Jet Tankers in Merrie Old England

The Royal Air Force has an interesting way of doing things.  The are just getting a brand new 14 aircraft fleet of Airbus A330 jet tankers into the RAF.  Or sort of.  The aircraft are owned by a "private" company called AirTanker .  This company is authorized to rent, loan, or lease these shiny new tankers out to other EU countries when they are not needed by the RAF.  For instance just last month, France found itself way short of tankers to support their Mali operation. 
   This sort of thing has been going on long enough for the various EU air forces to define a "Standard C130 Flying Hour" as a unit of account.  One flying hour from an RAF jet tanker will be worth three Standard C130 Flying Hours.  Borrow my nice new A330 tanker for one hour and you owe me three C130 flying hours.
   And the Brits have yet to accomplish some Brit paperwork needed in order to actually refuel in the air.  Each warplane type (F16, Tornado, Grippen, whatever) needs paperwork before air to air refueling can be done.  This has gotta be some kind of Euro job security system.  In USAF all warplanes refueled off the KC-135's, here now and forever.  There was no paperwork to accomplish on a type by type basis. 

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.