On this day in 1920 a young Amelia Earhart rode in an airplane piloted by Frank Hawks at the California State Fair in Los Angeles. She was 23 years old and her father paid the $10.00 charge for the ten minute flight.
On this day in 1940, a photo was taken of some new construction benefiting aircraft at a Naval Air Station in Rhode Island.
On the same day, famous aviator August Eddie Schneider was killed in an aviation accident.
Schneider was a well known daring aviator and had won multiple aviation speed records. He'd also flown for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. On this day he was training a student when his plane was struck by a Navy aircraft, taking it down and killing him.
And of course the war raged on:
On this day in the war, Winston Churchill addressed the Italian people and urged them to rebel against Mussolini and take Italy out of the war. The overall poor performance of Italian troops in combat was already effectively achieving that result.
Joe Biden will not, I'm sure, take advice from me. I've offered him some already, but I doubt he's one of the 200 to 800 people who stop in here on any particular day.
Still, if he is. . .
If you want to read an enthusiastic view of the Space Force read the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine. It's an excellent publication anyway and it loves the space force. The last issue had an article on the "black hat squadron" of the now one year old Space Force and what it does.
My view?
M'eh.
The Space Force was basically the Air Force's Space Command and it should revert to it. The Space Force can't and won't be doing any real mission that Space Command was not, but it will have its own budget, its own seat at the Joint Chiefs, and its own bloated budget. Given the habit of the current U.S. military, it won't share anything that it could in terms of obviously common items with the other services, and will have to have its own unique everything.
The Space Force/Space Command really has a mission that's simply auxiliary to the Air Forces and therefore the creation of what essentially is a branch of the military that does nothing other than to deal with menacing Russian satellites and the potential militarization of space is really grossly overweighting that mission and massively trespassing on something the Air Force already does and does well. The Air Force has been in space, frankly, in a militarized way since the launch of the first ballistic missiles that excited the atmosphere and so they've been at this a long, long time. If the Space Force having a seat at the Joint Chiefs makes sense, and its own very special budget, giving the Civil Air Patrol a seat there does as well.
Moreover both balkanization and mission inflation is a problem in the U.S. military as it is. The Air Force itself was once, and rightly, part of the Army but has been busy trying to forget its ground support role ever since it became a separate service, which was a massive military mistake in the first place. Double balkanization of a role that should have just remained with the Army is not help.
Moreover, this recalls the example of the Marine Corps, which I have another thread in the hopper on. I'm not opposed to the Marine Corps by any means and I worry about its current direction towards a new role, but its hard not to recall that the Marine Corps is properly part of the Department of the Navy but since the Second World War its freakishly expanded into its own service in a way. And its one that has developed the habit of never using anything, right down to boots, that other branches of the service do.
All these services, moreover, get a chair with the Joint Chiefs of Staff which now is starting to look as large as a high school graduating class. The Army, Air Force, Space Force, Marine Corps, and the Navy all have seats at the Joint Chiefs and the National Guard gets its own as well.
This is now way overdone. The Marines ought to really revert fully to being part of the Department of the Navy. If they can't do that, they're really just a second Army in disguise. The Air Force ought to revert to being part of the Department of the Army. I'm so so about the National Guard having a seat at the table, but I'd leave that alone for the time being.
At a bare minimum, the Space Force ought to go and on day one of the Biden Administration. If I were he, I'd not only sign an executive order doing away with it immediately on day one, but I'd frankly reduce any officer in grade by one grade if they were foolish enough to go along with this silliness and I'd shift those enlisted men who volunteered for this transfer (and not all of them did) over to the Army rather than the Air Force. They'd have their same jobs, but if they want to be playing musical services they can be in one that might, perhaps, have to call on them to be a "guardian" in the old fashioned way.
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.
This Day In Aviation: 25 November 1920
Aviation was a new thing as well, as we have been tracking, and things associated were still so novel as to make the front page in newspapers.
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.
