The US Air Force has stopped flying all Lockheed Martin F-22s for an indefinite period over concerns about a possible glitch in the onboard oxygen generation system.The stand-down order issued on 3 May by Air Combat Command ACC chief Gen Will Fraser comes about six weeks after the F-22s were restricted to flying below 25,000ft Read more about Oxygen system concerns prompt F-22 stand-down[…]
This is an excellent current military affairs resource with a forum, blog and articles written by serving military officers. Small Wars Journal.
Pictures from the 2nd flight show ground crew to give a sense of scale China’s Stealth Jet Makes Second Flight | Defense Tech.
Attempt two, will this one work? is.gd – a URL shortener. Mmmm, tasty URLs!.
As every time someone clicks a bit.ly link that money goes into the coffers of Ghaddafhi, I’ve changed to tinyurl. No statistics on my clicks any more, but hey, I never used them anyway 🙂 TinyURL.com – shorten that long URL into a tiny URL.
This timeline shows all wars, seiges, battles ever with their location on a google maps api. You scroll through periods of time and see where they were fighting, doing what. You can choose a war and find a small precis on what the war was about, why they were fighting. Conflict History | 1582-1586.
With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly. The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can Read more about Tiny Spy Planes Mimic Birds, Insects[…]
The XO of the Enterprise used to hold movie nights featuring funny, sexually tinted skits. One or two people got upset, it got out and now the USN top is going nuts in a frantic attempt to show how humorless they are. Enterprise Skipper Condemned, Defended.
They’ll share carriers as well as R&D, set up a joint military force comprising 5000 personell from each country to start off with, jointly fund UAV MALE acquisition and train together for the A400M programme. These agreements should last for 50 years. UK–France Summit 2010 Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation Joint carrier operations, UAV Read more about Very deep Anglo / French military cooperation[…]
The silo missileers couldn’t communicate and so control the 50 nukes. Apparently this has happened before, but only with up to around 8 missiles at a time… USAF Has Nuke Issues, Again. Really, Really?! | Defense Tech.
The navy loses a carrier and a helicopter landing ship immediately (no words on the planned acquisition of the next 2 carriers) and four frigates. The army loses a brigade as well as artillery (35%) and tanks (40%). The air force loses Harrier immediately and will lose C-130 10 years earlier than planned as well Read more about UK Strategic Defence and Security Review published[…]
Lockheed Martin’s objective is to deliver 15 field-testable and hardened prototype systems by October 2011 that provides the capability to profile downrange crosswind and range to target in near real time, at longer ranges, and improved probability of a first round hit. The system’s integrated spotter scope ISS should measure crosswinds, maximum effective range of Read more about One Shot program – auto aiming for snipers[…]
The visualising data blog has a few interesting graphs of how the wikileaks data shows the war in Afghanistan is spreading and getting progressively worse. They’ve also used data analysis to show that the data isn’t faked. Visualising the wikileaks war logs using tableau public Wikileaks War Logs: A triumph in ‘data journalism’?.
Wikileaks has released logs from the Afghanistan war covering 2004 – 2010. The amount of data is massive and Wikileaks is down Wikleaks The Guardian has a good rundown going on about the data and has some analysis. Afghanistan war logs: live blog | World news | guardian.co.uk.
This is what it looks like to be lasered down Raytheon airs video at Farnborough Airshow of CIWS laser shooting down drone | News.com.au.
Unexpected deviations in gravity are indicative of differences in density. If you point your detector (a gravity gradiometer) in that direction, you can tell what kind of structure is underground. Lockheed Martin is calling this the GATE (Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure) programme. Using Gravity to Detect Underground Threats | Lockheed Martin.
In order to reduce costs on the allready expensive F-35, they’ve decided to remove the shutoff valves for engine coolant and hydraulic lines and five of six dry bay fire-suppression systems. This means if they get hit by 30mm incendiary AAA rounds (very common), it’ll blow up instead of venting the extra pressure in these Read more about Cost cutting on JSF dangerous for pilots[…]
Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the service’s technology development arm, announced today that LaWS (Laser Weapons System) had “successfully tracked, engaged, and destroyed” a drone in flight, during an over-the-water engagement at San Nicholas Island, Calif. via Navy’s Drone Death Ray Takes Out Targets at Sea | Danger Room | Wired.com.
It’s a good document, showing that NATO is definitely heading in the right direction. However, you can tell that much of the experts are stuck in the mud a bit and that the US is using this document to flex its muscles in Iran’s direction. NATO needs to form a new and clear strategic vision, Read more about NATO’s Strategic Concept: Experts’ Report on the New Strategic Concept Released[…]
Not only is the F-35 underperforming and overpriced, it’s also not an air dominance fighter. It’s a point defence fighter with the same limitations of the F-16 when it first came out. If you want to play with the big boys, you gotta have a big stick, and the F-35 just isn’t it. Now it’s Read more about F-35 price hiked by 90%[…]
Opinion piece by a former CIA operative on its current lack of operational capability, On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this Read more about A dagger to the CIA[…]
It used to be that you needed a huge cellphone network to start mapping changes in air currents, but now these guys have developed a sensor that can measure the movement and displacement of air particles using a sensor smaller than a matchstick head! The Microflown The Microflown is the worlds first and only MEMS Read more about End of stealth aircraft[…]
well well well, not that we didn’t expect it – it’s now delayed by a year and development costs are $100m over budget allready. Now if only the Netherlands had bought something like Eurofighter or Rafale. F-35 Delayed Again | Defense Tech.
Looks like the Rafale provides a lot more bang for buck than the F-22, at least in close range… In those six engagements, the F-22 scored one gun kill, but the other five dogfights ended in a draw, Air & Cosmos says. Another sources tells the magazine the F-22 scored two gun kills, with four Read more about Rafale vs Raptor[…]
The US Navy had 2 flying aircraft carriers – zeppelins, which launched and recovered biplanes using a skyhook. The USS Akron and the USS Macon The Sparrowhawk aircraft had their landing gear removed and had to hit a hook that slung them in a corner in and out of the ship. No arrestor cable, no Read more about Flying aircraft carriers[…]