First: Who but a gullible person would trust any ‘study’ or ‘survey’ trying to correlate politics with paper credentials?
Second: One of the key ongoing political scandals is the fraud of pretending that paper credentials are necessarily education, adn that scholarly publications are necessarily science.
“Look Skippy, don’t tease the Dragon, just drop the coffee off and leave” Boss ordered. “Oh, c’mon boss why not?” Skippy dejectedly asked. “Because Dragons are grumpy without their coffee and you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup” the Boss warned… “You sure about that?” Skippy asked. “Just delivered a case of ketchup to the dragon’s cave last week” the Boss warned.
Every time I hear something about that show, I think, “Look, I’m all for mocking NuTrek, but isn’t that going a bit far, even for parody.” And then it turns out that no, that’s not mocking, it’s not parody, it’s just a literal description of the next episode.
Re: “worse than Hitler”
I might very well be worse than Hitler in this regard, but I feel like I can at least do consistent shadows. I keep looking at that thing and saying, “Where’s the light, and what the heck is casting that shadow across the building?”
All of A.H.’s paintings have flat lighting, aside from one landscape study of Neuschwanstein (go figure). I’m not certain if that was his personal artistic style, or because of doing them for postcards, or if he never quite mastered how to show lighting and light-source direction.
Every Starfleet Academy ep reviewer is astonished weekly that the latest ep is worse than the one before, and then the subsequent ep surpasses the last in worseness. It’s quite an accomplishment, but I don’t know if they can keep it up.
(Kurtzmantrek: “Hold My decaf vegan Romulan Ale.”)
It is the shadow of communism (Russophilic International Socialism) about to fall across Europe, which can only be stopped Germanphilic National Socialism.
Why are the Marines a department of the Navy? Because someone has to keep watch over what Sailors are doing and the Army didn’t want to do it and there was no Air Force at the time, so like everything else it got dumped on the Marines.
Besides you can’t let Sailors run amuck all over the world they just scare the hell out of people. You thought herding cats was hard, try controlling a couple hundred drunken sailors on liberty. There is a reason the ramps leading from a ship are called the Gangway. Trust me on this…
The reason they made Marines is to keep as many Sailors on the ship possible, for as long as possible. You’ll notice they train Marines in swamps with alligators to give them a rough idea of what they will be facing when dealing with Sailors…
I bet you a donut the guys who stole the tank to get beer were Sailors on Liberty. I knew a guy who left the ship wearing navy summer whites, and came back wearing a Japanese naval uniform, ( also summer whites) he had his ID and he was in uniform so…
He was drinking with a bunch of Japanese Sailors and one commented on how his crackerjacks were cool and how he wished he could show up at Colors dressed in them just to see what his Chief would say. I guess the Japanese Chief had a sense of humor, his division officer on the other hand…
The problem with that idea is that something happened a quarter-century ago that changed our views on airport security. In the year 2000, it was assumed that, if the airline screwed up security, their passengers and customers were pretty much the only ones to suffer if there was a hijacking; if you didn’t think United Airlines did a good job with their security, you could just not fly with them, and it wouldn’t affect you. By 2002, that was no longer the default assumption.
TSA is a joke that basically just took the existing airport security personnel and made them federal employees, assuming that a new job title would magically make them more competent (in fact the opposite seems to be the case, but that’s another subject). They had to keep outlawing more and more stupid stuff because they were always trying to keep the terrorists from repeating the last method of attack, rather than trying to keep the terrorists themselves off the plane. The agency, as it’s existed for the past 20 years, is something between a joke and a disaster.
But, in the modern world, airport security is a national problem, unfortunately. We can no more let British Air be in charge of its own security than we can allow Minnesota to become a haven for federal law breakers.
But, in the modern world, airport security is a national problem, unfortunately.
“The problem is Just Too Big, therefore we must put government in charge of it!!!”
How many times does that have to blow up in everybody’s faces before you learn that government is not the solution? You literally admit that government handling it is a joke and a disaster, even as you say that’s how it has to be.
