Russia Pulling out of the Joint Venture Commercial Airplane with China.

 I am still working scads of overtime and it will continue until late October so bear with me.

The Russians are pulling out of the "CR929" program...I wonder how the plane will perform compared to Boeing and Airbus.  My gut feeling is that the plane will be much cheaper, but not as reliable as the Boeing and Airbus offerings...but 3rd world airlines will buy it trying to get something on the cheep and those countries that are beholdin to the Red Chinese will buy them also.

Russia has confirmed it is exiting its CR929 joint venture with China.

Credit: Imaginechina Limited/Alamy

When Russia invaded Ukraine 18 months ago, Russia’s aviation industry was immediately identified as a target for Western sanctions: Flight connections were cut, and support and parts supply stopped. Moscow refused to return hundreds of commercial aircraft that Western lessors wanted back.

Although it is difficult to obtain much reliable information about the true state of spares supply and the safety of in-service aircraft, details that have been leaked are worrying and show that keeping Russia’s airliner fleet safely operational is becoming more challenging by the day. The long-term structural consequences of Russia’s isolation are also reverberating across commercial aircraft programs that involve some international cooperation. The latest victim is the CR929 widebody project with China.

• Western sanctions are impeding Russia's capabilities
• Further delays affect the MC-21 and Superjet programs

United Aircraft Corp. (UAC) CEO Yury Slyusar earlier this month confirmed for the first time that UAC is no longer a partner in the CR929 joint venture. Although the decision has been made, undoing the joint venture will likely take considerable time, since it involves changing agreements between the governments of China and Russia.

Beijing has not commented on the change of plans. The CR929 has accumulated years of delays and is not expected to enter service until well after 2030 due to lengthy negotiations about sharing work and intellectual property. For months, reports indicated that China had decided to pursue the widebody on its own. Keeping a sanctions-ravaged partner on board would make the project even more difficult.

Russia still hopes to remain involved. Slyusar says Russian industry plans to continue with the program as a normal supplier and builder of the composite wing, PD-35 engines and other subsystems for the aircraft. Although China is not participating in international sanctions against Russia—Comac could, in theory, engage in an industrial partnership with a Russian aerospace company—it is unclear how Western suppliers could take part, given the level of integration work, cooperation and information-sharing in aircraft programs. Potential Western suppliers affected include Eaton, Honeywell, Liebherr, RTX, Safran, Thales, Zodiac Aerospace and an engine manufacturer. In addition to the Russian PD-35, China plans to use the indigenous Aero Engine Corp. of China CJ-2000 engine in development. For many systems, the CR929 would initially rely on Western specialists.

China and Russia formed the China-Russia Commercial Aircraft International Corp. (CRAIC) in 2017, following years of preparatory work. The aircraft is to be offered in three versions, seating between 250 and 320 passengers in typical configurations.

Separately, deliveries of Yakovlev’s Irkut MC-21 will slip further than expected by the Russian government, which is financing the program. “We hope that the first six aircraft will be handed over to Aeroflot in the beginning of 2025,” Anatoly Gaidansky, Yakovlev’s first deputy general director, acknowledged in a podcast with the Moscow Aviation Institute on Aug 13.

Under production plans that Moscow approved in mid-2022, Yakovlev was expected to hand over the MC-21s in 2024 and roll out 270 of them through 2030.

These six MC-21s were initially scheduled to arrive at Aeroflot subsidiary Rossiya Airlines by the end of 2022. The government has extended the deadline for two more years to give the manufacturer additional time to substitute imported components after Western suppliers withdrew from the program.

The MC-21 program gained approval for the Russian PD-14 turbofans and a Russian-made composite wing in December 2022 but still needs to replace many other Western systems, including actuators, avionics and air conditioning, Gaidansky explained.

He said the MC-21 prototype with 70% substituted Western-made equipment would fly beginning in December 2023. The fully import-substituted version, dubbed MC-21-310RUS, is to make its first flight in April 2024 and then receive its supplemental type certificate by the end of that year.

