure either. The paper then went on to state:
Long guided by a network of extremely high-frequency, short-range ground-based systems known as VORs, pilots in the Rocky Mountains will soon go the way of the rest of the country and come to rely heavily on the same GPS-guided navigation systems promoted by the FAA since the technology’s introduction in the early ‘90s.
It’s a significant step for pilots in the region, who have long relied on the older, more inexpensive systems already in place for navigating the mountainous terrain, and one long pursued by a bureaucracy seeking ways to make air travel as streamlined, efficient and responsive as possible.
“It’s been a quantum leap forward,” said Joe MacGuire, a local airline pilot and a Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives.
This change, Casper-based corporate pilot and 45-year flight veteran Dallas Chopping said, could also be a potentially dangerous one: though the number of VOR approaches proposed for elimination by the FAA – at just over two dozen statewide – seems small, they could present a significant liability for pilots in a rare event when the GPS systems fail or are disrupted, potentially creating risks for commercial pilots, emergency responders and even the National Guard, who often provide a critical role in search-and-rescue operations around the state.Hmmm. . . . I'm not a pilot, but I'm skeptical. That's the argument anyway.
Already, the Casper Chamber of Commerce is mobilizing its membership to respond out of concerns the changes could impact commercial air traffic. In a message to its membership on Wednesday, the Chamber urged its members to weigh in on the potential decommissioning prior to the Jan. 15 deadline set by the FAA, highlighting a number of examples where the decommissioning of the route could impact the local economy.
* * *
“The FAA will argue that it is a cost savings,” she added. “However, for Casper, there is no advantage to losing the approach!”