The airlines, realizing they Could Get Sued! told the FedGov that unless FedGov took over security, they were done flying. FedGov didnt mind at all taking up that responsibility, because You Cant Sue The Govt.
And the TSA grope and wand-(bleep) is pure theater, versus putting a pair of armed Deputy Marshals on every flight.
Letting suitable trained passengers and flight crew go heeled would also have done rather nicely, at far lest cost. Hardest part would be training folks to use a shoulder holster, more suitable for flight defense than any belt rig.
I have actually done anti-hijack training, including live fire and “Simmunitions” force-on-force. Its a fairly simple thing. Mainly, you are there to prevent the goons from turning the plane into a cruise missile. Any survivors are a bonus. harsh, but that is the state of current threat.
The airlines, realizing they Could Get Sued! told the FedGov that unless FedGov took over security, they were done flying.
Letting suitable trained passengers and flight crew go heeled would also have done rather nicely, at far lest cost.
Your solution does nothing to solve the actual problem you yourself described. I don’t care if you and former Seal Team 6 are the carriers, someone WILL sue, and even if they lose, they will cost airlines more than they can afford to drag it through at least partially sympathetic courts.
From gun manufacturers (“deceptive marketing to kids”) to oil companies (“climate change liability”) to vaccine and drug makers, Leftists have learned that they can force companies to do things that they could never get voter approval for. SCOTUS is looking at a “climate change” lawsuit from Boulder CO and the lead plaintiff has admitted (outside of court) that “we’d like a carbon tax, but we can’t get one enacted directly. If we sue the oil companies, they can either go out of business or pass those costs on to all their customers worldwide. Voila, we have a carbon tax.”
Regulation of civil aviation safety in the US is FAA, with complaints by the NTSB.
(Call me naive, but I had not realized that the NTSB is salty at the FAA where the electronics situation is concerned.)
Anyway, the thing that became the FAA was started in 1926. In 1930, the /military/ aviation accident rate was around 144 per hundred thousand flight hours.
This is very much apples and oranges, of course.
There are about twenty frogs who would pause their baseball game to say ‘your terms are acceptable’ to just about any shut down.
I’m not /that/ sure that NOAA’s WSR-88Ds, and the FAA’s ASRs and ARSRs are necessary.
Anyway, we could have railroads provide private transportation security gendarmes for aviation. Like the French Foreign Legion, but they are mall cops with light tanks.
The NTSB and FAA have a very fraught relationship. The NTSB makes recommendations in their accident investigations but the FAA (and airlines) choose whether or not to implement them. Read the NTSB report about the Potomac mid-air between the military Blackhawk and the American Eagle flight last year to see the NTSB absolutely tear the FAA a new one about all the recommendations they’ve ignored.
The NTSB is unusual in the world. Elsewhere, the agency that investigates a transportation incident is almost always the regulatory agency.
The NTSB has the authority to be the federal lead investigator in almost all transportation incidents in the U.S. The major exception is when a construction worker is injured or killed, for which OSHA is lead. Even then the NTSB basically writes the report .
That means anything: planes, trucks, buses, trains, & ships. Some authority is delegated to FAA (private planes) or FRA (some classes of incidents) but the NTSB can step in. They even have supeona authority.
However, they don’t have the power to write the rules. They can only make recommendations. I was taught that the intention was to avoid knee jerk reactions or individual obsessions getting enacted as regulations.
The downside is that the regulatory agency can blow off the NTSB.
The old ATC surveillance radar system is clearly obsolete for air traffic control, superseded by ADS-B position reporting with greater accuracy, less latency, more data, and no tubes. Andf there’s zero chance of the remaining few Rooskie Bear bombers coming in at us up at FL300 so that they could pick them up.
However, there is a threat scenario, one taken so seriously during the Autopen Interregnum that it drove the design choices and ultimate quantity purchase of the new F-15EX, a threat which the big brain air power gurus identified and talked about in conferences for decades without actually allocating any budget to put anything in place to counter it – that of low altitude cruise missile attacks on the U.S. mainland.
