XBradTC

In the years immediately after World War II, the advent of the jet engine meant vastly improved performance was a real possibility. You’ve certainly heard of Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the first of the X-Planes, the X-1. That plane spawned a whole series of ever faster rocket powered test planes, up to the X-1E, and then onto the X-2 and eventually the X-15. Along the way, NACA, and its later iteration, NASA, would take over from the Air Force for much of the pure research role. But in the early years, the Air Force had the obvious need to understand the aerodynamics of high speed flight, and so they ran the show.

Mostly.

Because the Air Force wasn’t the only service deeply interested in the possibility of supersonic flight. The Navy was ready to jump on the jet powered bandwagon as well. And it has to be remembered, in 1947, with World War II over, and the Iron Curtain not quite descended on Europe, as far as the Navy was concerned, the Air Force was the only enemy worth fighting. And to some extent, the Air Force regarded the Navy the same way. So the Navy set up its own high speed flight research program, contracting with Douglas to build the D588 Skyrocket. The first D588 was a rather uninspired jet with a straight wing. Something more was needed. And so the contract was “modified” and the next iteration, the D-588-II Skyrocket, was born.

The very sleek D-588-II had an interesting propulsion system. It was originally intended to take off under its own power for most tests. The early rocket motors of the day simply didn’t have enough firing time to make that practical. And the early jets of the day didn’t have nearly the thrust to meet the performance potential of the airframe. So the Skyrocket had both.

In the end, most tests were air drops from a modified Boeing B-29, where, after the drop, the jet would take it up as fast or high as it could, and then the rocket would lit off to increase the performance.

NACA and the Navy decided that, of the three aircraft built, one would have its turbojet removed, and operate solely on rocket power. On November 20th, 1953, NACA pilot Scott Crossfield took off with the objective of reaching Mach 2. Mind you, no one had ever done that before, in any plane at all. Furthermore, the Skyrocket wasn’t really designed to reach that speed, being intended more for a top speed of about Mach 1.8. But some very creative, but simple tricks, like simply giving her a good wax job, and chilling the rocket fuel (alcohol) to allow more to be onloaded, allowed Crossfield to juuuuuuuust barely eek out 1291 miles per hour, or Mach 2.005.

After being in ordinary for a few years after the DADT wars, the Executive Steering Committee of the Don’t Care Caucus would like to issue a statement via it Spokesman Plenipotentiary, Scott Faith;

Source: CDR Salamander: The “Don’t Care” Caucus Would Like to Make a Statement

We would like to not care that Erik Fanning is gay. Being gay is not an automatic red line that should preclude one from serving as Secretary of the Army. Nor is the fact that he’s never served in uniform. That’s not terribly unusual for a service secretary.

Here’s the problem. The administration likes to point out how historic appointing an openly gay man to SecArmy is. When you point out that they’re milking it for PR purposes, they throw his resume in your face. And it’s a pretty impressive resume. Various jobs in the civilian defense establishment, including undersecretary jobs, and acting Secretary of the Air Force.

But we have a sneaking suspicion that *those* job appointments were also of the “wow, history making first openly gay man appointed* variety, rather than based solely on his competency.

Further, and far, far more worrying, is that it appears Mr. Fanning’s approach to the services is a pursuit of personnel policies that further the liberal agenda, rather than a focus on building readiness and combat capabilities in the service.

An Army effort to equip infantry troops with a light combat vehicle is now underway, and officials are aiming to issue a request for proposals in fiscal year 2017. “We have what we call a capability production document that is currently still in draft and it’s being socialized throughout the Army,” said Tom Stafford, chief of the support systems branch at the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence’s capabilities directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia.Lt. Col. Garth Winterle, the provisional project manager for the “ground mobility vehicle” or GMV, said the document is already in general officer-level staffing at the Pentagon.The focus in fiscal year 2016 will be on conducting an analysis of alternatives and an effort to “fine tune” the requirements, he said in an interview. From there, he expects the Army to issue a request for proposals from industry.

Source: Army’s Light Combat Vehicle Gaining Traction

Here’s more on LTG McMaster’s proposed Ground Mobility Vehicle.

Mind you, the replacement for the HUMVEE across the force (including light and heavy brigade combat teams) will be the JLTV. This GMV is a niche vehicle, tailored to the needs of light infantry.

There’s a dispute whether it is only needed for the Airborne Infantry of the 82nd Airborne Division, or across all the light Infantry BCTs.

This is something of a politically charged issue, as leaving the troops dismounted means they simply cannot maneuver against an enemy. But the first time a troop dies from an IED in an unarmored vehicle, there will be hell to pay.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) is calling on the Defense Department to release the full study by the Marine Corps that found women performed worse than men in combat training. A summary of the study was released earlier this month, and has become the subject of heated debate between the Marine Corps and its service secretary, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.The summary said women performed less well than men with combat tasks and that mixed-gender units did not perform as well all-male units. Mabus has called the study biased and said he will recommend opening all combat positions anyway.

Source: Republican to Pentagon: Release disputed study on women in combat | TheHill

Most. Transparent. Administration, Ever.

While the US continues its supposed aerial campaign against ISIS, the Russians have upped the ante, stationing combat aircraft in Syria, in support of the Assad regime. Basically, Iran and Russia have agreed to support Assad for access to the region. Part of Russia’s support is sending fighter bombers (Su-30s) and attack aircraft (Su-25s).

Russia is also reported to have deployed some of its Su-24 attack aircraft. Less than two dozen attack aircraft is a fairly modest deployment, but if they’re willing to aggressively use the sorties they can generate, they can have a significant influence on the fight.