Meanwhile, Aeroflot CEO Sergey Alexandrovsky confirmed in an interview to Russia’s Vedomosti daily newspaper that the airline plans to firm up orders for the first 18 MC-21-310RUS and 34 import-substituted Sukhoi Superjet New (SJ-100) regional jets in September through the Avia Capital Service leasing company. Aeroflot Group placed a preliminary order for 89 SJ-100s, 210 MC-21s and 40 Tupolev Tu-214 aircraft last September.

The group expects to receive the first two SJ-100s by year-end, but those deliveries are also at risk due to the protracted certification process. According to UAC’s Slyusar, deliveries might not start until 2024, which means the manufacturer needs more time to complete the SJ-100 development. The first partially substituted SJ-100 is expected to fly in September. It should be followed by another prototype that will test only Russian-made PD-8 engines and another aircraft in a fully Russian-made configuration. The SJ-100 is planned to be certified before year-end.

A380 collides with Drone near Nice France.

 It isn't a new thing with drones and airports. Heathrow near London has had incidents with drones piloted by "activists" who are protesting the pollution and other things that activist in Europe protest about, and they use the drones to go after commercial aircraft coming in on approach.  To me this is counterintuitive...but environmental activist and common sense are not the same.

A picture of an Emirates A380.

Credit: robertharding / Alamy Stock Photo

LYON—French air safety investigation bureau BEA has started an investigation after an Emirates-operated Airbus A380 was found damaged following its arrival at Nice Airport from an apparent in-flight collision. 

During the A380’s approach to Nice Airport Aug. 18, the crew "heard an abnormal noise and felt slight vibrations," a BEA summary of the incident said. That happened as pilots were switching to the CONF 1 configuration, which extends leading-edge slats. The crew continued the approach and landed safely.

On the ground, the upper part of slat number 2, located inboard on the right wing, was found "severely damaged," the summary said. The slat was replaced and the repair was carried out within 48 hr., according to local newspaper Nice-Matin.

The event, which BEA categorized as an accident, happened at the end of an otherwise routine trip from Dubai. The BEA's preliminary summary does not include any analysis of the damage or discuss possible causes.

Several reports have speculated that the A380 collided with a drone.

Investigators will likely be able to pinpoint the cause. Emirates’ A380s are equipped with tail-mounted cameras. Their field of view includes inboard slats. 

Investigators also will examine the damaged parts for clues, such as bird remains or paint chips, left behind by whatever struck the aircraft. They may also ask passengers if they saw anything unusual during the approach.

Investigation reports involving collisions or near-misses with unmanned air systems are rare in BEA’s archive. In February 2016, the crew of an Air France A320 reported a near-miss while on approach to Paris Charles-de-Gaulle, at an altitude of 5,400 ft. The round-shape drone was seen 30 m (100 ft.) below the Airbus.

In July 2016, the crew of an Air France A319 reported a near-miss with a drone at 2,000 ft., also on approach to Paris Charles-de-Gaulle. A swept-wing drone crossed at an estimated 5 m.

Despite police investigations, neither the drones nor the pilots could be identified.

Regardless of the Nice accident's cause, drone collision risks have been a source of worry for regulators and first responders again this summer.

The Nice investigations are taking place as firefighters around the world are concerned unruly drone pilots may jeopardize their operations, or at least hamper their efforts to put out summer blazes.

In the U.S., the Washington State Department of Natural Resources posted a strongly worded tweet asking pilots to stop flying drones near wildfires. “Air crews had to leave the Iron Creek Fire in June due to a drone in the area,” the department said.

In Canada, civil aviation authority Transport Canada reminded drone pilots to “keep their aircraft out of the sky if in the vicinity of active wildfires.” Canadian rules set a 5 nm. perimeter around a forest fire, within which a permission is required to fly a drone. Before flying a drone, the pilot should check the absence of smoke plumes or active forest fires nearby, using local information and a website dedicated to drone users, Transport Canada says.