If the classified intel is bad enough that the puppets with their hand up Autopen decided to spend money on other than fraud such that we needed a whole pile of big new shiny (okay more flat grey, but all new) missile-truck fighters to counter it, well, we probably need also something air-surveillance-radar flavored to look for those cruise missiles. And given the threat is low altitude it probably needs to be up in the air. Ideally it would be in space but they have been “any year now”-ing space based air surveillance for the past 15+ years with none working even in a technology demonstrator yet. So for the nonce it’s probably aerostats or long persistence stratospheric UAVs.
But we do needs a radar of some sort.
.
Alex Hollings at Sandboxx Air Power has a YT vid on that threat at:
The Reader observes (from experience at the Great Big Defense Contractor) that tracking air targets from space is one of the hardest radar problems (only matched by trying to take the clutter from bird choppers out of a horizon search) because the entire background is clutter which changes at orbital speeds. We were exploring some approaches around the time the Reader retired, but they were insanely computationally intensive. Maybe this is really why Musk wants to put data centers in space.
He also notes that the use of an F15EX as a missile truck has a lot more applications than cruise missile defense, especially paired with features in the sensor packages of F22s and F35s and the just coming into service AIM-260.
Re uses for modern, stronger (no front of cockpit falling off events!), much better radar, much better computer, more-hardpoint Eagles – oh, yeah, definitely. The lesson “everything does not have to be stealth” being learned ant last is nice to see.
And re the AIM-260, the F-15EX being all two seaters even if they leave the back seat normally empty enables in extremis adding a GIB to talk to “loyal wingman” UCAVs to service targets way, way out in front, far enough that the F-15EX not being stealth won’t matter.
I just wish we had a timeline where the F-14 got extended new-model-production love like the Eagle has. One thing naval air lacks these days is range, and the Tomcat had range in spades. Oh well.
Even in the current day of GNSS and ADS-B, the Reader would prefer the ATC radars be upgraded and stay in place for redundancy. And the weather radar systems have already saved enough lives with tornado and other severe weather warnings that they should be retained and upgraded as well. The FAA apparently agrees. https://view-su2.highspot.com/viewer/4832514a45b5c9917a85dba94bf8c484#1
I didn’t mention it because one thinks it would be obvious, but there is no alternative to weather radar, and the fact that the NWS weather radar system has been allowed to get this old is an absolute disgrace. It’s an undisputed life saving system. Just insane to let it rot in place.
The NEXRADs were upgraded a little less than 15 years ago to add dual polarization capability (which has enabled tornado detection and accurate rain rate measurement), and have had service life extensions since. They are far more capable than they were when first installed.
I m not a radar guy, but I have heard some concerning things about the NEXRAD base hardware. You can only SLEP things so far. And then there’s the supporting infrastructure – even here in tech central, if there’s a bad storm we lose the local NEXRAD up in the Santa Cruz mountains, when these days a generator and a Starlink would be all that’s needed to ensure the thing can keep radaring and sending that data back to the NWS.
Even when working it has two major modes, basically non-precip for clear to approaching storms and precip for active rain, and the NWS folks have to switch that themselves.
But compared to the ATC radars, the NEXRAD is Starfleet hardware. The ATC radars, especially the en route radars, are really old, their as-designed revisit sweep time is pretty slow, and there’s no way to do anything like “track while scan” on noncooperative targets of interest (like, oh, a hijacked airliner with the transponder off). Tracking radar tech has advanced a lot since they were put in service, and a new system, electronically scanned with beam forming so it can do more than one thing at a time, only makes sense in this day and age and in this threat environment.
One difference I notice between the (regional) feds and the private weather radar is that the private outfits have different software, and so can milk more data out of the same basic data set. (Amarillo was a test-bed for NexRad when one of the local TV channels bought and installed their own unit, before the feds did. Ditto software. This was in the days before private, crowd-funded forecasters and nowcasters, like the guy who does exit-by-exit weather for truckers and others on the road in storm season.)
