Nied

Well it's possible that the UN Air Force, and UNS Marines avoid using special aircraft for wing/squadron commanders. Keep in mind that in modern terms most times you will only see one wing assigned to an aircraft carrier at a time and your average wing has 5 squadrons of 12-24 fighters each (there's also several squadrons of support craft but those don't really matter for our purposes here). 5x24=120 so if there are 120 VF-1s in a wing and 30 or so wings (one for every VF-1S built) that's 3600 VF-1A's, enough to account for a few thousand going to non-Spacy squadrons and attrition replacements. You'd also be able to sprinkle 2-3 VF-1Js in each wing with those numbers as well. Though I'll admit that's way less than 6 to a wing, maybe several VF-1Js were re-manufactured from VF-1As? Unlike the VF-1S, the only difference between an A and a J seems to be the head.

So that's what's been causing it... It's all David's fault!!!!!

First C-17 in civil airline colors (sort of).

Yeah things had gone great for most of the weekend and then this morning I tired going to MW and at first (maybe 11:00 or so PDT) I was getting a page not found error while trying to access the main page. Later (maybe noon or so) I could get to the main page but the forum was back to it's old tricks. When attempting to access the forum the browser would just get stuck loading for 5-10 minutes, and once it finished I would get nothing but a blank page (no 404 or IPS error messages). I don't know if this is just how Firefox chooses to render the page or what (I'll have to remember trying things in a couple of different browsers the next time this happens), but I haven't seen an error message besides "page not found."

"Now I just have 10 A380's that look like pregnant ducks waddling about the airport." Awesome.

If we're talking a block 60 F-16E vs a Block 5 F-15A yes. While the F-35 is a little inferior to the Raptor in terms of aerodynamics it's light-years ahead in terms of avionics.

Yeah we did. I tired to post something and had the boards get stuck loading for about 5 minutes. When it finally finished I got nothing but a blank page (no error messages text or anything). Got the same behavior the first couple of times I hit refresh until I got a "your connection was reset at the host" message from Firefox. A couple more times trying to refresh and things returned to normal, and surprisingly my post had posted (this one if it helps).

That's the plan. The ROF on the F-35's cannon is a lot lower than an M61 (it also fires a much larger slug). For comparison's sake the Typhoon's BK27 cannon (which the JSF was originally supposed to carry before Boeing killed the deal out of spite) carries 150 rounds, the same gun mounted in the Gripen carries 120, the Rafale's GIAT30 carries 125, and the Mig-29's GsH-30 carries 100. I have a hard time believing the F-35 is going to have trouble as an air superiority platform, it takes the warload and performance of an F-16 wraps a stealthy airframe around it and adds a quantum leap of avionics on top of everything else (my understanding is that it's practically a piloted UCAV).

It would be possible to do though there's no current program for it. The AMRAAM's follow on the JDRADM will in fact replace both it and the HARM though, but that wont be for a while (IIRC 2020 is the year for IOC). Also Raytheon is the manufacturer of the AMRAAM not Lockheed.

You know I've seen this kind of behavior before on Sharepoint sites running on MSSQL (mainly Dynamics), and every time it wasn't a matter of individual tables getting too big but the hard drive filling up to capacity. Most of the servers I worked with were single HD affairs and as the hard drive filled up (either because the DB or the swap file expanded to fill the drive or both) performance would become slower and slower until the entire site would timeout. Eventually an automated DB shrink routine would run or the swap file would shrink down from inactivity and things would begin working again, but eventually things would build back up again and stop the site. Now I'm not familiar with MySQL or PHP and IIRC the MW server is running on Linux (all my training is in MS based stuff) but it certainly feels like something similar is happening here.

F-35C rollout on Lockheed's Flickr page. I hate the way Lockheed can't be bothered to paint their F-35s before they roll them out. Also WTF happened to AF-1 (the first production standard F-35A)? They rolled it out all the way back in December, and it's disappeared since, where's it been for the past 8 months?

anime52k8 beat me to half of it by about 15 minutes, but as a big Kubrick fan I have to say 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Dr. Strangelove are easily better than the books they were based on.

The official answer is the 10 years of development time between the two aircraft. But really we don't know that isn't going to happen.