"The Human Cost of Covid Restrictions"

 I know I posted something a couple of days ago about Covid Restrictions, but I will continue to add more material.  Sure, this article focuses more on the aviation industry, but it bleeds over into the general economy, and more information that I can out there and if helps someone with information to counteract the coming madness as I see the rumors of coming restrictions and mask mandates as there is "Supposedly" some super strain from Africa.(How convenient you know)  I personally believe that this is a cover to run the same playbook the donks and their apparatchiks used in the 2020 election to scare the crap out of people and push the "Mail In ballots" that were so successful in the 2020 elections to in effect to "steal the Elections like they did in 2020.  Sure, that happened 2.5 years ago, but my belief hasn't changed, matter of fact it has solidified and the subsequent charges against the presumptive frontrunner from the GOP every time there is a problem for the Bidens, Trump collects another indictment to push the Biden drama off the news cycle.

Credit: Chalabala / Getty Images

The financial cost to airlines worldwide of the coronavirus pandemic has been well documented, with estimates in the $280 billion range for the two worst years of 2020 and 2021. 

The industry also proved to be resilient in the face of its worst ever crisis, with IATA now forecasting a net profit of around $10 billion for airlines as a collective in 2023, although most carriers will remain deeply in debt.

What has been less widely reported is the cost for human populations of government policies that were swiftly introduced in the early weeks and months of the pandemic and that targeted and severely restricted global air travel. 

At the end of the day, it wasn’t the coronavirus that brought the global passenger air transport system almost to a standstill (cargo operations continued but under severe constraints); it was the border shutdowns, mandatory quarantines, and multiple and expensive testing processes that prevented or dissuaded people from flying. And in many regions, those rules continued for months—in some cases years—after vaccination programs were well established and data pointed to the ineffectiveness of such rules to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Scientific data also showed that flying did not raise the risk of catching the coronavirus. On the contrary, the hospital-grade HEPA filters on modern airliners combined with masking and the natural barriers provided by seatbacks made them one of the safest places to be, certainly safer than a restaurant or grocery store.

All this was mostly ignored by governments, which for the most part implemented, then stuck with, prolonged air travel restrictions regardless of whether they did any good.

But reports are now coming out from a set of independent studies—many conducted by top medical and university organizations worldwide—that show that far from doing any good, these rules did great harm. And for all the immense cost to airlines, those rules inflicted far worse on the economies and citizens of the nations that governments were supposedly trying to protect.

The September ATW cover story “World in Chains” reports on the calamitous findings of these studies. For the most part, the government rules did little to nothing to stop the spread of the virus. At best, they delayed the spread to some remote islands by a few weeks at most and ultimately, they did not prevent infection.

Without their vital air connections, 90 million people fell into extreme poverty, receiving less than $2.15 per day as tourism and export demand collapsed. About 350 million people were pushed into food insecurity, risking starvation, according to the United Nations. Tragically, it was the poorest and most vulnerable who suffered most and will, undoubtedly, find it hardest to recover.

As Subhas Menon, director general at the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines, put it, “government response was generally knee-jerk as well as isolationist and parochial.”

While governments and their people are understandably eager to move on and put the dark years of the pandemic behind them—something that is clear by the huge demand for air travel last summer and in 2023—the wider lessons of the effect of these policies need to be broadcast and understood.

A professor involved in one of the studies has called for an investigation similar to that which typically follows an air crash, and it’s a sensible and perhaps urgent call. Reports are emerging of yet another coronavirus variant taking hold. Thankfully, there’s also likely to be a vaccine up to task of mitigating the effects on human life. 

But given how reluctant governments were to turn back their border and air travel policies in the face of strong scientific data, why should the air transport industry or the general public trust or believe that governments will behave more wisely and rationally if there is another COVID-19 wave?

