Does the world need a STOL C17?

Aviation Week is ruminating about the fate of the C17 production line. The Air Force has bought most, nearly all, the c17's it wants/can afford/can-get-funding-for. AFAIR that's 187 aircraft. It's a good plane, a lot better than the aging C5, but expensive. The RAF bought 4 or 5 and the Europeans bought a few more, but it's so expensive that only USAF can afford it. So, Boeing is looking at shutting down the lucrative C17 production line next summer. Once shut down, it's gone for good. So Boeing is doing everything it can to generate some more orders for the plane to keep the production line open and the money coming in.
Latest plan is to offer a Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) version of the plane. More wheels to spread the weight so it doesn't sink in to dirt fields, more engine power, bigger flaps. Might work, but does anyone really want to fly something that big. heavy and expensive into a dirt field? And risk ground looping it? The world is covered with real airfields, the kind with 5000 foot paved runways. Better is to fly the big long range C17 into a real airfield, and swap the cargo over to a real STOL aircraft like the old reliable C130. Air cargo all goes onto pallets with rollers on the bottom. It only takes minutes for the loadmaster to undo the tiedowns and roll the palletized cargo out the rear ramp onto a loader/crawler vehicle. The loader rumbles across the ramp to a C-130 and in a few minutes the cargo is all inside the C130.
Actually, in real life, the long range C17 coming in from the States has a mixed cargo intended for everyone in theater. So they cargo comes of the C17 and into a warehouse. The C130, going upcountry to supply troops off some bean patch, gets a mixed load of stuff off the C17, locally purchased food and drink, ammo that came in by ship last month, and whatever.
In short, the C17 is a good long range transport that needs STOL capabilty like a snake needs shoes.
Boeing needs to keep hoping that the project to rebuild and re engine the aging C5's gets scrapped and the Air Force uses the extra money to buy more C17's. That would probably be a better use of tax payer funds. C5 was a disaster when it was new. McNamara and his whiz kids managed to screw up the design beyond recovery. We would be better retiring it and going with something newer.

FAA plays gotcha with AD's. ( Aviation Week)

Herb Kelleher, Southwest's executive chairman, suggests compliance with airworthiness directives (AD) might be more effective if they were simplified. He was referring to 1,100 pages of six AD's covering the Boeing 737 fuselage cracks. Congresscritter James Oberstar (D-Minn) thought that unwise.
I think we just found the root cause of all those groundings. The airworthiness directives are unreadable garbage. No one can keep 1,100 pages of boilerplate in mind as he inspects a real airplane on a flightline. Hell, he can't even carry that much paper work out of the office. In real life, directions for crack inspection can be written in 10 pages, single spaced. In a former life I used to inspect aircraft and write inspection procedures. I never needed more than ten pages myself.
Once you have 1,100 pages of mush, a pissant inspector can find just about anything he wants, buried somewhere in the 1,100 pages. No matter what the line mechanics do, an inspector with 1,100 pages to play gotcha with can always find fault. Betcha the recent FAA grounding of American's fleet started with some pissant inspector playing gotcha with the mechanics.
I suggest we put the FAA out of the paperwork business. Have the engineering departments of the aircraft makers write the maintainance procedures for their products.

To Gap or not to Gap (Medigap that is)

Decided to wade thru the forty pounds of stuff about health insurance that has piled up since my medicare eligibility hove into sight. Let's see. We have Medicare, Part A, which covers hospitalization and is actually free. There is Medicare Part B which covers some doctor's visits and some shots and tests. That's $93 out of your social security check. Doesn't cover annual physicals which are $500 a pop. Medicare, either sort, has pretty high deductibles.
If the high deductibles are scary there is a raft of private insurance out there that offers all sorts of coverage for all sorts of prices.
Then if you are onto expensive medicines, there is Medicare Part D,m newly passed, that buys your pills. With a deductible of course.
Question. Are the extra coverages worth the monthly fee? Do I have the energy to read thru all this stuff and figure out what they cost and what they return?

Hollywood has forgotten how to mix the soundtracks

Watched "Revenge of the Sith" on DVD last night with teenaged children. Lucas needs to find a new sound man. He forgot the fundamental rule of sound mixing, MAKE THE DIALOG LOUDER THAN THE SCORE. Dialog was almost impossible to hear over score, sound effects, crashing space craft and what ever. This isn't the only recent movie to suffer from inept sound men, "Charlie Wilson's War" was just as bad.

Can McCain balance the Federal Budget?

McCain will extend the Bush tax cuts, declare a gasoline tax moratorium, lower capital gains, and increase individual income tax deductions. He plans to balance the budget by reducing Federal spending. Question, is there enough fat to cut?
Well let's see. $18 billion in pork. $11.5 billion for fancy presidential helicopters. $30 billion in farm subsidies. We could declare the Interstate Highway system complete and close down the highway trust fund. That is good for $100 billion a year savings. Repeal the "energy bill" which is a $30 billion subsidy to the oil companies. Drop the ethanol subsidy. That's about $190 billion in savings right there. There is surely more.

Surprise, retired military officers remain pro military

The Lehrer news hour did a length piece concerning retired military officers servicing as military commentators on the TV news. The piece was kicked off by a NY Times story (which I haven't read) which charged that all the military commentators on TV had received friendly treatment, briefings, junkets to Iraq, and other favors from the Pentagon. The NYT guy on the program called this illegal tampering with a free press. The officers in question were being buttered up to push the Administration's story over the air. This was illegal, unnatural, unconstitutional, and fattening.
Wow. What planet do NYT reporters live on? Does any grownup fail to understand that a retiree who has spent his working life in the service will share his service's view of things when he starts speaking as a TV pundit? And, I wouldn't have it any other way. I want military officers who are loyal to their branch of service. A guy who retires and then opines that we are doing it all wrong, the generals are losing the war, and we ought to quit, wasn't much of an officer on active service. Any how, the NYT is still outraged to find out what the rest of us know, that US officers are pro military and favor victory. And that they have friends still on active duty who give them valuable information.

Plastic turf scare mongering on Fox News

Just this minute Megyn Kelly was doing a story on toxic artificial turf (Astroturf). Some one has claimed the stuff is bad for kids. Fox did not tell us who made the claim, the chemical name of the bad stuff, the amount of the unnamed bad stuff in the plastic grass. All we got was an interview with a doctor who recommended we all watch our children for any sort of ill health.
Right. Watch your kids, and when they get sick blame the Astroturf. They will get sick sooner or later, that's part of being a kid. Salem witches were burned on this kind of "evidence". At least we won't burn the Astroturf, too much air pollution.