Blog Mirror: Frustrated Natrona Commissioners Call $650K SkyWest Guarantee ‘Extortion”

Frustrated Natrona Commissioners Call $650K SkyWest Guarantee ‘Extortion”

 

Casper airport to hold first annual 5K fun run/walk

A "rash decision" on pilot retirement age.

The House Committee on Transportation, operating in a Boomer dominated era in which there's a persistent belief that nobody every gets old, voted to extend airline pilot retirement age from 65 to 67.

The Air Line Pilots Association, a commercial pilot's union, opposed the measure, stating:

The rash decision to move an amendment on changing the statutory pilot retirement age, without consulting agencies responsible for safety, or studying potential impacts of such a change as has been done elsewhere, is a politically driven choice that betrays a fundamental understanding of airline industry operations, the pilot profession, and safety.

The measure now goes to the full House. 

Why Canada didn't shoot down the "unidentified" object over its own airspace and relied upon the USAF to do it.

 An excellent thread on NORAD and the strategic considerations that went into it and the modern RCAF:

Why didn't Canada shoot down the object?

Very revealing about the Canadian military budget and the current number of fighter aircraft, and type, that Canada has.

Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part 2. The United States shoots down a Chinese spy balloon.

Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part 2. The Gatherin...: 

Feb 4, cont.

China v. US.

Perhaps for the first time since World War One, a US aircraft has shot down a balloon.

Lex Anteinternet: The 2023 Wyoming Legislative Session. Commercial Pilot Scholarship

Lex Anteinternet: The 2023 Wyoming Legislative Session. End of the f...: HB202 would provide for scholorships for students wanting to be commercial pilots.

HOUSE BILL NO. HB0202

Pilot student loan payments.

Sponsored by: Representative(s) Walters, Northrup, Sherwood, Sommers and Western and Senator(s) Gierau and Landen

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to education; providing financial assistance to students obtaining commercial pilot certificates; requiring pilots licensed under this act to fly commercially as specified or repay funds expended by the state; requiring students to satisfy a residency requirement to qualify for the program; allowing the community college commission to forgive student debt where undue hardship exists; requiring reports; providing an appropriation; requiring rulemaking; and providing for effective dates.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 21‑18‑227 is created to read:

21‑18‑227.  Wyoming airline pilot loan repayment program; eligibility criteria; procedures; program reporting.

(a)  The Wyoming airline pilot loan repayment program is created to be administered by the Wyoming community college commission established under W.S. 21‑18‑201. Applicants shall have a Wyoming residence, as defined in W.S. 22‑1‑102(a)(xxx), or shall be graduates of a Wyoming high school and may apply for loans from the program in accordance with this section.

(b)  To qualify for a loan under this section, the applicant shall:

(i)  Be enrolled in good standing in a program at a Wyoming community college for the purpose of receiving an aviation or related degree and a commercial pilot certificate;

(ii)  Intend to obtain an airline transport pilot certification; and

(iii)  Apply for federal financial assistance.

(c)  Subject to the availability of funds appropriated for this program, loans under this section may be granted to qualified applicants to pay the cost of attendance for the aviation or related program and the commercial pilot certificate specified under paragraph (b)(i) of this section.

(d)  A loan provided under this section shall not exceed the cost of tuition fees for the approved program and the cost of earning the commercial pilot certificate, reduced by the amount of any Pell or other federal grant and any employer based financial assistance received by the applicant.

(e)  A recipient of a loan under this section may repay the loan without cash payment by earning an airline transport pilot certification and actively engaging in commercial aviation as an airline transport pilot employed by an airline that regularly flies into airports within Wyoming for three (3) years.

(f)  Any recipient of a loan under this section who fails to:

(i)  Complete the academic program for which the loan was provided shall commence cash repayment of the loan no later than forty‑five (45) days after the recipient leaves the academic program;

(ii)  Obtain employment in the targeted occupation specified in subsection (e) of this section within two hundred forty (240) days after successfully obtaining the airline transport pilot certification, shall commence cash repayment of the loan within two hundred eighty‑five (285) days after successfully obtaining the airline transport pilot certification;

(iii)  Obtain the airline transport pilot certification within two and one‑half (2 1/2) years after completion of the aviation or related program and commercial pilot certificate shall commence cash repayment of the loan.

(g)  Loan repayment options under this section may be deferred for a period not to exceed five (5) years while a loan recipient is serving on full‑time active duty with any branch of the military services of the United States.