In any human crisis, the air transport system can be a vital part of the solution. Directly, it can get medical experts, equipment and food swiftly to where they are needed. The global air cargo system delivered ventilators, masks and then vaccines throughout the pandemic. Indirectly, air connectivity also delivers people, trade, and prosperity. Will that lesson be learned?

Wagner Chief killed in plane accident.

 

I have 2 divergent thoughts....One was that Putin eliminated a rivel and embarrassment, the second is that it was airplane related, Since the invasion, the sanctions have hit Aircraft maintenance hard, Russia has been forced to play fast and loose with the "Airworthiness" of the planes due to part shortages.   I guess we will see , but due to the Soviet er Russian way of dealing with bad news by covering it up and deflecting and gaslighting....we may never know, but this was convenient for Putin, either way. 

A law enforcement officer inspects the wreckage of the Embraer Legacy 600 that was reportedly carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group.

Credit: Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty Images

Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly died in the crash of an Embraer business jet in Russia on Aug. 23, Russian state media agencies reported, citing an official statement by Russia’s air transport agency.

The crash, which is now under investigation by Rosaviatsiya, occurred exactly two months after the mercernary leader led a failed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership over complaints about their conduct of the war in Ukraine and their treatment of Wagner fighters.

An Embraer Legacy 600 with registration RA-02795 is widely linked to Prigozhin. An Embraer business jet with Prigozhin and nine others on board took off from Shremetyevo Airport outside Moscow and was en route to St. Petersburg, according to the state-owned TASS news agency. But then the aircraft crashed about halfway to the destination, killing all on board, TASS added.

Several Russian news agencies, including TASS, Interfax and RIA Novosti, cited a statement by Rosaviatsiya confirming Progozhin’s name was on the manifest of the crashed aircraft. As this story went to press, that statement had not been published on the agency’s website or social media channels. The Ministry of Emergency Situtations reported the crash in a statement posted to its Telegram channel, but not the identities of the people on board.

“In the Tver region, near the village of Kuzhenkino, a private Embraer Legacy aircraft crashed while flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg,” says the statement by the Ministry of Emergency Situations. “There were 10 people on board, including three crewmembers. According to preliminary information, all on board were killed.”

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation announced a criminal investigation had been opened, focusing on the violation of traffic safety rules and air transport operations implied by the crash. 

“An investigation team has left for the scene, all the necessary forensic examinations will be appointed, a set of investigative actions will be carried out to establish the causes of the crash,” the committee said on its Telegram social media channel. 

Unconfirmed reports by social media channels close to Wagner, such as Greyzone, accused Russian air defenses of shooting down the jet, with unverified video clips from the ground showing an explosion in the sky followed by a large jet falling out of control to the ground.

The death of Prigozhin ends a bizarre chapter in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Prigozhin’s fighters, including thousands recruited from Russian prisons, played a key role in the Russian military’s capture of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in May after a long and costly campaign.

But the Russian military cut off Wagner’s access to recruits from Russia’s penal system, then demanded that private military contractors agree to serve the Russian general staff directly. In response, Prigozhin staged an uprising with thousands of Wagner troops on June 23, capturing the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and dispatching an column of armoured vehicles toward Moscow. The mutiny was diffused after Prigozhin reportedly agreed to move himself and his organization to Belarus, but he was seen repeatedly afterward inside Russia.

Covid and Restrictions...

 

This popped up in my work feed from a 3rd party email.  I have concerns because there is apparently a new strain of "Covid" in several countries in Africa and our "Betters" will probably try to use the playbook from 2020 to ratchet down again and scare the crap out of the "low info voters" again and push the absentee voting that worked soo well for the Donks, they will try something because a lot of people are disillusioned with the meat puppet presently in the White House.  

