Aviation Week criticizes FAA's 787 Lithium battery decision

Aviation Week feels that the 787 should have gone back to nickel cadmium batteries.  Lithium is not an essential technology.  They never did figure out why the batteries burst into flames.  The fixes to the battery itself may or may not work.  Nobody knows.  The fireproof battery box ought to work, but who can be happy with a battery so fire prone to need such?
   Clearly, if Aviation Week had been calling the shots, they would have told Boeing to get rid of the lithium.

Leaf Day at last.

Spring is indeed sprung.  The trees up here at the top of Franconia Notch have turned green.  Took long enough.  In fact, it got so nice and warm I had to break out an electric fan to keep cool as I watched the 6 o'clock TV news.

Up here, trees are the enemy.

Now that the snow has melted out, I'm doing some yard work.  Been using the lopping shears and the grass whip to cut back the eager saplings and briar bushes around the house.  Took me an hour to cut back the wannabee trees  for a mere six feet from the foundation of the house.  I have woods behinds the house, sort of concealing the house from the road behind, and giving me somewhere to rake the autumn leaves.  We don't get curbside pickup round here.  But I gotta get back there and lop some more brush or it will become an impenetrable briar patch in just another season.

The Cleveland Kidnapped women case

All I can say, is it is horrible what happened to these girls/young women.  I hope family, friends, and the society will do every thing in their power to mitigate the awful captivity they have suffered.

Sequester vs NASA

Aviation Week has Senator Barbara Mikulski as worried about future NASA funding, in the face of the sequester budget cuts.  Mikulski fears that there isn't enough money to continue the Space Launch System (SLS) booster program.  Oh dear, how tragic.
  Space Launch System is an unneeded boondoggle from the word go.  We have two (2) working, well proven, heavy lift boosters,  Space-X's Falcon 9, and United Launch Association's Atlas 5.  Atlas has been lofting big commercial satellites for years.  Falcon is newer and has a shorter service record, but it has made resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS).  SLS has never flown.
  SLS, wags have suggested the acronym stands for "Senate Launch System" is a  $1.385 billion program pushed by the US Senate as a way to keep all those redundant Shuttle people on the NASA payroll.  We ought to kill it off completely and use existing, well proven private industry boosters. 
   Now that the Russians have hiked the price of a ride up to the ISS from $21 million a seat to $71 million a seat, we could pop a capsule atop Falcon or Atlas and save a lot of money. 
   Aviation Week is clearly in favor of SLS.  They close their article thusly.  "Is the US space program any less important than on time arrivals for air travelers?"  
Well, actually, the US space program would be better off without the SLS program.

Where was the air support at Benghazi?

I asked this question back in September.  We could have had fighters over that beleaguered consulate within two hours.   Back when I was in USAF we kept two jet fighters on 10 minute alert.  Loaded, fueled, armed, pilots standing by in operations, they could be wheels up airborne within ten minutes of the sirens going off. Inside of two hours, they could be 1200 miles away, on internal fuel and drop tanks, no tankers.  We have bases and aircraft carriers all over the Mediterranean, we could have had fighter support over Benghazi.  Jet fighters, low overhead, are very intimidating to spontaneous demonstrators, trained Al Quada terrorists, just about anybody. 
  Some how, nobody in our gallant press corp has brought this issue up since last September.
  Until just today.  Someone on Fox News  said the issue of air support would be brought up on Wednesday.
  About time.

New Immigration bill does what?

Hard to tell.  The bill is long, hundreds of pages, all written in a foreign language (legal gobbledegook).  The best summary I found was this Reuters article.  It seems like a balanced discussion to me, Reuters has a good reputation for impartiality going back a century or so, and being British, is less likely to take sides in a purely American issue.   And, many, if not most, of the other articles on the web quote the Reuters article or are clearly based upon it.
  So what will this immigration reform bill do?
1.  Create a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegals already in the country.  It's a fairly demanding path.  Immigrant must have a reasonably clean criminal record, must become reasonably fluent in English, must attend civics classes, pay substantial fees, and probably more.  And spend some ten years on the path.  It will take serious motivation to stay on the path for that length of time.  I'm confident that any illegal who stays the course and gets naturalized will be a willing and loyal citizen of the US.
2.  Give the secretary of Homeland Security broad powers to waive problems with an immigrant's criminal history.  Pretty much, if the secretary is OK with the immigrant's record, he gets in.
3.   Revise immigration policy from the current family ties policy to a merit based policy.  Immigrants (all immigrants) will be given points for college degrees, valuable industrial experience (machinist, technician, computer programmer,etc) fluency in English, and again, probably more.  The idea is to favor immigrants who will contribute to the American economy, rather than the current policy that favors grandparents and siblings of US citizens.
4.  Provide $150 million in funding for immigrant advocacy groups to inform potential immigrants of  their opportunities and to assist them with the paperwork.
5.  Labor unions and the Chamber of Commerce have wrangled over the guest worker and H1B visa provisions and are reported to be happy with them. 
6.  Probably a lot of other stuff buried in the hundreds of pages of the bill.  Who has the energy to plow thru that much gobbledegook?
7.  Congresscritters have a couple of days left to slip their favorite goodies into the bill, so we won't know what's been done to us until they do it.   

From what Reuters has published, it isn't a bad bill.  It would be a better one if they boiled it down to 20 pages, in English and published it so we really knew what we were getting into.