(h)  The Wyoming community college commission shall have the powers and duties specified under W.S. 21‑18‑202(c) to implement this section and shall establish terms and conditions of loans issued under this section, including:

(i)  Interest rates and loan terms;

(ii)  The form and process for loan application, review and award;

(iii)  Criteria under which students may be relieved from having to repay loans and interest thereon, in whole or in part, where the requirement to repay would cause undue hardship;

(iv)  Criteria for determining the cost of attendance as used in establishing the loan amount for aviation or related programs and commercial pilot certificates based upon each semester or summer school session of full or part‑time program attendance.

(j)  Funding of the loan program established under this section shall be by appropriation of the legislature. The community college commission shall transfer approved loan amounts to the appropriate Wyoming community college.

(k)  Cash repayment of loans and interest thereon shall be credited to the general fund.

(m)  The community college commission shall annually review the loan program established under this section and report to the governor and the legislature in accordance with W.S. 9‑2‑1014 regarding program results, funds received and loans issued during the preceding academic year, together with the status of all outstanding loan commitments and repayments under the program. 

(n)  Any person who receives a loan under this section shall continue to receive funding for the program as the person remains eligible as required by this section.

(o)  Repayment of loans provided under this section shall continue as specified by this section until all loan obligations have been satisfied.

Section 2.  There is appropriated one million five hundred thousand dollars ($1,500,000.00) from the general fund to the Wyoming community college commission for purposes of providing loans for students seeking aviation related degrees and commercial pilot certificates under W.S. 21‑18‑227 as created by section 1 of this act for the period beginning July 1, 2023 and ending June 30, 2026. This appropriation shall not be transferred or expended for any other purpose and any unexpended, unobligated funds remaining from this appropriation on June 30, 2026 shall revert as provided by law. It is the intent of the legislature that an appropriation to fund the student loans authorized by this act be included in the community college commission's standard budget request for the 2027‑2028 fiscal biennium.

Section 3.  The community college commission shall promulgate all rules necessary to implement this act.

Section 4.  

(a)  Except as otherwise provided by subsection (b) of this section, this act is effective July 1, 2023.

(b)  Sections 3 and 4 of this act are effective immediately upon completion of all acts necessary for a bill to become law as provided by Article 4, Section 8 of the Wyoming Constitution.

United Airlines has asked for $1,000,000

from the Federal Government in order to keep air travel open on United flights from Cody (Yellowstone Regional Airport) to Denver.

United Airlines Triples Pilot Pay for January.

This due to an ongoing pilot shortage, which has been heightened by the Omicron variant of COVID 19.

I.e, United is trying to fill the pilot seats this month.

United Airlines and Southwest cut the booze

The mental image some passengers have of flight attendants.

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".

What some folks seemingly see when getting on an airplane.

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.

Maybe there's still international flights. . . . 

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.

British Petition: Treat recreation flying as a form of allowable exercise during the lockdown.

Interesting petition related to the Coronavirus Pandemic measures form the UK.  I'm not opining on it, merely noting it.

PetitionTreat recreation flying as a form of allowable exercise during the lockdown.

The F15 is back in production and so is the Mig 31.

The F15 is the F15EX variant, a brand new version of the old F15, which first went into production in 1976.  The planes history dates back to tests that go as far back as 1972.

The enormous Mig 31 first went into production in 1981 and has a history that goes back to 1975.

Why are they back? 

Missiles.

The F15EX can carry a seven foot long missiles that can reach deep into China, should the need arise, and its external hard points can carry more missiles than the F35.

The Mig 31, which might simply be getting an overhaul rather than new editions, can carry missiles that can reach into low orbit and hit satellites.

And so the Cold War sort of returns, in a way.

Lex Anteinternet: And now Brooks Brothers. . .

Lex Anteinternet: And now Brooks Brothers. . .:

And now Brooks Brothers. . .

which has been in business since 1818, has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Well dressed New York lawyer, 1914.  Brooks Brothers suit?

The clothier is an iconic men's fashion institution, although it also makes clothing for women.  A privately owned company the entire time, in more formal eras it virtually set the pattern for really fine men's business wear.  Abraham Lincoln had suits made there, as did John F. Kennedy.  Theodore Roosevelt's size was on record there such that when the Spanish American War was declared, he ordered uniforms from the company.

I've had three Brooks Brothers suits myself, all of which were excellent suits.  By some odd law of nature, as soon as I acquire a really good suit, I gain weight, so I can't wear any of them anymore.  There's be no point in me keeping my size on record.