The most recent major hurdle was developing software that could filter out wind turbine returns. They generate enough turbulence that it reads as a level one or two thunderstorm. Back when I was flying charter, I’d occasionally ground-truth the weather returns for the air-traffic controllers.
We still need traffic radar, too. ADS-B can fail. I suspect it can be spoofed, too, to give false returns to the receivers around it. It’s harder to spoof a hunk of metal that bounces energy.
There’s stuff in the ADS-B specification that makes it harder to successfully feed bad position and vector data into the system, but it’s not impossible given enough money. As seen in the recent Venezuela/Russia shadow fleet stuff, the maritime digital position reporting analog (ha!), AIS, gets spoofed all the time.
Whether somebody would bother if the result is F-15s off your wing is left as an exercise for the criminals.
What really gets me about those Somalian illegal aliens that stole $BILLIONS of our tax money is how indignant they get when somebody starts asking questions. They fully believe they have the right to steal our tax money.
I have no doubt that part of this is the belief that their god brought them here and they take what they find as legitimate spoils. We have no right to keep it from them.
There is also the belief that they, as the favored of their god, are holding back the wrath by our compliance and taking care of them. I have seen both of these attitudes, although most people don’t even seem to hear the statements.
“You had the opportunity to bow to me!” is real. They mean it.
Actually, that’s a common criminal attitude. Worse, many will not live honestly even when they could earn more money by it because then they can’t prove they are smarter than their victims.
One of the Salvation Army majors I worked for commented that it was amazing how hard some people work to not work, but to take advantage of every single thing that they could find. It was a full-time job for the scammers, and they dedicated so much energy to the effort that he was impressed despite himself. It lets the scammers feel superior to mere working schlubs. Or it does until something goes wrong.
”Look, another illegal alien did another very bad thing. This seems to happen relatively often. Maybe the laws that we have making it illegal for just anyone to come here without checking beforehand to see if they are a bad person are a good idea, and we should send all of the illegal aliens back from whence they came, making any that want to return here go through the actual legal immigration process.”
”It’s NOT ALL illegal aliens, so anything you do to would be definitionally worse than the crimes individual illegal aliens commit.”
According To Hoyt 
SFBS!
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Love the, “And Rohan shall answer!” one.
Need to give our son the, “One step at a time,” meme.
On a totally different topic, will you’ll be at ConFinement this year?
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I was hoping someone else from this group was going. I will be there. I hope Sarah will be there as well.
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Where?
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Lebanon, beginning of March?
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Yeah. I’ll be there. :D
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Re: last word meme
First: Who but a gullible person would trust any ‘study’ or ‘survey’ trying to correlate politics with paper credentials?
Second: One of the key ongoing political scandals is the fraud of pretending that paper credentials are necessarily education, adn that scholarly publications are necessarily science.
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Another great meme-mine.
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I need to get more coffee.
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Don’t stores now deliver, or do they reject going to dragon’s caves because too many delivery people have been eaten?
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Why would a Dragon want “strange humans” to know where his lair is?????
Oh, in this case, I needed to brew more coffee.
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to have coffee and ketchup delivered, duh.
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“Look Skippy, don’t tease the Dragon, just drop the coffee off and leave” Boss ordered.
“Oh, c’mon boss why not?” Skippy dejectedly asked.
“Because Dragons are grumpy without their coffee and you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup” the Boss warned…
“You sure about that?” Skippy asked.
“Just delivered a case of ketchup to the dragon’s cave last week” the Boss warned.
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Re: the polyamorous Klingons.
Every time I hear something about that show, I think, “Look, I’m all for mocking NuTrek, but isn’t that going a bit far, even for parody.” And then it turns out that no, that’s not mocking, it’s not parody, it’s just a literal description of the next episode.
Re: “worse than Hitler”
I might very well be worse than Hitler in this regard, but I feel like I can at least do consistent shadows. I keep looking at that thing and saying, “Where’s the light, and what the heck is casting that shadow across the building?”
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As someone pointed out, they literally named the kid Jayden.