//sendvid.com/embed/ll596gb4

I suspect the embedding won’t work on the video.

One aspect of the US deployment of troops to Iraq over the last year or so to support the fight against ISIS has been that the US troops have mostly been confined to the Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport as their hub of operations. And for the most part, those locations have been secure. It seems the administration’s goal is to be seen as doing something, rather than actually doing something. Of prime importance is to not incur casualties.

BIAP has been a relatively secure location. But the other day, a significant rocket attack took place at BIAP.  Apparently, there were no casualties, but a full salvo of Katushya rockets isn’t a minor thing.

https://twitter.com/RamiAlLolah/status/646043270750072833

It’s big, and it’s gorgeous.

So, we’ve been a flight simmer for years, since back in the Win95 days. We’ve owned various combat flight sims dating back to Falcon 3 and whatnot.  We even had Flight of the Intruder on floppy disks.

Microsoft released a series of the flagship civil flight simulator, named, aptly enough, Flight Simulator. The last version released was Flight Simulator X (it was the 10th version) known almost universally in the industry as FSX. That version was released clear back in 2006, virtually an eternity in gaming culture. Microsoft did supply some support and expansion for a couple years, but eventually abandoned the flight simulator business as a distraction from its core business, and a poor return on investment. 

Still, one of the great strengths of FSX was its open architecture, meaning that third party developers could easily produce add on features, such as new planes, new liveries for existing planes, and even completely new scenery. Many fans of the community produces extremely high quality planes and scenery as freeware.  And of course, you could purchase payware airplanes that had an astonishingly high level of fidelity to the real thing.

FSX had some issues, however. First, it was (and is) a 32 bit program, which limits its ability in some areas to faithfully reproduce scenery. Crank the graphics up, and your frame rate will crater. Even fairly modest graphics on a mid grade computer would bog down into 10-12 frames per second. That makes the game visually “stutter” and add on scenery and planes could slow it down even more. Also, if you did get into using add ons, particularly freeware, you would very quickly become an expert navigator… of your computer’s file systems. Unlike most software that self installs, a lot of add ons had to be manually placed into the file system, and often multiple files in multiple folders. And woe betide you if you screwed up your .cfg file!

Still, it was a very flexible system, and you could make it do just about whatever you wanted. Want to fly a Cessna 172 around Puget Sound on a sunny day? No problem! Want to land an Airbus A380 on a stormy night in Berlin? Have at it!

In fact, the basic source code is so good that Microsoft licensed it to Lockheed Martin to use in professional simulations. LMT also has an agreement to release their own version, marketed as Prepar3D (P3D) to industry, individuals, and students.  Understand, this is used not just to simulate flight, but for generating an entire virtual world. Want to build a convoy simulator for training soldiers headed for Afghanistan? P3D can help you do that. In addition, there are other commercially available flight simulators, and even a free open source simulator.

Still, flight simming is a niche market. It has a very devoted (nay, fanatical!) fan base, but in terms of software sales units, it’s a small slice of the gaming pie. But gaming is extraordinarily popular, and big business. Games profits put movie profits to shame.  There’s a reason you’ll find game voice over work in a lot of actors IMDB profiles. That’s because it pays well. Flight simming, unlike most games, requires unique peripherals. That is, while a game controller is pretty much universal, for a flight sim, you pretty much need a joystick. You can get by with a cheap $20 one, or you can literally spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a yoke, rudder pedals, a throttle quadrant, communications panel, you name it.

So Microsoft decided to milk another tranche of money out of the program by licensing it once more. This time, they licensed it to Dovetail Games (DTG) makers of a popular railroad simulator. And to give DTG a chance to make money, it would be released over the wildly popular Steam gaming platform.

The game is still the basic FSX with all updates included, but DTG recompiles the program using VS2013, resulting in much better performance. Now even my relatively low powered laptop runs the basic sim with frame rates of about 60 or 70.

One of the nice things about the Steam edition is that you download it, rather than installing from a DVD. It takes forever for my slow internet to download, but if you have reasonably fast internet, it’s pretty quick and easy. And once you’ve bought it, it’s easy to always reinstall it. Which, if you start adding add ons, you’ll eventually have to do sometime.

If you’re new to flight simming, I’d recommend staying away from add on products until you get a basic grasp of flying. The program has an excellent series of tutorials that will teach you the basics of airmanship (in the simming world, at least) and navigation. Once you’ve mastered that, and the built in Air Traffic Control, you can start expanding your installation.

FSX:SE is available here.

The very first mod I’d recommend to simmers is to improve the scenery. Rather than going to the trouble of learning the ins and outs of freeware add on scenery that can be very hit or miss (and hey, look, time to do a full reinstall!) I’d recommend using the ORBX Global set. Simply adding that vastly improves the overall look of the sim for a very minor impact of performance. The much better scenery provides better ambiance even with a slightly slower frame rate.

Once you get hooked on simming, and want to try a more realistic aircraft, flying real airliner routes, I’d recommend the PMDG 737NGX. It features an extraordinary level of complication sophistication and features a functional Flight Management Computer to plan and navigate flights just like a real airliner does.

PMDG 737-800 on final to KSAN.

SWA 737-800 departing Denver for LAX.

Alaska Airlines arrives at the gate at Palm Springs International.

Finally, my other favorite add on doesn’t even operate within the sim, but parallel to it. Aivlasoft’s Electronic Flight Bag provides sophisticated flight planning support along with in flight moving map information. You can run it on your computer, or network it to another and run it side by side.