Blue

From the article: The number of aircraft has not been specified. Any thoughts as to how many tails 1.8 bil gets you?

I downloaded the FlightRadar24 app to my phone. You can zoom in on Oshkosh to see traffic. The below is from about 8:00 Central time this morning. Large mess of folks holding over Green Lake and Rush Lake to the SW of Oshkosh (in addition to everyone over Oshkosh itself).

https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=kosh Scroll about half way down, click on one of the options for: KOSH Fisk VFR Approach. Also using the free FlightRadar24 app on the phone to watch the lineup of airplanes coming in. Seems to have calmed down over the past hour. There was a big crush of airplanes this morning, but it's thinned out.

Through the wonders of the internet, I can listen to the Fisk VFR approach while sitting at my desk. Action, adventure, comedy, drama. Can't beat it.

Equalizer II: Meh. Supposedly, the Equalizer saga is going to be a trilogy. I thought the first one was really well done. A great action/vigilante movie where every scene kept you engaged. Equalizer II? Still fun to watch, but not nearly as engaging. Some plot elements that didn't really go anywhere. Felt like a mish-mash of scenes, interspersed with Denzel Washington kicking ass.

Sounds like Sierra Nevada took a proven design and bolted on a bunch of extra stuff (some needed, some not), with no thought to the challenges of integrating it all together into a working system.

Damn. Didn't realize that. Always seemed like the A-29 was marketed as some "off-the-shelf" solution. Didn't realize Sierra Nevada had changed the design so significantly.

Making sure the money gets spent. That's it.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-post-iii-8922ab127/ As of Sept 2017, he's a "Senior Adviser" to BGI LLC. Guess the calls from Lockheed and Boeing never came.

Since they couldn't retire the A-10, they're just going to fly the wings off them, while slow-rolling the wing replacement program. http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2018/air-force-leaders-deliberately-slow-rolling-a-10-refurbishment.html

Always did wonder--what was it about the F-2 that made it so damn expensive?

Link?

I would love it if they were no-kidding fired, and walked off of the base with cardboard boxes in-hand. Previous experience has shown me that SES folks are never exactly "fired." They're just given new, less visible jobs elsewhere on the base.

Am I the only one shaking my head at all this? When OBOGS problems first cropped up, the very first thing that should have been looked at was the maintenance interval of the individual components. Based on the above, this all sounds like the Air Force is the proverbial idiot who never does any preventative maintenance on their car, then bitches when their brakes fail, or the engine blows. Firing some folks in the T-6 SPO sounds like a good start. As a next step, how about finding someone to do some tracking of the performance of the system after parts are changed? The airlines all have robust programs monitoring reliability of various systems, and making a cost/benefit decision on what should be replaced proactively, and what should fly-to-fail. Someone at the SPO should be doing this going forward.

Ehh....., always thought the shoulder punch was kinda dumb. And every now and again someone would actually get hurt.

I don't have a dog in this fight. However, the above sounds like "Normalization of Deviance." Lots of stuff out there on the web. From one link: http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2016/01/07/the-normalization-of-deviance.html The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.

Quoted for truth.

USAF may be screwed, but damn do they make some good-looking powerpoint decks!

Just to back up a bit--how much flying have you done? 0 hours? 100? PPL?

Eh, it's a two-race sponsorship (The 4th of July Daytona race and the November Phoenix race). A long way from the early 2000's, where they would sponsor a car for the whole 36-race season. Can't say I agree it's a good use of taxpayer dollars, but in the grand scheme of things, there are bigger wastes.

This sounds like one big opportunity for LockMartNorthropBoeing to sell a bunch of expensive gold-plated technology. You know, the kind of high-tech gee whiz shit that kinda sorta works...sometimes........

Would be interesting to see a final summary of the AMP Program, from start to finish. Especially a total summation of how much money was put into it, and what exactly was gotten out of it. Even though the full-up AMP program was never completed, I'm sure there still were some benefits gleaned (AMP-light, mods installed on J-models, etc). But it sure seems like it was primarily a jobs program for Lockheed, Boeing, and the C-130 Program Office.

Pick the battles that are big enough to matter, but small enough to win....

I'm not a Boeing guy, but I've bounced around the Aerospace and Defense industry for awhile. This job title and job description sounds like something you'd see someone with a Marketing degree and 10 years of experience doing. Certainly not a retired O-6. Maybe there is justice in the world.....

Yeah, so a computer flew........another computer. Great. Real earth-shattering news....