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This would be a bad time to take up drinking prune juice.
IYKYK
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All of A.H.’s paintings have flat lighting, aside from one landscape study of Neuschwanstein (go figure). I’m not certain if that was his personal artistic style, or because of doing them for postcards, or if he never quite mastered how to show lighting and light-source direction.
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Every Starfleet Academy ep reviewer is astonished weekly that the latest ep is worse than the one before, and then the subsequent ep surpasses the last in worseness. It’s quite an accomplishment, but I don’t know if they can keep it up.
(Kurtzmantrek: “Hold My decaf vegan Romulan Ale.”)
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It is the shadow of communism (Russophilic International Socialism) about to fall across Europe, which can only be stopped Germanphilic National Socialism.
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Why are the Marines a department of the Navy?
Because someone has to keep watch over what Sailors are doing and the Army didn’t want to do it and there was no Air Force at the time, so like everything else it got dumped on the Marines.
Besides you can’t let Sailors run amuck all over the world they just scare the hell out of people. You thought herding cats was hard, try controlling a couple hundred drunken sailors on liberty. There is a reason the ramps leading from a ship are called the Gangway. Trust me on this…
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The reason they made Marines is to keep as many Sailors on the ship possible, for as long as possible. You’ll notice they train Marines in swamps with alligators to give them a rough idea of what they will be facing when dealing with Sailors…
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I bet you a donut the guys who stole the tank to get beer were Sailors on Liberty. I knew a guy who left the ship wearing navy summer whites, and came back wearing a Japanese naval uniform, ( also summer whites) he had his ID and he was in uniform so…
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I… kinda want to know how he pulled that off. And… kinda don’t.
But at least I don’t have to stand through the safety brief written just for him!
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He was drinking with a bunch of Japanese Sailors and one commented on how his crackerjacks were cool and how he wished he could show up at Colors dressed in them just to see what his Chief would say. I guess the Japanese Chief had a sense of humor, his division officer on the other hand…
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Excuse me while I howl with laughter over here, at this remove in years in miles. Thank you for the evening’s delight!
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You’ve got a tank and you’re going to *buy* beer? And you let some cop pull you over?
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well it was a soviet tank…
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A T-55 may be crude, but they generally work well enough. They are the Kalasknikov of Soviet tanks.
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My comment when I first saw that one was “I want this movie as an 80s style teen comedy.”.
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That sounds *awesome*
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Wasn’t that the movie Stripes?”
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I wouldn’t know “I am getting too old for this Shitttt”
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Not exactly.
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I’ll try to remember to add the sarcasm sarc. (or better yet get better material) meh it’s a Saturday.
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“Stripe-niks”
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You may want to return to the store. Don’t burn good will.
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That meme with the stairs…I feel it. But hey, at least there are handrails… (practicing my optimism skills. How’d I do?)
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“And these are the stairs I had to go up both ways home when I was a kid, kid” Grandpa droned on.
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Well, the Democrats are trying to hold the government for ransom again.
I say no taxes should be collected for the time the government is ‘shut down’ and all funding to ‘NGOs’ should be cut off instantly.
If we cut government funding to an ‘NGO’ and it goes broke, it wasn’t really an ‘NGO’ was it?
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You think, if they lost their salaries during the shutdown they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to use a shutdown fir “leverage”?
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Shut down TSA and all but emergency MAC flights. Shut down everything they possibly can.
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Shut down TSA and make fight safety the purview of the airlines again, like it was up ’til a quarter century ago.
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Uh, *flight* safety . . .
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Depends on if you’re flying Spirit or not.
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The problem with that idea is that something happened a quarter-century ago that changed our views on airport security. In the year 2000, it was assumed that, if the airline screwed up security, their passengers and customers were pretty much the only ones to suffer if there was a hijacking; if you didn’t think United Airlines did a good job with their security, you could just not fly with them, and it wouldn’t affect you. By 2002, that was no longer the default assumption.