Credit: daboost/Getty Images

It was the worst public health disaster in a century and the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. And it did the worst damage to the airline industry since World War II. What can be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that will prevent a repetition, of either the virus or its massive damage?

Every virus is different and methods of dealing with each must be tailored to the virus itself, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, cautions. But Gupta thinks some lessons from COVID can and should be learned.

Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University puts it more strongly. Like Gupta, Bhattacharya warned against lockdowns and all the other restrictions early in the pandemic. He now thinks something similar to an NTSB review of a disastrous aircraft crash is needed to look at how governments mishandled the virus.

Nearly three years after Gupta, Bhattacharya and many others made their arguments, a raft of studies, research reports and meta-analyses of many studies reached the same conclusion: With the exception of fast and tight border closings of a handful of Asia-Pacific islands, all the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) ordered by governments, including restrictions on air travel, had little effect on virus mortality but imposed massive economic, social, health and other costs on people.   

Source: “A Literature Review And Meta-Analysis Of The Effects Of Lockdowns On Covid-19 Mortality,” Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, Steve Hanke, Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and Study of Business Enterprise, May 2022.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School reviewed 600 publications and studies and concluded that lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions and other NPIs inflicted huge “collateral damage,” beyond that of the virus itself.

During the pandemic, heath visits, diagnostics, therapeutics and hospital admissions declined between 30% and 60% for non-COVID illnesses. Mental health also declined, especially for those vulnerable to mental challenges. Pandemic damage thus included an increase of between 2% and 20% in non-COVID mortality, higher in some countries.

Per capita GDP initially declined about 7% in emerging markets, 5% in advanced economies and 4% in low-income countries. Even after recovery, the 2024 GDP in emerging and developing countries will remain 6% below levels expected before the pandemic, according to the World Bank. Borrowing to counter this slump led to the largest one-year increase in global debt since World War II, which will crimp social expenditures of poor countries well into the future. Income inequality increased both within and between nations. Global poverty increased for the first time in a generation, and 90 million people fell into extreme poverty, receiving less than $2.15 per day as tourism and export demand collapsed. About 350 million people were pushed into food insecurity, risking starvation, according to the UN.

Sources: 2022 Actual GDP v. 2013-2019 GDP Trend To 2022; Worldometer, mid-July, 2023

Some of this immense damage was caused by the virus itself or voluntary reactions to the virus. But as much as half the GDP losses were caused by government policies—the NPIs, including travel restrictions—according to economist Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University, who drew this conclusion after reviewing 100 COVID studies. Yet Allen found that these same policy reactions “had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of COVID-19 deaths.” For different nations, per capita death rates generally showed no relation to the stringency of each country’s NPIs. This was chiefly because people voluntarily changed much of their behavior in light of the virus’s danger to themselves.

Ineffective Travel Restrictions

The ineffectiveness of NPIs in general also characterized travel constraints. In May 2022, a survey of five studies of travel restrictions was published by a division of Johns Hopkins University. The best estimate of the authors was an average of study results, weighted by a judgement on the coverage and accuracy of the studies. This “precision-weighted average” estimated that a wide variety of travel restrictions imposed by many countries had reduced COVID deaths by only 3%.

Individual studies differed widely in their estimates. Only one estimated that restricting travel had significant effects. And this study related only fatalities through May 9, 2020, to the speed of border closures, so its estimate is dominated by the early impact of fast closures by Asia-Pacific islands.

A second study found some effects—a 2%-10% reduction in fatalities—but this too focused on short-term impacts very early in the pandemic. Border closures yielded no effects in a third study, and a later study found that travel quarantines were associated with increased deaths. Another later study similarly found travel restrictions associated with increased COVID deaths. In both cases it is likely that higher mortality drove tighter travel restrictions, not the other way around. But neither study shows tighter controls helped.

Taken together, the travel studies provide no evidence that travel restrictions helped much, except for those fast and tight closures in Asia-Pacific.

