David Axe has a good piece on how vulnerable drones are to any kind of organised air defence. “The predominant use of RPAs [Remotely Piloted Aircraft] over the past decade has been passive [intelligence] collection coupled with air-to-ground strikes in permissive airspace,” Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis tells Danger Room. “There’s very little…
Read More The drone that didn’t crashInspired by this weekend’s story that you now pay a transaction fee to fly Ryanair even if you use a Ryanair credit card, which is apparently a thing that exists even if it sounds like it shouldn’t, I have been thinking about their business model. It is not what you may think it is. This…
Read More A brief inquiry into the nature and consequences of think-of-a-number pricingInteresting PPRuNe thread on airports. Unsurprisingly for an aviation forum, if there is anything like consensus, it’s for Heathrow. Unsurprisingly, there’s one single, hyper-boosterish Borisland proponent, possibly even a sockpuppet. Surprisingly, the experts have some really wonderfully crazy ideas. Why not build two more runways at LHR, not just one – putting the fourth between…
Read More ask the expertsSo, the Southern Investigations wing of the Murdoch scandal just woke up again. It seems that Jonathan Rees, the guy whose business partner in the dodgy detective agency run by moonlighting cops got axed to death and the cop investigating the case took his place before he went to jail as a kiddy fiddler –…
Read More the intersection of Leveson and political plane-spottingThe key point in the airports row is, I think, that the technocrats can rule options out but only the politicians can rule them in. For example, the industry, the air traffic controllers, and the transport planners are keen on Heathrow, but it’s politically difficult. On the other hand, the planners, the controllers, and the…
Read More so where will that airport end up?OK, so the Syrian air force drops these things – large, light alloy containers stuffed with shrapnel and low explosive, with a canister of much higher explosive in the middle, probably delivered from a helicopter or a tactical airlifter. Here’s an odd historical point. a two gallon drum with a cylinder containing about two pounds…
Read More Hello to all that – Syria, Sudan, and his LordshipPaul Klee’s students apparently celebrated his 50th birthday by dropping presents through his (flat) roof at the Bauhaus from a Junkers aircraft. An interesting story, although Mark Brown doesn’t pick up on it (Rowan Moore does here but only superficially). Junkers was the home-town industry of Dessau by then, which is probably why the students…
Read More Birthday present bomberDavid Cameron goes trying to sell Airbus A330s. In his chartered Boeing. Chartered, eventually, from an Angolan company on the EU air safety blacklist.
Read More why yes, they could fuck it upLook what he’s up to now. It’s amazing how common the “that hillside is full of warbirds/jeeps/whatever” story is, and how geographically widespread. I worked on a north-west Australian cattle station that included an abandoned WW2 airfield, and more than a couple of people had wasted time and money digging into bits of it looking…
Read More magic beans, Spitfires, etcIs there a drone bubble? It’s not clear whether this is more like the .com bubble, when a lot of useful stuff was built but a couple of years too early, or more like the housing bubble, when a lot of stuff was built in the wrong places to the wrong standards at the wrong…
Read More RQ-170 upshot, part 2: the bubble