TSA is a joke that basically just took the existing airport security personnel and made them federal employees, assuming that a new job title would magically make them more competent (in fact the opposite seems to be the case, but that’s another subject). They had to keep outlawing more and more stupid stuff because they were always trying to keep the terrorists from repeating the last method of attack, rather than trying to keep the terrorists themselves off the plane. The agency, as it’s existed for the past 20 years, is something between a joke and a disaster.
But, in the modern world, airport security is a national problem, unfortunately. We can no more let British Air be in charge of its own security than we can allow Minnesota to become a haven for federal law breakers.
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“The problem is Just Too Big, therefore we must put government in charge of it!!!”
How many times does that have to blow up in everybody’s faces before you learn that government is not the solution? You literally admit that government handling it is a joke and a disaster, even as you say that’s how it has to be.
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The airlines, realizing they Could Get Sued! told the FedGov that unless FedGov took over security, they were done flying. FedGov didnt mind at all taking up that responsibility, because You Cant Sue The Govt.
And the TSA grope and wand-(bleep) is pure theater, versus putting a pair of armed Deputy Marshals on every flight.
Letting suitable trained passengers and flight crew go heeled would also have done rather nicely, at far lest cost. Hardest part would be training folks to use a shoulder holster, more suitable for flight defense than any belt rig.
I have actually done anti-hijack training, including live fire and “Simmunitions” force-on-force. Its a fairly simple thing. Mainly, you are there to prevent the goons from turning the plane into a cruise missile. Any survivors are a bonus. harsh, but that is the state of current threat.
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Your solution does nothing to solve the actual problem you yourself described. I don’t care if you and former Seal Team 6 are the carriers, someone WILL sue, and even if they lose, they will cost airlines more than they can afford to drag it through at least partially sympathetic courts.
From gun manufacturers (“deceptive marketing to kids”) to oil companies (“climate change liability”) to vaccine and drug makers, Leftists have learned that they can force companies to do things that they could never get voter approval for. SCOTUS is looking at a “climate change” lawsuit from Boulder CO and the lead plaintiff has admitted (outside of court) that “we’d like a carbon tax, but we can’t get one enacted directly. If we sue the oil companies, they can either go out of business or pass those costs on to all their customers worldwide. Voila, we have a carbon tax.”
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TSA is security in airports.
Regulation of civil aviation safety in the US is FAA, with complaints by the NTSB.
(Call me naive, but I had not realized that the NTSB is salty at the FAA where the electronics situation is concerned.)
Anyway, the thing that became the FAA was started in 1926. In 1930, the /military/ aviation accident rate was around 144 per hundred thousand flight hours.
This is very much apples and oranges, of course.
There are about twenty frogs who would pause their baseball game to say ‘your terms are acceptable’ to just about any shut down.
I’m not /that/ sure that NOAA’s WSR-88Ds, and the FAA’s ASRs and ARSRs are necessary.
Anyway, we could have railroads provide private transportation security gendarmes for aviation. Like the French Foreign Legion, but they are mall cops with light tanks.
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The NTSB and FAA have a very fraught relationship. The NTSB makes recommendations in their accident investigations but the FAA (and airlines) choose whether or not to implement them. Read the NTSB report about the Potomac mid-air between the military Blackhawk and the American Eagle flight last year to see the NTSB absolutely tear the FAA a new one about all the recommendations they’ve ignored.
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The NTSB is unusual in the world. Elsewhere, the agency that investigates a transportation incident is almost always the regulatory agency.
The NTSB has the authority to be the federal lead investigator in almost all transportation incidents in the U.S. The major exception is when a construction worker is injured or killed, for which OSHA is lead. Even then the NTSB basically writes the report .
That means anything: planes, trucks, buses, trains, & ships. Some authority is delegated to FAA (private planes) or FRA (some classes of incidents) but the NTSB can step in. They even have supeona authority.
However, they don’t have the power to write the rules. They can only make recommendations. I was taught that the intention was to avoid knee jerk reactions or individual obsessions getting enacted as regulations.
The downside is that the regulatory agency can blow off the NTSB.
