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Post Crash Fire
Surviving an airplane crash is actually more common than you’d think. The problem is, there’s often a post crash fire, which is often quite a bit harder to survive. A major portion of aviation safety engineering is geared toward providing survivors just a bit more time to exit the aircraft before it is consumed by flames.
Indeed, this has been a long standing goal of NASA and its predecessor NACA.
The C-82 Packet was not a terribly successful aircraft, and only about 223 were built. Redesigned and with the R-2800 swapped out for the more powerful R-4360, it would emerge as the C-119 Flying Boxcar, a far more successful design that would soldier on from the 1950s into the 1970s, with over 1100 built. According to NASA around 50 airframes, mostly C-82 but also a couple of C-46 Commandoes, were expended in the testing.
Poor Roamy doesn’t get to blow up airplanes.
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Biggest thing afloat.
We like to think of the US Navy’s aircraft carriers as the biggest, baddest warships around. And they are. But at 1092’ and about 95,000 tons, they’re not even close to being the biggest vessels around. And right now, in South Korea, the biggest vessel in the world is under construction.
Off the northwestern shores of Australia lies a field of natural gas deposits that are huge. But natural gas is difficult to transport from the fields to the end users. The only way to move it by sea is to liquefy it by chilling it to extremely low temperatures. And so Shell is building a plant to do so, while moored in the heart of the gas fields offshore.
At 488 meters (that’s 1601 feet in real measurements) and 600,000 tons, it dwarfs an aircraft carrier. It’s expected to serve on station for a quarter century.
Gas will be pumped aboard, liquefied, stored, and then transferred to LNG tankers for transport to buyers.
And here’s an earlier look at the construction of Prelude, including some of the living quarters, which, let’s just say they’re a little nicer than aboard a carrier.
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The T-231- an odd approach to Air Defense
The other day, friend o’ the blog Craig steered me to this post on Facebook by the Manassas National Battlefield Park:
On Saturday, May 23, a visiting family made a most unusual discovery at Manassas Battlefield. They found what appeared to be an unexploded 20th century shell while out hiking and brought it to the Visitor Center. Park law enforcement staff called in the state police bomb squad and subsequently evacuated the Visitor Center and Henry Hill. The bomb squad later confirmed the shell was inert and harmless.
First and foremost, if you find anything that even remotely resembles unexploded ordnance, do not touch it. Note the location and inform the authorities.
As it turns out, the EOD detachment was able to discern the projectile was a T-231 rocket. Which got me digging, what the heck is a T-231? Well, it was a 2.75 inch diameter (70mm) rocket projectile, sometimes referred to as HEAA.
Forgive us for not having a lot of concrete information on this, but it appears that not more than a relative handful were constructed. We infer that HEAA stands for High Explosive Anti-Aircraft. That is, in spite of the notation in the Facebook post that it was an air to air weapon, it was in fact intended as the ammunition for a ground based anti-aircraft gun system. What’s that, you say? How does a rocket work in an anti-aircraft gun? Well…
You may recall we’ve occasionally addressed anti-aircraft artillery and fire control here.
One of the challenges in anti-aircraft gun fire control is the lengthy time of flight for the shells to reach the target area. The longer the time of flight, the greater the chance the target will maneuver away from the aimpoint selected as much as an entire minute before. Remember, while a projectile fired from a cannon might have great velocity as it leaves the muzzle, it immediately begins to decelerate due to both gravity and air resistance. Thus, the closer to maximum effective range, the slower and slower the shell is moving.
If there were a way to have the velocity of the projectile remain constant over the course of its time of flight, or even just significant portion, that would simplify the fire control problem. A rocket, of course, accelerates as long as its motor continues to burn, until it reaches its maximum possible aerodynamic speed. Rockets of those days were, however, somewhat inaccurate weapons.
And so it appears the Army tried an intriguing approach to combining both a gun and a rocket into one weapon. The T-231 was packed inside a recoilless rifle shell casing. That is, it had an open end and was fired from a recoilless rifle. The firing charge imparted a relatively modest muzzle velocity of about 1000 feet per second to the round. The initial charge also served to ignite the round’s rocket motor, which then boosted it to a velocity of about 3000 feet per second, roughly on par with the muzzle velocity of existing anti-aircraft guns. But the small size of the projectile meant there was a correspondingly small rocket motor (and less size for a warhead as well) and that limited the burn time for the motor.
The program never really went beyond a handful of test firings, mostly to gather data. The performance wasn’t significantly better than existing anti-aircraft artillery, and the first generation of guided missiles was just reaching operational status at the time, rendering the project obsolete.