That and manned systems (and unmanned ones for that matter) are going to move to attacking SAMs with the same weapons they use to attack any other target. So an F-35 on a DEAD mission will just drop a JSOW on a radar site it pinpointed using it's extensive ESM suite and be done with it, or one of the handful of Raptors that will be capable of self designating ground targets (more on that in a sec) will do the same and lob a JDAM supersonically. I've been a big supporter of the Raptor for a long time but I'm finding myself unable to get worked up over this. The big thing that's changed my mind wasn't the Wapo story, it was this story on the planned upgrades for the Raptor, and the recent estimates on how much an export Raptor for Japan would cost. The examiner goes over a lot of the Raptors neato future capabilities , like electronic attack capabilities AIM-9X and AIM-120D integration, but it also makes clear that a lot of them aren't going to be installed on anything but the last 87 planes because the first 100 just don't have that computers to accept them. The closed architecture of it's computer systems means it's difficult (and expensive) to add systems that weren't planned for when the plane was originally designed, especially compared to the F-35's open architecture. Even if you MLUed the early planes they still would end up having integration issues somewhere down the line with a future system. "Fine" some have said "just install the F-35's computers in it," that's where the price of Japanese Raptors comes into play. The price for an export Raptor is going to be somewhere in the range of $290 million dollars per plane, and most of that money is going to re-develop the avionics architecture, and there's the rub. Since Lockheed would almost assuredly have to start from the F-35's export friendly systems, in building an export Raptor, the extra $170 million above the normal fly away cost of the Raptor is a good baseline for what it would cost per-plane to upgrade the F-22 with some F-35 based computer system. That basically eats the price the other 194 planes the Air force wants, and upgrading the full 381 planes the Air force wanted would cost the same as a third of the planned F-35 buy. On top of that the higher life cycle costs of the Raptor would swallow up the money to buy legacy platforms to cover the missing F-35s. In the end it looks like Gates made the decision to sacrifice the Raptor so that we could replace (and upgrade) the rest of the Air Force.

Put me down as having problems now too, maybe half an hour ago. Same behavior as Hurin mentioned.

Or the converse is true and we're seeing multiple canopies being tested to make sure they'll fit on an aircraft even if they aren't destined for that particular one.

IIRC part of the RAAF's lease deal is the option to give the planes to the US Navy once the lease is up. I don't know what kind of modifications would be involved though. Also I thought the non-existent option was eliminated after it was found to cause all sorts of unexpected vibrations while taxiing.

Durn gubmint servers not allowing you to see outside linked images! I don't believe I've seen the picture of the PAK-FA under a camo net, I'd love to see it if you could post it.

As the link itself says those are conjectural designs from some Russian industrial designer. As far as I know this is the only known official design taken from an NPO-Saturn (maker of the PAK-FA's engines) press release.

Another round of pictures from Andrews: This last one is Dale Snodgrass, he put on a great show as always and I got a lot of great pictures of him in part because he flew so close to the crowd. I thought this one was sort of indicative of his whole display, shades of that famous shot of him in the F-14 doing a knife edge pass in front of the carrier deck crew.

So as I mentioned I went to the Andrews Air Force Base Open house last month with my brand new Camera and telephoto lens. Most of my shots ended up being of the aerial performers as there were both slim pickens in the static display area and it was overcast during the first half of the day when I normally walk about the tarmac looking at planes. Here's what I've cropped and edited so far: (click to enlarge) This one's my new desktop background:

This is just downright shocking! Note too that that headline is inaccurate, Boeing will announce the new flight schedule in a few weeks, from the sound of the modifications they need to do the first flight itself will likely be quite a few months from now. Also David you're really showing me up here. I went to the Andrews Air Force Base open house last month, and I'm still sorting and cropping the pictures.

Not so fast. It's also looking like congress might keep the VH-71A while scrapping the hyper costly mini-Air-Force-One VH-71B. If the A400 is in as deep trouble as it looks that might keep the C-17 line open as A400 customers would likely buy it instead.

More for performance reasons. The bigger the cockpit the bigger you need to make the nose which means more drag and weight, and a less effective fighter. The cockpits on nearly all fighters are about as big as they can be made.

WANT! Although I'm not sure those virtual prayer mats are strictly Halal.