As the virus mutated, another study explained why the great majority of travel restrictions grew less and less effective as they were prolonged.  In January 2021, Oxera and Edge Health delivered a report on the impact of UK travel restrictions on the Omicron variant to the Manchester Airports Group. The report concluded that, “when a variant is already highly prevalent in the domestic environment, travel restrictions are likely to have a very limited impact on the growth and the peak of cases and hospitalizations.”

Omicron had been circulating internationally throughout November 2020, and the UK started requiring pre-departure tests and second-day PCRs in late November and early December. Oxera found these new restrictions had only a mild and temporary effect on preventing Omicron’s spread.

“If no travel restrictions had been in place at all in November/December, cases would have peaked seven days earlier and the peak would have been 8% higher. … Now that Omicron is highly prevalent in the UK, if all travel testing requirements are removed in January, there would be no impact on Omicron case numbers or hospitalizations,” the Oxera report concluded.

In other words, once a virus or variant is established in a country, it makes no or very little difference if a stream of visitors who have about the same proportions of infected, immune and vulnerable individuals as the host population enters the country.

“The horse was already out of the gate,” Gupta notes.

Only in that handful of Asia-Pacific islands (or virtual island South Korea) did snapping the door shut fast and keeping it shut until vaccines were available help at first. But early success led to prolonged and costly slumps in Asian travel, domestic growth and the air connectivity crucial to global economic health.

Shutting down international air travel is only effective in a sudden surge of infections, argues Subhas Menon, director general ar the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines. With COVID, “government response was generally knee-jerk as well as isolationist and parochial, unlike when SARS happened,” Menon said.

A Better Plan

What should have been done about travel and other policy choices?

The World Health Organization (WHO) initially opposed border closures. WHO is now strongly encouraging nations to have already prepared plans in place for dealing with respiratory viruses. ICAO now recommends balancing public health risks with the need for air travel and doing regular risk assessments based on evidence. ICAO says it is essential to maintain air connectivity to support global health, safety, food security, tourism, trade and economic growth. IATA has asked governments to learn from the pandemic and avoid closing borders to manage future health threats.

From the beginning, Gupta, Bhattacharya and many other scientists called for focusing protection on the vulnerable elderly and sick population rather than shutting down society, business, schooling and travel.

During the COVID-related travel restrictions, most airlines were forced to store aircraft, like these at Alice Springs Airport in Australia. Credit: Rob Finlayson 

“We knew at the outset that COVID vulnerability was highly specific to the condition of individuals—the elderly and frail, diabetes and very obese,” Gupta said.

Gupta ticks off some ways focused protection might be given. Elderly couples living with each other should stay at home, and relatives should be tested before visits. Recovering virus patients should not be placed in nursing homes, but in special facilities. Nursing home staff can be paid extra for working in two-week shifts and should be tested before duties. Elderly persons living with young, healthy individuals might be evacuated to safe facilities during flu season. The Oxford epidemiologist also thinks a pan-coronavirus vaccine should be developed and stored to be offered to vulnerable people if another coronavirus emerges. She acknowledges all these steps would be expensive, but much less so than the lockdown approach.

“The lockdowns did not do a damn thing,” Gupta summarizes. “The whole idea that we could stop it in its tracks was misguided.”

And lockdowns hurt lower-income workers, who could not work at normal workplaces, the most, while leaving the “laptop” class, who could work remotely, relatively unaffected.

Gupta believes something like the COVID respiratory virus might occur again in the next few decades. As for much more lethal viruses like Ebola, these must be contained in a different way, but their very lethality and visibility makes it much easier to block their spread very early.

WHO has urged tighter controls on wet markets, the source of previous respiratory viruses and initially suspected of originating COVID. Johns Hopkins medical professor Marty Makary has urged for a treaty, using principles from a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, banning laboratories from doing dangerous gain-of-function research.

