Slovakia Sends 4 Mig 29's to the Ukraine

 I got this from another email.

      This goes with an article that I "Published" last week  about Poland sending some " Mig 29's" to the

Ukraine as they replace their losses against the Russians.  

Slovakia MiG-29s

Slovakia has become the first country to declare it has delivered operational crewed combat aircraft to Ukraine, with the transfer of four MiG-29s to the war-torn country. 

Ukrainian pilots collected the aircraft, which had been in storage in Slovakia since the Warsaw Pact-era fighters were withdrawn from the Slovak Air Force inventory last summer. 

Video released by the Slovak defense ministry shows the four aircraft, all single-seaters, taxiing out and taking off on the short delivery flight, their final destination in Ukraine unknown.  

All four aircraft had their Slovak national markings painted out, but their serials remain. Another nine aircraft are expected to follow in the coming weeks, defense officials say. 

Slovakia’s handing over of MiG-29s is the first officially declared transfer of operational combat aircraft to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Other nations may have made similar transfers but have not publicly announced them.  

Several countries are believed to have delivered nonoperational airframes that could be stripped for spares. These include North Macedonia, which delivered four Sukhoi Su-25s ground attack aircraft from long-term storage. 

“Slovakia is on the right side, and with this gesture, we as a country have written ourselves in capital letters in modern world history,” Slovak Defense Minister Jaro Nad said. 

Poland has also declared that it will deliver its surplus MiG-29s to Ukraine. The transfers are expected to take place shortly, if they have not already. Warsaw has so far kept a tight lid on its defense equipment transfers to Ukraine. 

It is hoped that the fighter transfers will help bolster the Ukrainian Air Force fighter fleet. The fleet has employed its MiG-29s mainly for air defense duties and also in an austere destruction of enemy air defense role, thanks to deliveries of U.S. anti-radiation missiles. 

Ukraine is ultimately seeking deliveries of Western combat aircraft such as Lockheed Martin F-16s to try to secure air superiority over Russian fighters and air defenses. 

 

                                                   "F-16 Block 70/72"

Slovakia plans to backfill the MiG-29s with deliveries of Block 70 F-16s that were on order prior to the war starting, but deliveries have been delayed. 

Without a fighter aircraft to perform national air policing, protection of Slovak airspace is currently being performed by fighters from Poland and the Czech Republic.

 

The Commercial Aviation and the FAA are Focusing on Safety and doing a Safety Standown.

 I have my own ideas what the problems are and the biggie is that when Covid happened, the experienced people were forced to retire or took a package or leave on the commercial side and on the .gov side, a lot of people in the government side took retirement or were released rather than take "The VAXX".  Then when demand came back with a vengeance, the staffing wasn't there to handle it.

        I got this from me 3rd party email at work

Commercial aviation safety professionals will reexamine and refine risk-mitigation strategies as part of an FAA push to curb a troubling trend of serious incidents that suggest developing cracks in the industry’s solid safety foundation.

Industry groups kicked off the FAA-led initiative at a March 15 summit held to frame the issue and discuss possible responses. While signs of increased risk are evident across civil aviation, leaders focused on six runway incursions since Jan. 1 involving air transport aircraft as warning signs. “These events are concerning,” FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nolen said at the summit. “The question is, what do they mean?”

• Summit focuses on 2023 runway incursions
• Risk identification and mitigation efforts receive jump-starts
• Successful CAST program expected to play a key role

Industry will spend the next several months trying to find out. One immediate step is using existing safety programs both to flag risks and take action. The Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST)—the FAA-industry group that uses aggregated data to identify risks and develop mitigation strategies—is best positioned to deliver short-term results. But the program, the primary driver behind lowering the U.S. commercial airline fatality risk since its formation in the mid-1990s, must adapt.

“I believe that historians will look at the strides we’ve made under CAST as one of the greatest successes of the modern transportation age,” Nolen said, referring to a record that includes zero passenger fatalities in 10 of the last 12 calendar years. “But we must also ask ourselves if the CAST process is nimble enough to help us reach a goal of eliminating the rare but still concerning incidents we’ve seen recently.”

CAST participants remain confident in the program. “It has served us well over the past two decades,” Flight Safety Foundation President and CEO and CAST member Hassan Shahidi tells Aviation Week. “But moving forward, it needs to adapt to what we’re seeing.”

The March 15 event will help drive strategic discussions at subsequent CAST meetings. “We will definitely be taking the outcome of this and rolling it into the work program of CAST coming up, and seeing how CAST can find ways to start looking for solutions and mitigations,” Shahidi says.

Summit participants were reluctant to identify specific links between the incursions or several other notable events, including a December turbulence encounter near Hawaii and a pair of wrong-runway landings earlier in 2022. They agreed, however, that the industry’s strong safety record brings with it the risk of complacency. “The absence of a fatality or accident doesn’t mean the presence of safety,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said at the summit.

Participants identified several steps that would eventually increase safety. They include hiring more air traffic controllers and obtaining stable, consistent funding for infrastructure. More and better training is another high-priority item.

But other issues are likely more to blame for the recent occurrences. Several participants noted as a significant disruption the unprecedented demand trends that saw most airlines stop flying in the spring of 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and then start to ramp up just a few months later. The whipsaw upset training routines and, perhaps most critically, led thousands of experienced employees, including senior pilots and other key front-line workers, to take voluntary retirement. The resulting shake-up in the ranks has created a training backlog (many experienced staff also serve as instructors) and means some new hires are being fast-tracked to roles normally held by more seasoned workers.

