October 09, 2013 Military Aviation News
10/09/2013
September was not a good month for The Boeing Company’s defense operations. On September 15, Defense News reported that Air Force planners were considering retirement of all 59 Boeing KC-10 tankers, even though they are the newest aerial refuelers in the fleet. On September 18, the company announced it would close the California plant assembling its highly-regarded C-17 airlifter in 2015 due to low overseas demand.
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10/09/2013
Syrian government warplanes bombed rebel positions near a strategic northern city on Tuesday, activists said, as international inspectors toured production and storage sites of the country's chemical weapons arsenal. The rebels captured Maaret al-Numan a year ago, after systematically seizing the army's outposts in the city, along astride a major supply route linking the capital, Damascus with the contested Idlib region and Syria's largest city, Aleppo.
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10/09/2013
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors called on the U.S. Department of Defense Tuesday to transfer as many as seven excess aircraft to the U.S. Forest Service for aerial firefighting in the region. Air Force officials plan to retire some C27 aircraft this fall and make the twin-engine, turboprop-driven cargo planes available to the Forest Service, which, according to Supervisors Greg Cox and Dianne Jacob, has a shortage of firefighting planes.
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10/09/2013
Five brand new military cargo airplanes slated for delivery to the U.S. armed services early next year will go directly to an Arizona “boneyard” set aside for equipment no longer in use, according to Military.com. The report, citing the Dayton Daily News, said about a dozen of the new C-27J Spartan equipment haulers already have been taken out of service and sent to Tucson, where the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base stores unused equipment and airplanes.
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10/09/2013
In the not-so-distant future, U.S. special operators, like those who used scuba gear boats and SUVs to go after terrorists this weekend, may be carried into combat by quiet, ultra-fast helicopters that bear only a passing resemblance to today's models.
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10/09/2013
By stockpiling weapons, China will be able to take Taiwan by force by the end of the year 2020, even if Taiwan gets help “from outside”, says Taiwan’s military report. Western military analysts say that China targeted the island with at least 1,600 ballistic missiles.
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10/09/2013
Circling around this air force base in southern France, an orange helicopter earlier this year completed a test flight—without a pilot. Made by Eurocopter, a unit of Franco-German aerospace giant European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co., the military chopper was controlled by technicians in a distant control room.
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10/09/2013
Boeing has delivered the Royal Canadian Air Force's (RCAF) fifth CH-147F Chinook helicopter one month ahead of schedule and only three months after the arrival of the first in June, expanding Canada’s military cargo capability while continuing the Chinook program’s history of excellence.
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