Craig did point out one mystery yet to be solved. The test firings apparently took place at Wallops Island. So how did the projectile find its way to Manassas? We may never know.
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Air Attack! Western Wildfire Edition
Shu reached out yesterday to share with us. Turns out, there was a small fire near his home, and the air attack tanker assets were out. And apparently, chasing him.
That’s an AT-802F, a floatplane tanker variant of a plane that was first designed as a cropduster.
That’s just about the smallest fixed wing tanker for firefighting I’m familiar with.
Down here in SoCal, when we have a fire, we tend to contract for the big boy, the Tanker 10 modified DC-10.
In recent years, the use of converted surplus military aircraft has fallen largely due to maintenance and fatigue issues. So a new market has opened for large air tankers for firefighting. And the availability of airframes on the surplus market has led to retired regional airliners being a popular option. For instance, the BAe 146 was a very quiet regional airliner designed to serve airports like London City, and Midway, and other airports with noise restrictions. Moderately successful as an airliner, it has recently been a popular choice for tanker conversion.
Here’s a picture of a dry test taken about 10 years ago.
The fires in western Canada are bad enough right now that Coulson’s JRM Mars might be getting a contract to do some dropping later this week.
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Air Force Fighter Jet Collided With Private Plane: FAA – NBC News
An Air Force F-16 fighter jet and a small private plane collided in midair over Charleston, South Carolina, on Tuesday according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the fighter jet collided with a Cessna C150 around 11 a.m. ET. The collision occurred roughly 11 miles north of Charleston.
A Coast Guard MH-65 helicopter lowered an EMT to the crash scene to assist with one injured person. The chopper was already airborne in the area on a training mission when the crash happened and diverted to the scene.
Defense officials told NBC News that reports indicate the military pilot safely ejected from the F-16 before it crashed.
via Air Force Fighter Jet Collided With Private Plane: FAA – NBC News.
It’s not looking good for the pilot of the Cessna.
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New, cutting edge drone technology, from 1961
In the late 1950s, various pieces of rocketry and missiles began to enter the Army’s inventory. One of the challenges the Army suddenly faced was pinpointing targets for these deep strike weapons. And so the call went out for an unmanned high performance drone that could use radar, infrared or photography to reconnoiter places of interest. Fairchild responded with the attractive SD-5 Osprey jet powered autonomous drone.
Some folks say the program was cancelled on budgetary grounds, and that likely is mostly true. But one must also suspect the Air Force was not at all thrilled with the prospect of the Army flying a high performance recon drone, and considered the reconnaissance mission its own turf and the rightful job of its RF-101s and RF-4Cs.
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Traders recall the ‘rush’ and ‘roar’ as famed pits close – Salon.com
NEW YORK (AP) — Pete Meegan had every intention of going back to college, but then he got a summer job in the Chicago trading pits and fell in love with the “roar” of the floor, the excitement of “4,000 people yelling, ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’” and decided no more classroom for him.
That roar will soon go silent. On Monday, most futures pits in Chicago and New York, where frenzied buying and selling once helped set prices on cattle and corn, palladium and gold, and dozens of other commodities, are expected to close for good. Traders yelled and shoved and flashed hand signals, just as they did in the movie “Trading Places.” But now the computer — faster, cheaper and not nearly as noisy — has taken over.
It will be a sad day for Meegan, still in the pits 34 years after dropping out of college, donning a trading jacket and mustering the courage to tell his dad.
“I thought he was gonna kill me, but he was like, ‘I don’t care if you pick up garbage or you’re a dog groomer. If you are happy doing what you are doing, you’re ahead of 99 percent of the people in the world,’” recalls Meegan, now 54.
via Traders recall the ‘rush’ and ‘roar’ as famed pits close – Salon.com.
Working on a trading floor is, in its own way, every bit as stressful as combat, though without the risk of death or significant injury. Indeed, death or injury is the worst that can happen to you in combat. In the pits, you face catastrophic financial disaster, which can be tougher to face than mere death.
The pits are at once competitive and cutthroat, and oddly collegial. After all, if you stand next to your competition every day for years on end, you’re bound to make enough small talk during slow periods to establish a bond of respect, if not admiration.
I was at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, rather than the Merc. Still the fundamentals of open outcry are the same.
Making Trading Places today with online trading would make for a much less interesting movie.
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The Greek “Haircut”; Watching How It’s Done
Pay attention to Greece. It seems that the EU countries that have loaned billions to Greece, which continues to hemorrhage cash because of its rejection of “austerity” (austerity: not frittering away a THIRD infusion of someone else’s money on an unsustainable socialist paradise), have the temerity to ask for decent terms for payback of loans. For the Greeks, that is absolutely unconscionable.