Some airlines also have changed how they schedule staff. At one U.S. major carrier, pilots now often have 3 hr. between flights at hubs—much longer than previously. A captain there suggested the move makes last-minute reassignments easier, giving the airline flexibility to respond to schedule interruptions.

“You’ll come into a hub city and, all of a sudden, whatever you were planning on doing, it’s probably not your plan going forward, because now they need you to go somewhere different,” the pilot tells Aviation Week. While reassignments are common, they increase the chance of distractions or unintentional errors, the captain says. “If I had known I was going to [the newly assigned airport], I would have prepped for it, as opposed to going through the manuals en route.”

While the FAA is focused mainly on short-term strategies, long-term changes are in the works. The agency plans to mandate installation on new aircraft—and possibly on the existing fleet—of cockpit voice recorders (CVR) that can capture at least 25 hr. Requiring such CVRs on large commercial aircraft would harmonize the FAA with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and International Civil Aviation Organization. It also will help fill an increasingly relevant gap in U.S. incident investigation and risk-mitigation strategies. Current FAA standards require 2-hr. durations, and guidance about preserving recorder data focuses on postflight actions, such as pulling circuit breakers to stop recorders after immediately recognizable “reportable incidents.”

Problems with this approach have been evident for years. Inflight emergencies that last longer than the CVR’s duration can result in key data loss, for instance. Occurrences such as runway incursions or losses of separation are not always recognized right away, and the aircraft involved may continue on, wiping out valuable information in the process.

The issue is hampering probes of the six runway incidents highlighted at the summit. In each case, CVR data was overwritten, Homendy confirmed, leaving investigators without key information to help explain what happened.

 

The P-8 is increasingly important to the Defense of our Nation

 I saw this on "Townhall", kinda surprised me, My employer worked on these airplanes and they are different than the commercial 737's that we normally deal with.  They to me were really cool and different, the versatility of this system has been demonstrated.  Of course the plane has big shoes to fill, they are slated to replace the "P-3 Orion" which has a rich history of serving this nation and my friend and blog buddy "Old NFO", that is his war chariot.

 

The P-8 Poseidon — named for the mythological Greek Olympian who presided over the sea — is the Navy’s high-tech wartime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. It is popularly known as the world’s most capable and effective submarine hunter. But that’s only a small part of what it can do. It is a highly capable and unbelievably versatile aircraft.

As the world’s most capable anti-submarine platform, it can deploy and monitor high-tech buoys that listen for and track nearly silent submarines and is also armed with torpedos to destroy them. 

The P-8 is also a highly effective anti-surface warfare weapon and is armed with high-tech Harpoon anti-ship missiles. It can defend aircraft carriers and other naval assets long before the enemy is in range to harm our naval ships. And it can destroy enemy ships from long range.

The P-8 is also an advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform. It has a wide array of high-tech radars, sonars, and sensors that make it an incredible intelligence and reconnaissance asset. Most of the crew inside the P-8 are monitoring computers and data readouts from all the various sensors and radars. In some regards, it looks like a high-tech flying computer lab. But, of course, it is so much more.

The P-8 doesn’t stop there, it is a highly effective sea search and rescue platform as well. In fact, some of our allies use the P-8 predominately for its search and rescue capabilities.

The P-8 is so effective and versatile that many of our allies have added it or are adding it to their military toolsets. The United Kingdom, India, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, South Korea, and Germany all see the P-8 as a versatile and powerful maritime and reconnaissance aircraft. Several of our other allies are in the early phases of obtaining the P-8 for exactly the same reason.

 

The P-8 is based upon the Boeing 737-800, but it is built from the ground up as a P-8, not a passenger plane. It is not simply a refurbished or modified 737 that we are all familiar with as the world’s most popular passenger airplane. The most obvious difference is that there is not a long line of windows on either side of the fuselage. But things you might not notice with the naked eye include: the P-8 is built with a much thicker aluminum skin, a stronger fuselage, and a substantially larger wing profile to support the lift requirements of the P-8. And due to its power demands to power all the computers, electronics, radars and sensors, it has a much larger generator than the passenger plane. 

One of the reasons the P-8 is so effective is because former Navy pilots who flew and operated the P-8’s predecessor, the P-3, are included on the development team and production teams. When you include people who have practical experience on how to improve the platform, not surprisingly, you get a platform that is designed from the ground up by experts who know exactly what is needed to get the job done.

Former P-3 pilots told me that the P-8 is substantially smoother in flight and subjects the crew to far less turbulence, noise, and fumes. This change is not merely about crew comfort. It contributes to the crew’s ability to do their jobs where concentration and detail matter. When you’re on a mission that can last more than 24 hours, it is helpful to not be fatigued by turbulence, noise, and fumes and to have a more stable work environment.

 

 

The P-8 has a wide array of high-tech sensors and electronics that make it capable of reliable reconnaissance and that help keep it safe from enemy fire. Since the first P-8s came on line in 2012, upgrades have made it even more capable and more survivable.

In a world where our adversaries are upping their submarine and surface navy capabilities, the P-8’s importance is only increasing. Were it not for the P-8, enemy subs could threaten America without detection. But with the P-8, we have the ability to track enemy subs with great precision and even destroy them if necessary. But the P-8 can also track and attack enemy warships. And even when it isn’t destroying enemy subs or warships, it is one of our top reconnaissance platforms. 

The P-8 was built and designed to work in cooperation with our other intelligence sources. The level of communication and interconnectedness with data from other platforms compliments and leverages the P-8’s capabilities. 

While the P-8 can fly for an impressive 10 hours without refueling, it can be refueled in flight by the KC-46 Tanker which means that it can stay on site and on target as long as the crew can last at which point a new plane and crew will take over. But that extended range and time on target only augments the P-8’s effectiveness.

