Lighting things up.

C.P. Search under starboard wing of Martin PBM-3C Mariner from Air Sub Dev, Lant, Quonset Point, Rhode Island.  December 19, 1943.

NASA Opens Some UFO Files to Public

This was in its first public meeting.

I'm underwhelmed by this story.  In a world in which technology is getting so advanced that our own creation that we should avoid making, AK, will probably end us, these are almost certain many made.

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday March 8, 1923. Air to Air, almost.

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday March 8, 1923. Air to Air, almost.: 

Thursday March 8, 1923. Air to Air, almost.

Inventor Lawrence Sperry, inventor of the autopilot and artificial horizon, demonstrated that air-to-air refueling was a theoretical possibility by intentionally touching a Sperry Messenger to a deHavilland flown by Lt. Clyde Finter.  He did it eight times.

Sperry Messenger.

Both plans maintained a speed of 65 mph during the demonstration.

Sperry would go down over the English Channel that December, losing his life at age 30.  He was flying a Sperry Messenger at the time.  His company lives on.

Blog Mirror: Biofuels: Ready to Fly into the Future

 

Biofuels: Ready to Fly into the Future

Why Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are almost certainly not aliens.

 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.

 

Air Force Goes Low And Slow With XCub (Corrected)

Shifting to GPS Guided Landings In Wyoming.

A recent headline in the Tribune read:

Local pilots decry federal changes to flight routes

The article went on to note:

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.

Well, I'm still not really following, but I sort of grasp it.  But why wouldn't this be a good change?

Well, I'm not really sure, but apparently it has to do with weather and costs.  Having said that, I think that aircraft have all been shifting over to GPS by Federal mandate for some time.

The paper went on to include this comment:

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.

And its mobilized, apparently at least one community group.

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!”

Well, the 15th is today.  We'll see if the FAA was convinced.