October 11, 2014 Military Aviation News
10/11/2014
An outer suburb of Baghdad located only eight miles from the city's airport has now been breached by Islamic State (ISIS) forces as the jihadist group inches ominously close to Iraq's capital. The suburb of Abu Ghraib has been infiltrated by ISIS militants who are currently engaging in hit-and-run style attacks on local Iraqi security forces.
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10/11/2014
Obama’s no-boots-on-the-ground pledge is keeping America from fighting an effective air campaign in Iraq and Syria. Within the U.S. Air Force, there’s mounting frustration that the air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is moving far more slowly than expected. Instead of a fast-moving operation with hundreds of sorties flown in a single day—the kind favored by many in the air service—American warplanes are hitting small numbers of targets after a painstaking and cumbersome process.
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10/11/2014
The Air Force could not determine if it paid jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney “fair and reasonable” prices for spare parts for engines that power the stealthy F-22 Raptor, a Department of Defense Inspector General’s report has concluded. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, based at Wright-Patterson, also could not determine how much it paid for individual spare parts under a $1.6 billion sustainment contract on the F119 engine on the fifth-generation, supersonic fighter jet.
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10/11/2014
Boeing said Wednesday that the first test plane for its KC-46 Air Force aerial-refueling tanker program is expected to fly in late November or early December. That's a delay of two months or more beyond the projection Boeing's leadership gave in July, when Chief Financial Officer Greg Smith predicted on an earnings call with analysts that first flight would be late in the third quarter.
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10/11/2014
From high in the sky, the most notable feature of this bit of northern Iraq is Mount Sinjar, a weather-eroded ridgeline no one had heard of until Iraq's Yazidi Christian minority sought refuge from Islamic State (IS) forces. Australia has been here before, air-dropping emergency food aid in a pair of mercy flights conducted by C-130 transport aircraft in August.
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10/11/2014
Two Canadian CF-18 fighter jets based out of Lithuania intercepted a Russian military aircraft as it flew over the Baltic Sea on Tuesday morning. Officials say the Canadian fighters identified the aircraft as a Russian AN-26 transport plane, then shadowed it for about 10 minutes as it travelled through international airspace from one Russian port to another.
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