From a taxpayer perspective, the P-8 has been a tremendous success — coming in on time and under budget. 

As China has been expanding its Navy, we should consider expanding our defensive capabilities. The P-8 is one of the premier platforms to defend against foreign navies. And as capable as it is, it is constantly being upgraded to keep it ahead of the curve in defending America.

 

Monday Music "Paint It Black" By The Rolling Stones

I am continuing my Vietnam War Themed Monday Music, This will probably be the last week for the muse.

 

  Vietnam was a taboo subject for a while the wounds that the conflict left on the American Psyche was deep.  We had won the battles but lost the war because we as a nation had lost the will to fight it thanks to the media and the hippies and the antiwar movement that was funded by the communist party and liberal donors.  it took several years before Vietnam could be discussed outside of the veterans.  My Dad was a Vietnam Veteran, he did a tour in 1968 and dealt with the tunnels of Cu-Chi and the Tet Offensive, then he returned in 1972 for a second tour.   For a while especially in the 1970's, the Vietnam vet was portrayed as crazy or dangerous.  The specter of Vietnam dogged every use of the Military or any support during the 1980's, from Grenada, to Beirut, to Honduras and Nicaragua.  The Ghost of Vietnam were finally laid to rest during Desert Storm. 

 

 I decided to roll with "Paint it black" It is a Rolling Stone song that was used in the opening credits of a TV series that we GI's watched in the barracks.  We liked the realism, the attention to detail,  they had used Vietnam veterans as advisers to ensure the realism and gritty reality...for 80's TV anyway.  When the show came on, the dayroom was full as everybody clustered around the AFN broadcast of the show.  This song is the only song by the Rolling Stones that I  really liked.....We would cheer when the soldiers would shoot up Charlie and the firefights.  The interplay of the people was very well done, we liked the way the new LT played by Stephen Caffrey was mentored by the platoon sergeant played by Terrance Knox.  All the other guys also played well on each other and at the end of the video, it showed the 3 soldiers standing at attention and saluting the flag on TV at the end of the broadcast day....when they played the national Anthem.   That was telling for me.  The simple patriotism showed represented the beliefs of the Veterans in their country..

 

"Paint It Black" is a song recorded in 1966 by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. A product of the songwriting partnership of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it is a raga rock song with Indian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European influences and lyrics about grief and loss. London Records released the song as a single on 7 May 1966 in the United States, and Decca Records released it on 13 May in the United Kingdom. Two months later, London Records included it as the opening track on the American version of the band's 1966 studio album Aftermath, though it is not on the original UK release.

Originating from a series of improvisational melodies played by Brian Jones on the sitar, all five members of the band contributed to the final arrangement, although only Jagger and Richards were credited as songwriters. In contrast to previous Rolling Stones singles with straightforward rock arrangements, "Paint It Black" has unconventional instrumentation including a prominent sitar, the Hammond organ, and castanets. This instrumental experimentation matches other songs on Aftermath. The song was influential to the burgeoning psychedelic genre as the first chart-topping single to feature the sitar, and widened the instrument's audience. Reviews of the song at the time were mixed and some music critics believed its use of the sitar was an attempt to copy the Beatles, and others criticized its experimental style and doubted its commercial potential.

"Paint It Black" was a major chart success for the Rolling Stones, at eleven weeks (including two at number one) on the US Billboard Hot 100, and 10 weeks (including one atop the chart) on the Record Retailer chart in the UK. Upon a re-issue in 2007, it reentered the UK Singles Chart for 11 weeks. It was the band's third number-one single in the US and sixth in the UK. The song also topped charts in Canada and the Netherlands. It received a platinum certification in the UK from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and from Italy's Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana (FIMI).

"Paint It Black" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song number 213 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2011, the song was added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of "The Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll". Many artists have covered "Paint It Black" since its initial release. It has been included on many of the band's compilation albums, and several film soundtracks. It was played on several Rolling Stones tours. 

In 1965, popularity of the Rolling Stones increased markedly with a series of international hit singles written by lead singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards.While 1964 saw the band reach the top of both the albums and singles charts in their native United Kingdom, other bands from Britain dominated the American market, such as the Beatles. In 1965, the Stones crossed over to the American Market with their first number one single, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", and first number one album Out of Our Heads. That year also saw the Stones reach the top of the charts for the first time in countries such as Finland, Germany, and South Africa.

This success attracted the attention of Allen Klein, an American businessman who became their US representative in August while Andrew Loog Oldham, the group's manager, continued in the role of promoter and record producer.^[4] One of Klein's first actions on the band's behalf was to force Decca Records to grant a $1.2 million royalty advance to the group, bringing the members their first signs of financial wealth and allowing them to purchase country houses and new cars. Their October–December 1965 tour of North America was the group's fourth and largest tour there up to that point.According to the biographer Victor Bockris, through Klein's involvement, the concerts afforded the band "more publicity, more protection and higher fees than ever before".

By this time, the Rolling Stones had begun to respond to the increasingly sophisticated music of the Beatles, in comparison to whom they had long been promoted by Oldham as a rougher alternative.With the success of the Jagger-Richards-penned singles "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (1965), "Get Off of My Cloud" (1965) and "19th Nervous Breakdown" (1966), the band increasingly rivalled the musical and cultural influence of the Beatles, and began to be identified as one of the major pillars of the British Invasion. The Stones' outspoken, surly attitude on songs like "Satisfaction" alienated the Establishment detractors of rock music, which music historian Colin King explains, "only made the group more appealing to those sons and daughters who found themselves estranged from the hypocrisies of the adult world – an element that would solidify into an increasingly militant and disenchanted counterculture as the decade wore on".

