May 11, 2014 Military Aviation News
05/11/2014
According to a Sveriges Television report on Thursday, the incident occurred on March 3rd just 50 kilometres south of the Swedish city of Malmö - home to over 300,000 people. The plane was reportedly a Russian Ilyushin 20m military aircraft used for signals surveillance. The two aircraft are reported to have passed by each other a mere 90 metres apart.
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05/11/2014
Despite problems with recently refurbished MiG-31 fighters Russia is moving forward with yet another round of fixes and improvements. In particular the D30F6 engines will be tweaked and upgraded to make them more powerful, efficient and reliable. This comes in the aftermath of two crashes (in early and late 2013) that involved these engines. In December 2013 Russia grounded all 122 of its MiG-31 fighters after one of them crashed because both of its engines failed.
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05/11/2014
SOUTHEAST Asian foreign ministers on the eve of a regional summit viewed with “serious concern” the rising tensions in the South China Sea as the United States Seventh Fleet reported sighting two Chinese frigates at the Panatag Shoal where Beijing fired water cannons at Filipino fishermen last January.
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05/11/2014
The Air Force’s plan to retire the A-10 and U-2 fleets has hit major congressional opposition that could ripple across the service and put other aircraft fleets at risk of being eliminated or downsized. The House Armed Services Committe on May 7 passed amendments to the fiscal 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, which, if approved by the full Congress, would leave the service scrambling for other ways to save money, both in fiscal 2015 and in 2016 when sequestration returns.
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05/11/2014
The Kingdom of Jordan will become the first international customer of BAE Systems’ Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) laser-guided rockets. Jordan signed a Letter of Offer and Acceptance for the system here at the Special Operations Forces Exhibition and Conference (SOFEX). In its third year of full-rate production, the APKWS rocket is the only guided 2.75-inch rocket fully qualified by the US Department of Defense that uses semi-active laser guidance technology.
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05/11/2014
The discovery of major deepwater oil finds off of Brazil’s coast changed its military priorities. The military’s mission has always been influenced by the land’s vastness, but until recently, that meant keeping a careful watch over the Amazon basin. The Marinha do Brazil had its own role policing the wide swathes of ocean around its long coast, but the air force’s construction was oriented toward supporting the army.
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05/11/2014
Russell Carpenter owes his life to the ugliest warplane in the Pentagon fleet. When about 3,000 U.S. soldiers traveling on a dirt road in Iraq came under fire from behind a ridge in the opening weeks of the 2003 American invasion, the retired Air Force chief master sergeant says he called for air support from the only plane that could fly low and slow enough to tell friend from foe: the A-10.
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