The company couldn't weather the storm of COVID 19 and the decline in American standards of dress.  It's going to close 200 outlets and hope to reorganize.

Another clothing institution having trouble is Levi Strauss, which saw a 62% decline in sales this past quarter.

Both Levis and Brooks Brothers have had to weather the changes in fashion over the past half century, but Brooks Brothers actually seemed to be handling it better, never forgetting that its flagship line were men's suits.  Levis, in contrast, only weakly defended its legendary brand, Levis blue jeans, which are now made overseas as a rule.  The company has seemed to lose its way in general.

Levis "Dockers", which the company introduced when business casual became a think.  I do like this product line.

Levis advertising, a symbol of the company, really hit rock bottom during the last couple of decades when it tried to really appeal to hipsters.  Perhaps its worst advertisement was a young, grungy, looking woman wearing Levis 501s and a wool cap just spouting nonsense.

Not from Sur La Table.

Also taking bankruptcy is a company called Sur La Table, a company that sells high end kitchen goods.  You'd almost think that in this stay at home era, it'd be doing good  Apparently not.

Also not from Sur La Table.

It's interesting how this company, which in some ways must have ridden the foodie boom of the last fifteen or so years, would be in trouble now.  Turns out, probably, that you cook with some pretty old fashioned generic stuff.

United Airlines contract regional aircraft in Denver.

Not taking bankruptcy, but warning employees of possible furloughs, is United Airlines, who this past week gave that notice to 36,000 of its employees, 1/3d of its total work force.  Air travel, as everyone knows, has dropped way off due to COVID 19.

United is a major local carrier here and they've reduced their flights considerably.  I understand that, but its unfortunate as I really liked their Denver red eye, which is one of the cancelled flights.

Lex Anteinternet: Pandemic. May 14, 2020

Lex Anteinternet: Pandemic: The Wyoming Air National Guard will be doing a fly over of regional hospitals throughout the state on Friday to honor health care workers.  At the same time, some of the emergency centers set up for the Pandemic are standing down. They'll remain ready as a reserve, should the virus revive, but they are not going to be maintained on a standing basis.

Due to a large drop in flights the FAA has announced that it's cutting Tower hours by 50% at the Natrona County International Airport . . .

which means that the tower will now be manned for 8  hours rather than 16.

P51 in foreground, NIA Tower in background.

The airport is open 24 hours a day, but it only has tower personnel now for 16 of those hours.  While this is due to the drop in flights caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic, there's concern that the 8 hour subtraction will become permanent as that's the history of such things.

The Natrona County International Airport is the largest airport in Wyoming and has major infrastructure.  Indeed its so large that, sadly, some of its original runways are closed.  They unnecessary but they've also fallen into disrepair.  Something like this doesn't help keep the airport be what it is, let alone help it obtain what it should be.

Additionally, while the news article I read didn't go into it, this seems odd as the only major cost savings associated with reducing hours by 50% would be to reduce tower personnel by 50% as well.  But didn't the government want employers to keep everyone on the payroll that they could?

Lex Anteinternet: Trains, Planes and Automobiles. . . and the Coronavirus

Lex Anteinternet: Trains, Planes and Automobiles. . . and the Corona...:

Trains, Planes and Automobiles. . . and the Coronavirus Pandemic

Unless you have a special interest in them, you probably haven't been thinking much about means of transportation lately.



Indeed, you probably haven't been going anywhere much, for that matter.



But because we have a special interest in the topic, and have dedicated blogs on two of the three title items here, we've been thinking about them a little, and we're seeing some interesting things going on.

Burlington Northern Train in Wyoming.

Let's take the oldest topic first, trains.  We have a companion blog that's just dedicated to that topic.  Have the railroad been impacted by the COVID 19 Pandemic? We'll, here's a recent industry magazine headline on what's going on.

US rail traffic falls off a cliff

AAR information shows Intermodal traffic dropped 20% and carloads plunged more than 23% for the week ended April 11

So indeed, it would appear so.



Regionally, at least one of the railroads has been furloughing employees.  Coal is collapsing, there isn't really anywhere near as much oil shipped by rail as there once was and oil is down anyway, and we're entering what appears to be a pretty deep recession.



Not a cheery scenario for the railroads right now at all.



So what about air then?

Denver International Airport B Concourse.

Not looking super either.