 

"Paint It Black" came at a pivotal period in the band's recording history. The Jagger/Richards songwriting collaboration had begun producing more original material for the band over the past year, with the early model of Stones albums featuring only a few Jagger-Richards compositions having been replaced by that of albums such as Out of Our Heads and December's Children (and Everybody's), each of which consisted of half original tracks and half cover songs. This trend culminated in the sessions for Aftermath (1966) where, for the first time, the duo penned every track on the album. Brian Jones, originally the band's founder and leader over the first few years of its existence, began feeling overshadowed by the prominence of Jagger and Richards' contributions to the group.

Despite having contributed to early songs by the Stones via the Nanker Phelge pseudonym, Jones had less and less influence over the group's direction as their popularity grew primarily as a result of original Jagger-Richards singles. Jones grew bored attempting to write songs, and with conventional guitar melodies. To alleviate his boredom, he begun exploring Eastern instruments, specifically the Indian sitar, with a goal to bolstering the musical texture and complexity of the band's sound. A multi-instrumentalist, Jones could develop a tune on the sitar in a short time; he had a background with the instrument largely from his studies under Harihar Rao, a disciple of Ravi Shankar.

Over 1965, the sitar had become a more and more prominent instrument in the landscape of british rock. The Yardbirds had attempted to record "Heart Full of Soul" with the sitar as part of the arrangement in April, however they had run into problems getting the instrument to "cut through" the mix, and the session musician responsible for playing the instrument had trouble staying within the 4/4 time signature of the song. Ultimately, the final version of "Heart Full of Soul" featured a fuzz guitar in place of the sitar, although the song's distinctively Indian timbre remained. Following similar Indian-influenced experimentation by the Kinks on "See My Friends" that nonetheless still used guitar as the primary instrument, the first British band to release a recording featuring the sitar was the Beatles, with "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" released that December on the album Rubber Soul. Following a discussion with the Beatles' lead guitarist George Harrison, who had recently played the sitar on the sessions for "Norwegian Wood" in October 1965, Jones began devoting more time to the sitar, and began arranging basic melodies with the instrument. One of these melodies morphed over time into the tune featured in "Paint It Black"

Initial reaction to "Paint It Black" was mixed. Some music critics found the addition of the sitar to be simply a case of the band copying the Beatles.n his book Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones, Paul Trynka comments on the influence of Harrison's sitar playing on the Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood" from the Rubber Soul album and draws parallels with Jones' droning sitar melody on "Paint It Black". Responding to claims that he was imitating the Beatles, Jones replied: "What utter rubbish", comparing the argument to saying that all groups using a guitar copy each other merely by using the instrument. Jonathan Bellman, an American musicologist, agreed with Jones, writing in a 1997 issue of The Journal of Musicology that the events are an example of concurrent musical and instrumental experimentation. Jones' sitar part on the track influenced the development of a whole subgenre of minor-key psychedelic music.

Lindy Shannon of the La Crosse Tribune felt "Paint It Black", the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" and the Beatles' "Rain" were straying from the "commercial field" and instead "going into a sort of distorted area of unpleasant sounds". Staff at Melody Maker lauded the track, calling it "a glorious Indian raga-riot that will send the Stones back to number one".Writing for Disc and Music Echo, Penny Valentine praised Jagger's singing, writing that it was "better than ever" but was critical of the track's sitar Guitar Player's Jesse Gress cited "Paint It Black" as originating the 1960s ragarock craze.In a review for New Musical Express (NME), Keith Altham considered "Paint It Black" the band's best single since "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was released the previous year. A reviewer for Billboard predicted that Aftermath would become another hit for the band, citing "Paint It Black" as the focal point of this hard rock album and praising Oldham's production. The Herald News considered the song a "top record ... for teeners", and in The Sunday Press Nancy Brown described it as a "pulsating, blues-soaked romantic tear-jerker".In the San Francisco Examiner, Ralph J. Gleason lauded the song for its "hypnotizing tone" and "same qualities of ambiguity and obscurity as some of the previous Stones hits". In April 1967, while hosting the television documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, Leonard Bernstein praised the song for its "arab café" sound, and cited it as an example of contemporary pop music's ability to evoke disparate moods through instrumentation.

In a retrospective review, Richie Unterberger of AllMusic called the song an "eerily insistent" classic that features some of "the best use of sitar on a rock record", and in another AllMusic review wrote it is "perhaps the most effective use of the Indian instrument in a rock song". Writing on the song's 50th anniversary in 2016, Dave Swanson of Ultimate Classic Rock considered the song, like its parent album Aftermath, to be a major turning point in artistic evolution for the band, noting: "'Paint It, Black' wasn't just another song by just another rock group; it was an explosion of ideas presented in one neat three-minute package." In 2017, ranking Aftermath as one of the best albums of the 1960s, Judy Berman of Pitchfork described the song as "rock's most nihilistic hit to date".vid Palmer, editor of the Cullman Times, wrote that the "attitude" songs on Aftermath – particularly "Paint It Black" – influenced the nihilistic outlook of punk music. Stereogum critic Tom Breihan praised the song as a strong example of the band's brand of "swirling doom-blues", and praised its heavy sound and dark lyrics as ahead of its time when compared to the landscape of popular music in 1966.

"Paint It Black" inspired almost four hundred covers.It has placed on many "best songs" lists including those by Rolling Stone, Vulture magazine, NME, and Pitchfork. The Recording Academy inducted the song into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018. It is ranked number 213 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,and according to Acclaimed Music it is the 115th most celebrated song in popular music history.

