August 17, 2013 Military Aviation News
08/17/2013
Canada’s air force has determined that unlike its counterparts in the U.S. and Europe, it does not need approval from civilian aviation agencies to fly drones in domestic airspace and it will operate those unmanned planes as it sees fit, according to newly released Department of National Defence documents.
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08/17/2013
Recent photos from a Chinese shipyard appear to show a section of a new Chinese aircraft carrier under construction. This appears to be a carrier similar to the American Nimitz class ships (100,000 ton vessels using a catapult rather than a ski jump flight deck for launching aircraft). Large ships, including warships, are often built in sections, then the sections are welded and bolted together.
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08/17/2013
Citizen airmen, they’re called. Members of the Air National Guard. Some have day jobs as airline pilots, police officers or construction workers. Those with the 131st Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base made history this month. They’re the first citizen airmen certified to drop nuclear bombs. Don’t panic: Nothing’s been ordered, and the U.S. Air Force is still around to do the heavy lifting in a doomsday scenario.
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08/17/2013
The United States, which has refused to cut off its hefty 1.3 billion dollars in annual military aid to Egypt, continues to argue that depriving arms to the 438,500-strong security forces will only "destabilise" the crisis-ridden country.There is perhaps a more significant - but undisclosed - reason for sustaining military aid flows to Egypt: protecting U.S. defence contractors.
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08/17/2013
One of the most distinctive features of U.S. military power is the Air Force’s fleet of heavy bombers. These long-range aircraft can visit tailored effects on targets anywhere in the world within a few hours, a capability no other nation has. The need to sustain such a fleet is dictated not only by the role America has assumed as guarantor of global security, but also by the geographical reality that vast oceans separate the U.S. from the rest of the world.
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08/17/2013
Most nations, including many close allies of the United States, require up to a week’s notice before American warplanes are allowed to cross their territory. Not Egypt, which offers near-automatic approval for military overflights, to resupply the war effort in Afghanistan or to carry out counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, Southwest Asia or the Horn of Africa.
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08/17/2013
Few military projects are more notorious than the V-22 Osprey. The name has become synonymous with flawed government contracting and planning. Originally conceived in 1980 in the wake of the botched Iranian Hostage Crisis rescue mission, the Osprey was supposed to represent a new type of aircraft that could land and takeoff vertically but also carry plane sized equipment and personnel. So ends the theory.
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08/17/2013
South Korea said at least one firm vying for a $7.4 billion fighter jet contract qualified for the next round of negotiations, concluding the price bidding stage for one of the largest contracts currently on offer for the global defense industry.
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08/17/2013
The second Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] HC-130J Combat King II to be assigned to Air Combat Command’s (ACC) 347th Rescue Group at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., was ferried by a Moody AFB crew from the company’s Aeronautics facility here on Aug. 14, 2013.
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08/17/2013
For decades the mysterious Area 51 site in the Nevada desert has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories, including the existence of extraterrestrials, alien autopsies and whether the site even existed at all. But newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents finally acknowledge that Area 51 did indeed exist and reveal that it was used as a base to test U-2 and other spy planes.
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