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The old ATC surveillance radar system is clearly obsolete for air traffic control, superseded by ADS-B position reporting with greater accuracy, less latency, more data, and no tubes. Andf there’s zero chance of the remaining few Rooskie Bear bombers coming in at us up at FL300 so that they could pick them up.
However, there is a threat scenario, one taken so seriously during the Autopen Interregnum that it drove the design choices and ultimate quantity purchase of the new F-15EX, a threat which the big brain air power gurus identified and talked about in conferences for decades without actually allocating any budget to put anything in place to counter it – that of low altitude cruise missile attacks on the U.S. mainland.
If the classified intel is bad enough that the puppets with their hand up Autopen decided to spend money on other than fraud such that we needed a whole pile of big new shiny (okay more flat grey, but all new) missile-truck fighters to counter it, well, we probably need also something air-surveillance-radar flavored to look for those cruise missiles. And given the threat is low altitude it probably needs to be up in the air. Ideally it would be in space but they have been “any year now”-ing space based air surveillance for the past 15+ years with none working even in a technology demonstrator yet. So for the nonce it’s probably aerostats or long persistence stratospheric UAVs.
But we do needs a radar of some sort.
.
Alex Hollings at Sandboxx Air Power has a YT vid on that threat at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVN1IHqb2uE
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The Reader observes (from experience at the Great Big Defense Contractor) that tracking air targets from space is one of the hardest radar problems (only matched by trying to take the clutter from bird choppers out of a horizon search) because the entire background is clutter which changes at orbital speeds. We were exploring some approaches around the time the Reader retired, but they were insanely computationally intensive. Maybe this is really why Musk wants to put data centers in space.
He also notes that the use of an F15EX as a missile truck has a lot more applications than cruise missile defense, especially paired with features in the sensor packages of F22s and F35s and the just coming into service AIM-260.
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Re uses for modern, stronger (no front of cockpit falling off events!), much better radar, much better computer, more-hardpoint Eagles – oh, yeah, definitely. The lesson “everything does not have to be stealth” being learned ant last is nice to see.
And re the AIM-260, the F-15EX being all two seaters even if they leave the back seat normally empty enables in extremis adding a GIB to talk to “loyal wingman” UCAVs to service targets way, way out in front, far enough that the F-15EX not being stealth won’t matter.
I just wish we had a timeline where the F-14 got extended new-model-production love like the Eagle has. One thing naval air lacks these days is range, and the Tomcat had range in spades. Oh well.
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Even in the current day of GNSS and ADS-B, the Reader would prefer the ATC radars be upgraded and stay in place for redundancy. And the weather radar systems have already saved enough lives with tornado and other severe weather warnings that they should be retained and upgraded as well. The FAA apparently agrees. https://view-su2.highspot.com/viewer/4832514a45b5c9917a85dba94bf8c484#1
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I didn’t mention it because one thinks it would be obvious, but there is no alternative to weather radar, and the fact that the NWS weather radar system has been allowed to get this old is an absolute disgrace. It’s an undisputed life saving system. Just insane to let it rot in place.
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The NEXRADs were upgraded a little less than 15 years ago to add dual polarization capability (which has enabled tornado detection and accurate rain rate measurement), and have had service life extensions since. They are far more capable than they were when first installed.
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I m not a radar guy, but I have heard some concerning things about the NEXRAD base hardware. You can only SLEP things so far. And then there’s the supporting infrastructure – even here in tech central, if there’s a bad storm we lose the local NEXRAD up in the Santa Cruz mountains, when these days a generator and a Starlink would be all that’s needed to ensure the thing can keep radaring and sending that data back to the NWS.
Even when working it has two major modes, basically non-precip for clear to approaching storms and precip for active rain, and the NWS folks have to switch that themselves.
But compared to the ATC radars, the NEXRAD is Starfleet hardware. The ATC radars, especially the en route radars, are really old, their as-designed revisit sweep time is pretty slow, and there’s no way to do anything like “track while scan” on noncooperative targets of interest (like, oh, a hijacked airliner with the transponder off). Tracking radar tech has advanced a lot since they were put in service, and a new system, electronically scanned with beam forming so it can do more than one thing at a time, only makes sense in this day and age and in this threat environment.