 

 

How Quick Thinking Saved The First Airliner To Break The Sound Barrier.

 I was guilty of this, I thought the "Concorde" was the first Airliner to break the Sound Barrier, I didn't know that a Douglas DC-8 "Greasy 8" broke it first.  Shows what is incomplete in the history and what I know, LOL

 

 

One would expect an airplane slated for a record flight attempt to be prepped and flawless down to the last rivet, but before it even left the Douglas Aircraft plant in California the DC-8 chosen for this particular attempt was no longer factory-fresh. In an interview with aviation historian Bill Was­serzieher for a Douglas employee oral history project, flight test engineer Richard H. Edwards recalled, “The night before, at Long Beach, somebody had dinged the [wing leading-edge] slats and they didn’t work.” And during the preflight check Edwards damaged the trailing-edge flaps, banging one on a flight crew workstand inadvertently left under it.

Without slats and flaps, low-speed handling was going to be tricky. Luckily, this crew wasn’t aiming for a low-speed record. Pilot William Magruder told them, “Well, we can take off with no flaps and the airplane will be all right…if we don’t lose an engine.”

 

From left: Magruder, Alvin M. “Tex” Johnston and Lt. Col. Guy M. Townsend confer near the YB-52, which made its first flight on April 15, 1952. (U.S. Air Force/Getty Images)

Douglas had a lot riding on the flight. Over the previous decade Boeing had just about locked up the market for military bombers with its B-47 and B-52. Now with Boeing’s new 707 jet airliner (first flown in December 1957), the company was seeking to do the same to the commercial market. Douglas had gained a huge head start in the airliner business with its legendary prewar DC-3, but its new four-jet DC-8 had not flown until six months after the 707 took off. 

Magruder had been copilot in 1958 on the DC-8’s maiden flight. As an Air Force test pilot and engineer he had flown everything from the North American F-86 Sabre and Martin B-57 Canberra to the Douglas C-124 Globemaster II and B-52 Stratofortress. He had flown with Chuck Yeager, the first man to exceed the speed of sound in level flight, and Alvin M. “Tex” Johnston, who had famously flown a Boeing 367-80 (707 prototype) through a double barrel roll, before joining Douglas in 1956. “He was well known in the industry and very articulate,” recalled Edwards, “well educated, with a lot of new ideas.”

His newest idea was to grab headlines for the DC-8 by making it the first commercial airliner to break the sound barrier. “Very smart,” agreed Edwards, “get it out there, show the airplane can survive this and not fall apart. Boeing will never try it [with the 707] because they don’t want to be second.”

The DC-8 was decidedly subsonic, designed to cruise at 542 mph at 35,000 feet (Mach .82). Douglas put a whole team of engineers to work on the math. Edwards recalled, “They had to determine the pushover load factor, the dive angle, to be sure they got to Mach 1.01 at a rather high altitude, so the airspeed wouldn’t be that high up there.”

 

On the designated day, August 21, 1961, Magruder and Edwards were joined at the Douglas plant in Long Beach by copilot Paul Patten and flight engineer Joseph Tomich. The aircraft chosen for the flight was a new DC-8-43, no. N9604Z, the 130th built. The Series 40 was the first airliner in the world powered by turbofans, for improved efficiency and less noise and smoke.

Resplendent in the red and white colors of its new owner, Canadian Pacific Air Lines, and emblazoned with its new name, Empress of Montreal, the DC-8 looked fine with its dinged slats and flaps closed—nobody could tell the bird was slightly crippled. “We took off with flaps up,” admitted Edwards, “which is kind of a no-no because at takeoff thrust, you can’t control the airplane if it loses an engine with flaps up—there’s an interlock on the rudder.”

The DC-8 and F-104 fly at high altitude on August 21, 1961, before making the dive. (Courtesy of Mike Machat)

The test was to be conducted about 80 miles to the north, over Askania Tracking Range at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. On the way up the DC-8 rendezvoused with a two-seat North American F-100F Super Sabre camera ship and a Lock­heed F-104 Star­fighter chase plane (flown by Magruder’s old friend Yeager) provided by the USAF Flight Test Cen­ter, which also supplied a weather bal­loon to verify speed and atmospheric data. Over the southern tip of Rogers Dry Lake, Magruder leveled out at 50,090 feet, in itself a record for a civil airliner at that time. “The thing that impressed me the most was the dark, black sky,” recalled Edwards. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

From that altitude, the rest of the flight would be downhill all the way. It was Edwards’ job to know when they crossed the magic number. “The Mach number itself isn’t used in a dive as a target because it’s much more accurate to use airspeed,” he explained. “So every thousand feet I would read off to Bill the airspeed at the next altitude. As we were coming down, I was talking almost all the time because at a descent rate of 500 feet per second, every two seconds we were 1,000 feet lower. Looking out the window—which I stopped doing—it looked like it was straight down.”

As the airliner neared Mach 1 it compressed the air moving over it into shock waves, capable of tearing a poorly designed aircraft to pieces. “At .96 Mach it buffeted for a while,” remembered Edwards, “…and a little above .96 it went away.”

But shock waves can also affect control surfaces, to the point of reducing or even reversing pilot input. “I had mounted some cameras in the middle of the airplane, shooting out each window,” Edwards recalled. “I wanted to catch the chase airplanes out there, but I never saw the chase airplanes in the pictures. But it did show the ailerons flapping up as the shock wave left—I think it was about .97 Mach. They went up about five degrees, I think—both sides, fortunately.” 