What all this research adds up to, tragically, is that governments worldwide focused on border shutdowns and travel restrictions that did massive and long-lasting damage to the airline industry and economies but did little to nothing to contain the virus or help their most vulnerable citizens survive. If anything, their policies made them poorer and more vulnerable.

Will those lessons be absorbed and acted upon before the next global humanitarian crisis? Probably not, given how governments have clung to post-9/11 air travel restrictions like the carry-on liquids and gels rules when there are better policies and technologies that could keep air travelers both safe and moving.

The air transport industry, however, should arm itself with the research and data being gathered on the ineffectiveness of government air travel policies through the pandemic and help educate lawmakers and authorities on what they risk if they don’t learn the lessons of the human cost now emerging from the pandemic.

The Concept of "Firebases" from Vietnam

 

I got this in my email from "Vietnam Cherries", I get tidbits from them about the Vietnam War,  and sometimes I would post them on the blog.   

A firebase in Vietnam, wherever in Vietnam, would be well-known to whoever habituated one anywhere.  There were several thousand firebases during the conflict, manned by many units and many men, but they were all the same. Similar to the 19th-century fort concept, fire support bases in Vietnam could reinforce each other across long distances with powerful effects. Read the article to learn more about these firebases.

(The cartoon is from my "Stash".)   

By DAVID T. ZABECKI

Vietnam was a non-linear war. There were no front lines with enemies on one side and friendlies on the other. Tactical problems could become very complex, with the enemy potentially in any or all directions. It was vital to be able to observe and fire 360 degrees all-around.

Although atypical of most 20th-century warfare, those conditions were not necessarily unique to military history. Perhaps the closest American experience was the Indian Wars of the 19th century—with isolated forts established to control certain areas and provide security to overland travel routes and civilian settlements in the sector.

One solution to the Vietnam War tactical problem was the fire support base (or firebase). Most 19th-century forts were isolated and had to be self-sufficient. Thanks to 20th-century technology, the firebases used by the allies in Vietnam could communicate with each other instantly and could be resupplied and reinforced by air.

WHAT WAS A FIREBASE?

The fire support base was a combined infantry-artillery position that sometimes included armor. Depending on the planned duration of the position, firebases could be dug-in heavily and reinforced with engineer assets.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the firebases was their ability to cover each other with mutually supporting fires over great distances. It is a long-standing principle of firepower that massing fires is the most effective way to use artillery.

Through the 19th century, the only way to mass fires was to physically group the guns together on the ground. Between World Wars I and II, improved communications combined with innovative advances in fire direction control techniques made it possible to mass fires instantly on enemy targets from many widely-dispersed guns.

Firebases could reinforce the fires of their own internal guns with the guns of any or all other firebases within artillery range. It was a powerful multiplier effect.

HOW WERE FIREBASES SET UP?

The size, composition, and positional duration of a firebase depended on the planning factors of mission, enemy, terrain, and troop availability. Some firebases were very large and held positions for months or longer. Other firebases were relatively small and remained in position for days or weeks. A smaller firebase might consist of a company of infantry with a two-gun artillery platoon in the center of the position. A larger firebase might consist of two or three infantry companies, or possibly an entire battalion.

The artillery would consist of an entire six-gun battery. Instead of being positioned in the normal staggered line, the guns were deployed in a star position, with the base piece at the center and the other five guns forming the points of the star to provide rapid and effective fire in any direction. Smaller firebases with two or four howitzers deployed their guns when possible in square or triangle formations.

Firebases on flatter terrain were usually round, and those on ridges generally were rectangular due to terrain. Most larger firebases contained a helicopter landing pad for resupply and medical evacuation. When a firebase deployed forward, the guns often were moved by air.

FIREBASES USED IN ATTACK AND DEFENSE

The firebases were not merely passive defensive positions. Infantry patrols aggressively pushed out from the perimeter, day and night, but usually stayed within the guns’ maximum effective range fan—roughly 11,000 meters for 105mm howitzers and 14,000 meters for 155mm howitzers. When a patrol made contact, it could call for fire support not only from the guns of its own firebase but those of any other firebase in range.  