But I don’t see it happening.
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One difference I notice between the (regional) feds and the private weather radar is that the private outfits have different software, and so can milk more data out of the same basic data set. (Amarillo was a test-bed for NexRad when one of the local TV channels bought and installed their own unit, before the feds did. Ditto software. This was in the days before private, crowd-funded forecasters and nowcasters, like the guy who does exit-by-exit weather for truckers and others on the road in storm season.)
The most recent major hurdle was developing software that could filter out wind turbine returns. They generate enough turbulence that it reads as a level one or two thunderstorm. Back when I was flying charter, I’d occasionally ground-truth the weather returns for the air-traffic controllers.
We still need traffic radar, too. ADS-B can fail. I suspect it can be spoofed, too, to give false returns to the receivers around it. It’s harder to spoof a hunk of metal that bounces energy.
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There’s stuff in the ADS-B specification that makes it harder to successfully feed bad position and vector data into the system, but it’s not impossible given enough money. As seen in the recent Venezuela/Russia shadow fleet stuff, the maritime digital position reporting analog (ha!), AIS, gets spoofed all the time.
Whether somebody would bother if the result is F-15s off your wing is left as an exercise for the criminals.
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sounds like “weather radar” and “low level air defense radar” is an opportunity for combination.
if weather radar can see wind turbine turbulence, spotting cruise/drone/stealth turbulence should be a matter of test and program.
A six hundred knot wake with neither transponder nor skin paint suggests “inbound mayhem”.
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What really gets me about those Somalian illegal aliens that stole $BILLIONS of our tax money is how indignant they get when somebody starts asking questions. They fully believe they have the right to steal our tax money.
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Yes, it’s not their fault for being scammers but ours for being scammed. Such tribal mentality, no wonder their country is like that.
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Even more “interesting” IIRC some of those idiots “threatened” to leave the US as if they were “important” to the well-being of the US.
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I have no doubt that part of this is the belief that their god brought them here and they take what they find as legitimate spoils. We have no right to keep it from them.
There is also the belief that they, as the favored of their god, are holding back the wrath by our compliance and taking care of them. I have seen both of these attitudes, although most people don’t even seem to hear the statements.
“You had the opportunity to bow to me!” is real. They mean it.
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That triggered an earworm of “Bastille Day” by Rush.
(Kzin grin)
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Actually, that’s a common criminal attitude. Worse, many will not live honestly even when they could earn more money by it because then they can’t prove they are smarter than their victims.
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One of the Salvation Army majors I worked for commented that it was amazing how hard some people work to not work, but to take advantage of every single thing that they could find. It was a full-time job for the scammers, and they dedicated so much energy to the effort that he was impressed despite himself. It lets the scammers feel superior to mere working schlubs. Or it does until something goes wrong.
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Theodore Dalrymple reported how criminals in jail talk among themselves about the poor idiots who work hard and will never be rich.
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“You are trying to take from me what I have rightfully stolen!”
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I still don’t get the “all” ants one.
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”Look, another illegal alien did another very bad thing. This seems to happen relatively often. Maybe the laws that we have making it illegal for just anyone to come here without checking beforehand to see if they are a bad person are a good idea, and we should send all of the illegal aliens back from whence they came, making any that want to return here go through the actual legal immigration process.”
”It’s NOT ALL illegal aliens, so anything you do to would be definitionally worse than the crimes individual illegal aliens commit.”
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Followed by: “Sending people back to their home countries is exactly like death camps. You are a Nazi.”
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Just because there are 3rd world shitholes, doesn’t mean we have to turn our cities and our nations into 3rd world shitholes.
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Did you by chance take your title from Sheridan’s poem…
“Let the toast pass,
Drink to the lass,
I’ll warrant she’ll prove an excuse for the glass.”
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No.
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