Magruder held the yoke steady as Empress made history. “In the dive, at about 45,000 feet, it went to Mach 1.01 for maybe 16 seconds,” said Edwards. In fact, at 41,088 feet the DC-8 recorded Mach 1.012, 660.6 mph at that altitude. By then Magruder was already starting to pull out, but as Edwards recalled, “The recovery was a little scary.” 

When Magruder eased back on the yoke to pull out of the dive, the plane barely responded. The elevators, not designed to operate at such speed, could not overcome the supersonic airflow. The DC-8 was out of control, hurtling earthward at just over Mach 1, and in less than a minute would impact the desert floor…unless it tore apart in midair first.

“Well, I’ll use the stabilizer,” said Magruder. Besides the elevators on their trailing edges, the DC-8’s horizontal tailplanes (also called stabilators) could rotate as one piece—at least, at sub­sonic speeds. At 39,614 feet the DC-8 hit a maximum true airspeed of 662.5 mph.

The flight and ground crews for the DC-8 supersonic run included flight test engineer Richard Edwards (third from left). Magruder is standing behind the sign in a white shirt. (Courtesy of Richard H. Edwards via Caroline Sheen)

“The stabilizer wouldn’t run….because of the load,” recalled Edwards. In the high-speed pullout, with the airliner ever so slightly nose-up to the wind, the motor controlling the tailplane angle literally couldn’t overcome the air pressure under the tail.

“What [Magruder] did, because he was smart, is something that no other pilot would do,” said Edwards. “He pushed over into the dive more, which relieved the load on the stabilizer.” 

It was unconventional thinking—increase the dive rate to pull out of a dive? But as soon as Magruder stopped trying to pull out, the airliner “straightened out” into the wind, and the reduced air pressure allowed the tailplane motor to function and the stabilators to bite into the airflow. They “recovered at about 35,000 feet,” Edwards noted, no doubt with a sense of relief.

In the course of the dive the DC-8 had covered almost 15 miles, to the southern tip of Rosamond Dry Lake. “We were all smiles,” said Edwards. “We weren’t frightened, but we were more or less happy that we had got there.”

In just that one flight, Empress of Montreal had set altitude, payload and speed records for commercial transport aircraft. The speed record stood until broken by a Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 SST in June 1969. Each crewman received a $1,000 bonus from Douglas, and the Society for Experimental Test Pilots awarded Magruder the Iven C. Kincheloe Trophy for outstanding professional accomplishment in flight testing.

Canadian Pacific took delivery of Empress of Montreal that November. With a small plaque on the forward bulkhead attesting to its place in history, it served for almost 20 years, logging 24,268 flights for a total of 70,567 hours in the air. In May 1981 it was sold, and at Opa Locka Municipal Airport north of Miami, Fla., scrapped. It never broke the sound barrier again.  

---

DC-8 no. N9604Z was the first airliner to exceed Mach 1, but not the last. The Concorde and Tu-144 made supersonic passenger flight seem routine (at least, until a series of crashes and economic considerations caused their retirement). Today most commercial airplanes like the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 cruise around Mach 0.85 to 0.89, while smaller corporate jets from Cessna, Gulfstream and Bombardier routinely cruise above Mach 0.90. It’s not unheard of, however, for subsonic airliners to exceed Mach 1 (761 mph at sea level), at least in terms of ground speed.

In February 2018 a Norwegian Air 787-9 heading from New York to London caught a ride on the jet stream over the Atlantic. Dreamliners had previously reached 776 mph with a tailwind, but this one made the crossing in 5 hours and 9 minutes, topping out at 799 mph. And a year later, a Virgin Atlantic 787-9 out of Los Angeles on its way to London also caught the jet stream 35,000 feet over Pennsylvania, achieving a ground speed of 801 mph. Because the high-speed wind was carrying the jets like boats on a river, these airplanes did not exceed Mach 1 as measured by local airspeed. At least one other non-SST airliner, however, did break the speed of sound…though not intentionally.

In April 1979 a TWA 727 suffered a slat retraction failure and entered into an uncontrolled spiral dive during which it exceeded the speed of sound. (Courtesy of John Proctor via Emilio Corsetti)

In April 1979 TWA Flight 841, a Boeing 727-31 en route from New York City to Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minn., deployed the no. 7 leading-edge slat on its starboard wing while cruising at Mach .816, 39,000 feet over Saginaw, Mich. Slats being low-speed, high-lift devices, the resulting asymmetrical lift and drag immediately threw the airliner into a starboard roll. It entered into an uncontrolled spiral dive and plunged about 6 miles in 63 seconds, according to the flight recorder doing two complete 360-degree rolls and breaking the sound barrier in the process. At that velocity the wind tore off the exposed slat, the captain dropped the landing gear to put maximum drag on the airframe and the crew regained control with about 8,000 feet to spare. They made a successful emergency landing in Detroit. 

Despite damaged landing gear, parts of flaps and wing spoilers missing and a host of other damage including a cracked cabin window, the passengers and crew suffered only minor injuries. The aircraft was returned to service a month later. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation attributed the incident to incorrect operation of the slats by the crew. (A rumor had circulated that slightly deploying slats and flaps at cruising speed increased the 727’s lift with no increase in drag, yielding greater fuel efficiency. According to the NTSB, the crew had deployed all the slats, but due to air loading no. 7 failed to retract.) The crew strongly denied wrongdoing, pointing out seven previous incidents of single-slat extensions by 727s.

 

Poland sending some Mig 29's to the Ukraine

 

 I clipped this from my work email, I get information from aviation sources in my work email, they are 3rd party sources not related to my employer.

Poland will send four operational Mikoyan "Mig 29" to the Ukrainian Air force in the “coming days” and possibly the rest of its Soviet-era Fulcrum fleet as they are restored to combat service condition, President Andrzej Duda said on March 16. 