Air travel has decreased 96% due to COVID 19.  That's a whopping  huge decrease to say the least.

96%.

Flights locally have been reduced 50%.  No need for all of the old ones, and it's not like they were flying out of here every few minutes as it was.  Cheyenne cancelled a run to Dallas it had (until they cancelled it, I didn't know that they even had one).  

As a minor plus, Cody's airport is going to receive $18,000,000 in the form of a grant, which was a surprise to them, but that is fairly minor in comparison to what's otherwise going on.

Well, all this shouldn't impact automobiles, that old standby, right?

Pontiac Super Chief

Well there'd certainly be good reason to suspect it wouldn't.  Oil is below $20bbl and now at an all time historic low.  Prices at the pump have been dropping.  Should be great for cars, right?

Nope.  Sales of automobiles have crashed.  People just aren't going out and buying, and in a lot of places, of course, they can't.  And they likely don't want to either.

Hired automobile rides, such as Uber, are also down, not surprisingly.

Interesting times.

In surprise, Cody airport awarded $18 million by federal government

In surprise, Cody airport awarded $18 million by federal government: Yellowstone Regional Airport officials knew they’d be getting a financial boost from the federal government’s new Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. But they were …

Lex Anteinternet: And now Iranian protests against its government

Lex Anteinternet: And now Iranian protests against its government:

And now Iranian protests against its government

The Iranian people's level of trust for their own government is low and has been waning for a long time.

Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran.  And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.

The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage.  President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.

It failed.

Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life.  It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War.  The US was shown to be impotent.

Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane.  The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down.  Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion.  In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.  

Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly.  It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.

And now they've shot down their own airliner.

A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988.  Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it.  Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly.  The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time.  The Iranian government is going to change.

The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly.  Now that seems to have already eroded.  Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist.  Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed.  The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident.  And Iranians are back to protesting their government.  The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.

Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.

Lex Anteinternet: Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

Lex Anteinternet: Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.:

Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran this week, after its retaliatory missile strikes on US facilities in Iraq.  The plane was carrying Iranians mostly bound for Canada, which has a large Iranian immigrant population.

To make this plane, Iran's military shot down a civilian aircraft over their own capitol city.

This is because the Iranian military isn't great.

Iran has universal male conscription at 18 years of age.  Interestingly, prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it also conscripted women, but stopped at that time.  This means it has a large conscript military.

And while it has obtained arms, as the greed and stupidity of nations exceeds their best interests all too often, their military is basically a 1970s vintage force.

We don't know what happened to lead to this tragedy, but my guess is that a tired and scared group of Iranian conscripts had been harangued by officers and seniors about expecting an American attack to the point they were worn out and scared.  So they fired on what they thought was an American military aircraft and 176 completely innocent people, most of whom were their fellow countrymen. We don't know what happened to the men who fired the missile, but we can be assured that it is or was bad.

Nothing will happen to the men ultimately responsible for the tragedy, which is the Iranian Islamist leadership that has governed the country for forty one years and kept in on a violent path of regional Shiite dominance. That government will ultimately go down in an Iranian revolution of some sort, and much of their theocratic views forever with it.

Where this leaves the Iranian American Conflict is not known, but what has turned out to be the case is that an extremely risky course of action the US embarked on due to an order of President Trump and under the apparent urging of Mike Pompeo has been surprisingly effective so far.  Nearly everyone agrees that Gen. Soleimani was a terrorist whose demise should not be lamented.  That he was a uniformed officer of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and the method by which it occurred really ramped up the risks, but Iran's response was ineffective, perhaps intentionally so, or perhaps simply because it was.  And Iran managed to put the period on the entire event by following up an ineffective missile strike by shooting down a Ukrainian airliner.  The U.S., in the meantime, has essentially declared the matter over.

Either as an example of truly masterful strategy, or by accident, the U.S. has effectively moved the bar on state sponsored terrorism and, due to the past week, managed to make state employed uniformed terrorist a routine target in wars on terrorism and to have exposed Iran's conventional forces as less than impressive.  Iran may have in fact suffered a set back as a sponsor of terrorism and given its history, that's a large part of its diplomatic approach to the world. Without it, it's not much.

At least not much until it acquires a nuclear weapon, which it is now working on.  Indeed, exposed as conventionally incompetent and now with a reduced military portfolio because of the changed nature of the game, it may be stepping back because it knows this has become a must for it.

Or so it probably believes. The irony of it is that nuclear weapons for small nations are, frankly, completely worthless.