Faux outrage aside, what is of interest is that, in order to prevent a collapse of the banking system in Greece, a “bail-in” is being considered, similar to what happened in Cyprus a couple of years ago. Where is the money going to come from? Why, it will be confiscated from private citizens’ bank accounts. Whereas in Cyprus, the accounts which were pinched were those over €100,000 (at the time nearly $130,000), Greece seems to be shooting for a much lower number.
The plans, which call for a “haircut” of at least 30 per cent on deposits above €8,000, sketch out an increasingly likely scenario for at least one bank, the sources said.
Why accounts so small? Here’s why:
With few deposits over €100,000 left in the banks after six months of capital flight, “it makes sense for the banks to consider imposing a haircut on small depositors as part of a recapitalization. . . It could even be flagged as a one-off tax,” said one analyst.
Hmmm. A tax. That word should be worrisome to Americans. Seeing as not long ago we have had “taxes” foisted upon us that were not intended to be taxes at all. As if the Ninth Amendment simply doesn’t exist.
How Greece’s problems approximate ours is a bit easier to grasp if you think of Greece having one giant EBT card, instead of tens of millions of smaller ones. Greece wants nobody to tell them what they can spend the EBT cash on, despite the fact that the money on the card is someone else’s. Oh, and when the money on the EBT card runs out, Greece feels perfectly justified in asking for more. In fact, if the creditors want to have anything to say about how Greece spends their money, or the terms of the next installment on the EBT card, why, it is terrorism.
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister, on Saturday accused the country’s creditors of trying to “terrorise” Greeks into accepting austerity.
“What they’re doing with Greece has a name: terrorism,” he told Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “Why have they forced us to close the banks? To frighten people.”
That smug sense of entitlement should ring familiar in the ears of middle-class Americans, who hear constantly about paying their “fair share” from the socialist-communist far Left that includes such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the Occupy nincompoops, and various Hollywood half-wits. More troubling, though, is that you can bet the Obama Administration (and every leftist candidate for 2016) is watching how Greece plans and executes the out-and-out confiscation of private wealth for the purpose of continuing government largess, while keeping the socialist sheeple placated long enough to get away with it.
The United States is walking a parallel path to Greece, and eventually, the music will stop. Then, debt will have to be paid, or loans defaulted. (This, despite record tax revenues for the second year in a row, incidentally.) When the reckoning comes, we will be subject to the same unfettered, oppressive, and draconian actions that the Greek government will enact (or allow) against its citizens in the current crisis.
We might see sudden limitations or “taxes” or “fees” on large cash transfers or withdrawals, followed by restrictions on ATM or debit cards. Then, couched in the familiar language of class warfare, the seizure of private wealth from large accounts, the “haircut” we saw in Cyprus and will see in Greece. When it is clear that such action cannot be prevented by the anger and outrage of the demonized wealthy class, the threshold for expropriation to feed the Great Society Welfare Furnace will be lowered by increments until the redistribution of private wealth by government fiat is completed to the satisfaction of the ardent socialists who so despise capitalism, and insist that prosperity comes from robbing the selected Peter, to pay the collective Paul.
For those who would say that such actions to expropriate private wealth cannot happen here, because there are laws to prevent those actions, I would offer that much we once viewed as illegal activity by the government in this country is now quite permissible, provided it furthers the far-left agenda. With a Supreme Court that acts as if the Constitution is a mere list of suggestions, don’t expect such actions as described above to face serious challenge.
So watch Greece, just as we watched Cyprus. You can be sure this Administration and its potential successors are taking copious notes, for when it is our turn in the barber’s chair for our “haircut”.
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The Greek Debt Crisis Explained
For those of us not fluent in international finance, Bloomberg has a helpful 12 minute video.
As Ace quipped, if you want to spend like the Germans, turns out, you have to work like the Germans.
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Monday Morning Links
We’ve got the usual tasks and chores of daily life to address today, so for now, just some links.
Bell sees V-280 Valor as common attack-utility platform.
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Lockheed’s F-35 Live-Bomb Drops Hit Targets
Either this month or next, the Marines will declare Initial Operational Capability for the F-35B.
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Iran second Ghadir radar unveiled.
Large array long wavelength phased arrays are probably the best bet for detecting stealthy aircraft. Unfortunately for Iran, that’s not quite good enough for a fire control solution.
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Footage of French Navy’s F-8 Crusader initial carrier flights
Live Leak- Autoplay warning.
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Marines Testing Operating from Foreign Ships, Near-Forgotten Platforms to Bring Units Back to Sea
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