The announcement breaks a yearlong impasse over whether Western governments would heed Ukrainian demands for fighters. The pending Polish MiG-29s will provide Ukrainian Air force pilots with a familiar fighter type with the need for little, if any, refresher training. But the aircraft still fall short of Kyiv’s pleas for NATO-standard fighters, such as Lockheed Martin F-16s or Fairchild Republic A-10s. 

“Literally, in the next few days, we are actually handing over four planes to Ukraine in full working order,” Duda told reporters in a joint press conference with Czech President Petr Pavel. “The remaining planes are currently being prepared, and will probably be handed over successively.” 

Ukraine has not reported aircraft losses during its yearlong, ongoing war with Russia, but the government has prioritized being resupplied with fighters for air defense and ground support operations. In February, Ukrainian officials also called for Western attack helicopters, such as Bell AH-1Zs and Boeing AH-64s. 

For Warsaw, the donated MiG-29s will be backfilled in the Polish Air force with 12 Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) FA-50s scheduled for delivery later this year, Duda said. The first batch of Lot 16-configured Lockheed Martin F-35As ordered by Poland are expected to be delivered in 2024, but the first several aircraft will likely remain in the U.S. for several months to train pilots and maintainers. 

 

                                               "KAI "Golden Eagle""

KAI is diverting the 12 light combat fighters ordered by Poland last September from planned deliveries to the South Korean Air force. A follow-on order by Poland for 36 FA-50PLs will be delivered after 2023 in a special configuration, with new extended-range fuel tanks, an active electronically scanned array radar and a high off-boresight air-to-air missile. 

Poland has about 24 MiG-29s in service, according to Aviation Week’s military aircraft database, but many are expected to be at a low level of combat readiness. The fleet is composed of a mix of MiG-29s ordered by Poland in the late 1980s, and others that were transferred from the Czech Republic in the 1990s and donated by Germany in the early 2000s. 

The Polish air force originally planned to retire the MiG-29s by 2010, but budget shortfalls delayed orders for their replacement for more than a decade. 

But the country’s leaders have struggled with the decision to donate the fleet to Ukraine. In the first two weeks of the war, Poland proposed handing over the MiG-29s to the U.S., which would then send them to Ukraine. But the U.S. government rejected the offer. Even last month, Duda had voiced doubts about the wisdom of sending even an aging portion of the country’s air power capability to another country. 

“We have not enough [fighters] … and we would need many more of them,” Duda told the BBC in an interview, noting the Polish MiG-29s have a “very serious need for maintenance.” 

But Poland’s decision to donate the MiG-29s anyway could inspire similar moves in Eastern Europe. Slovakian Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said on March 9 that the time had come to decide whether to send Ukraine its MiG-29s, which were officially retired last August. Slovakia is not due to receive the first of 12 F-16 Block 70s on order until March 2024. 

 

The Failed MBT 70 Project

 I touched on this a bit when I was doing my "Red Storm Rising" posts a few years ago and I had discussed the "M1 Tank", The failed MBT 70 project was touched on that posting, the United States and West Germany had different ideas on Armor development and Tank usage. THe end results are that both nations built the 2 best MBT's in the world.   I shamelessly snagged this from "SOFREP".

 

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

World War II came and went, and defeated Germany had been divided into two, with the eastern half falling under the influence of the communist Soviet Union and the western region working alongside the United States.

When tensions grew, and the Cold War era took hold in the late 1940s, western allies perceived the communist region’s rising power as an imminent threat. More potent main battle tanks were developed in case eastern forces decided to attack using their own war machines. This eventually became a race between the two sides to build the most innovative, powerful tanks.

When Russia introduced its T54/55 series, American and West German forces unveiled the MBT (main battle tank) M60 “Patton” and Leopard 1 as the former tank’s capable rival. Soon, however, US intelligence discovered the development of the Soviet Union’s advanced T-62 MBT equipped with powerful arms modifications, and they decided it was time to sprint ahead of the competition.

Subsequently, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara proposed an unprecedented “super tank” and initiated the joint battle tank program between the US and West German forces. During this period, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states lacked cohesion on common military equipment, which McNamara saw as needing improvement.

MBT-70 prototype undergoing a speed test at Aberdeen Proving Ground. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

By 1963, Germany and the US signed a memorandum of understanding that guaranteed both nations equal input in the tank’s design and features. This turned out to be the first big misstep in the program as engineers from both sides later couldn’t agree even on the smallest details, such as which system of measurement use.

“As testing continued, they realized they had another big problem. Because the driver would be located inside a turret that would be rotating in battle, the tank’s designers had come up with the solution of mounting the driver inside his own contra-rotating cupola within the turret. Regardless of the direction the turret was facing, the cupola would automatically face forward. The drivers, however, accustomed to being located in a stationary position at the front of a tank’s hull, were becoming disoriented and suffering from motion sickness.” via Defense Media Network, 2016.

Dubbed MBT-70 by the Americans and KPz-70 by the Germans, the designed super tank comprised promising, ahead-of-its-time features, which caused its eventual cancellation.

Couldn’t Agree on the Design

The main design of the super tank includes a steel-layered tungsten alloy armor and an inner protective shell capable of buffering Soviet ammunition.

But negotiations on the overall design of the tank were riddled with disagreements. Both superpowers had different requirements and standards, not to mention the language barrier. It was almost impossible for the US and German forces to meet halfway.

Nonetheless, prototypes for each side’s versions were produced, with the American MBT-70 powered by a Continental 12-cylinder air-cooled diesel engine that could generate up to 1,470 horsepower and the German KPz-70 powered by a Daimler-Benz MB-873 diesel engine that was later replaced by an MTU diesel engine capable of producing 1,500 hp. Both tanks could speed up to 43 miles per hour within a 400-mile range, making the MBT-70 prototype the world’s fastest MBT at the time.

Designers aimed to hydro-pneumatically lower the height of the MBT-70 compared to its predecessors, seeking to develop a tank with an extremely low profile on the battlefield. As a result, the prototype of the US-German tank was  29.9 feet (9.1 meters) in length, 11.6 ft (3.53 m) in width, and 8.6 ft (2.62 m) in height. The low-profile objective, however, significantly sacrificed the space in the interior, leaving no room for its driver in the hull. Instead of adjusting the compact lower structure of the tank, designers opted to place the driver along with the rest of the crew—in the turret.

 

While, at this time, this concept may sound ingenious, putting the driver in a revolving turret was just not viable. Why? For obvious reasons, this causes extreme disorientation, and you don’t want to be throwing up when it’s “go time” on the battlefield. Despite adding a “special cupola,” which designers would ensure the driver faces forward regardless of the turret’s direction in an attempt to emulate the driver being the hull, this concept was eventually discarded.

Another radical concept that caused significant technical issues was the tank’s weapons system. Both MBT-70 versions were fitted with a 20mm anti-aircraft cannon and a 7.62mm general coaxial purpose machine gun, The trouble began when they looked at a main weapon. While the German 120mm smoothbore gun looked promising, the American 152mm XM-150E5 main gun mounted on an M551 Sheridan had serious problems. For one thing, the rounds swell when soaked, essentially making them unusable. Moreover, the incorporation of the 152mm Shillelagh guided missile system also gave the engineers headaches. It was an exciting concept—if successful, the MBT-70 would be among the first tanks to be armed with guided missiles. The main problem was that the recoil from firing the Shillelagh completely threw off the missile optics, basically rendering it useless as a precision-guided weapon.

MBT-70 prototype test firing an MGM-51 missile (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

With Problem after problem, the development of the super tank spiraled out of control over the years. Despite efforts to alter and modify the machine, the increasingly high cost and expanding tonnage of the MBT-70 finally prompted everyone involved to abandon the project entirely.

By 1970, the promising yet ambitious super tank collaboration between the US and West German forces had been canceled. The introduction of the USSR’s T-62 and T-64 into service a few years prior also prompted the western allies to have a dependable tank in mass production ASAP, and the MBT-70 apparently was not going to be that tank.

It didn’t go all to waste, though. Yes, the super tank may have never seen the light of day on the battlefield, but this jointly constructed armored vehicle had significantly contributed to future MBT capabilities, notably the development of “XM1,” which would eventually become the famed M1 Abrams family of tanks we have today. Meanwhile, West Germany moved on by developing what later became the Leopard 2.

Both countries produced 14 prototypes of the failed tank throughout the program, with some still being displayed in museums. They serve as a reminder of a once-promising concept that never saw the battlefield. Still, through all of the frustrations, the project managed to help pave the way for future main battle tanks.

 

 

Monday Music "Age of Aquarius" by The 5th Edition.

 This song and a couple of others pretty much described the 60's to millions of people.  The 60's was a revolution in music and massive social change and upheaval.  We had several prominent people assassinated during this decade from the assassination of J.F.K which scarred the national psyche to the possibilities that might have been.  From the death of M.L.K and finally Robert Kennedy.  Those were the low points, the War in Vietnam was raging all over American television so the people were actually seeing "War" for the first time.  To the high point of the moon landings in 1969 that helped ended the decade that changed America.  I remember a comment my Dad made about this song, he had said that "Let The Sunshine In" described Vietnam...Depending on the season...Either no sun or too much, there were no half measures...  "

"Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" (commonly called "The Age of Aquarius" or "Let the Sunshine In") is a medley of two songs written for the 1967 musical Hair by James Rado & Gerome Ragni (lyrics), and Galt MacDermot (music), released as a single by The 5th Dimension. The song peaked at number one for six weeks on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart in the spring of 1969. The single became the first medley to top the American pop charts and was eventually certified platinum in the U.S. by the RIAA.^[1]

The song listed at #66 on Billboard's "Greatest Songs of All Time."^[2]

This song was one of the most popular songs of 1969 worldwide, and in the United States it reached the number one position on both the Billboard Hot 100 (for six weeks in April and May) and the Billboard Adult Contemporaries Chart. It also reached the top of the sales charts in Canada and elsewhere. It was also ranked as the #1 single for 1969.

The recording won both the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group for the Grammy Awards of 1970, after being published on the album The Age of Aquarius by The 5th Dimension, and also being released as aseven-inch vinyl single record.

The lyrics of this song were based on the astrological belief that the world would soon be entering the "Age of Aquarius", an age of love, light, and humanity, unlike the current "Age of Pisces". The exact circumstances for the change are "When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars." This change was presumed to occur at the end of the 20th century; however, majorastrologers differ extremely widely as to when. Their proposed dates range from 2062 to 2680.

"Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" was ranked thirty-third on the 2004 AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs.

More Goings on at Casa De Garabaldi...

 Sorry I haven't been posting, I mentioned A dumpster coming...well it came...

 The Guy dropped it off and we started filling it up...

                      That was from the first day.......

     That was my second run to "The Salvation Army" LOL   

    In Honor of "The Ides of March" I saw one of my "Asterix" Books, LOL

    I found more of them in the attic :)     I got turned into Asterix when I was a dependent kid in Germany in the 1970's. and when I went back to Germany in the 1980's., i found as many of the Asterix comics I could find at the "Stars and Stripes" book Store.