The firebases, of course, invited attack. One gun inside the firebase usually fired illumination rounds to deprive attackers of the cover of darkness. Other guns delivered fires where needed outward from the perimeter. Firing close to friendly troops could be complex because of the large bursting radius of HE ammunition. The solution to that problem was the M-546 Antipersonnel Round for the 105mm howitzer. Popularly called the “Beehive Round,” it fired 8,000 steel flechettes, triggered by a time fuze set to detonate just outside the perimeter. A green star cluster hand flare fired just before the Beehive warned troops on the perimeter to take cover.

Between 1961 and 1973, U.S. and allied forces established more than 8,000 fire support bases in Vietnam; only a small fraction existed at any given time.

Some of the war’s fiercest battles were fought over firebases, including Firebase Ripcord in Thua Thien Province (July 1-23, 1970); Firebase Mary Ann in Quang Tin Province (March 28, 1970); and Firebase Gold in Tay Ninh Province (March 21, 1967). Neither the VC nor the NVA ever managed to overrun a U.S. forces firebase.

The Saga of Biorn The Viking and a thought.

 

Biorn the Viking is old and wants to go to Valhalla like all good Vikings......

But his problem is that he can't find a worthy opponent.   at first.    Very good short film

    I remembered posting this video several years ago and I happen to watch it on you tube, I have it saved there and I got another laugh out of it.

     There is this scene in 13th warrior that is more serious but still describes the mindset of the Norsemen

I really liked that movie 13th Warrior and it is a good Saturday movie.  If that scene don't stir the blood, you ain't alive.

    And here is a belief that I have...I hope I never have to find out in such a manner, but truth be told everyone "Crosses the Rim", it is how you do so that makes your final standing as a man. It is a belief that I have.

Monday Music "On The Loose" By Saga

 

   Yay!    This edition of "Monday's Music" actually dropped on .......MONDAY!!!!!

 I am still running songs that I could play over and over again while I am riding the Motorcycle

   Saga got a lot of play on MTV and that is where I saw them for the first time and I really likes the song, to me it is a really good driving song, almost like "Golden Earring's " song I just had played a couple of weeks ago.  I hope Old NFO has heard of this one, lol

Originally known as Pockets, Saga formed in 1977 from the nucleus of Canadian rock band Fludd. In June 1978, they released their self-titled debut album Saga. A modest success in Canada, it would eventually sell over 30,000 copies in Germany as an import.
Their 1979 follow-up album Images at Twilight gave them their first charting single in Canada with the song "It's Time" peaking at No. 84 in the Canadian Charts. From the album, the songs "See Them Smile" and "Slow Motion" became strong radio favourites elsewhere. Saga's next album, Silent Knight was released in 1980, and included the singles "Don't Be Late" and "Careful Where You Step".

In 1981, the band's fourth album Worlds Apart was released. The lead single "Wind Him Up", finally broke them into the Top 40, peaking at No. 22 on the Canadian Charts in January 1982. A second single, "On the Loose", also fared well with the help of its music video receiving heavy rotation on MTV, and in December 1982, proved to be their breakthrough in America where it peaked at No. 26 on the Billboard chart in March 1983. "Wind Him Up" became the second single in America, peaking at No. 64 on Billboard the following month. Eventually, Worlds Apart was certified Gold in the US in 1983. The band opened for Jethro Tull on their North American tour in 1982.
Following on the success of Worlds Apart, the band won the 1982 Juno Award for "Most Promising Group of the Year."
A fifth album Heads or Tales was released in late 1983 and became another success. The lead single "The Flyer" fared well in Canada and also became their final U.S. hit, peaking at No. 79 on Billboard in November 1983. The follow-up single entitled "Scratching the Surface" became popular in Canada, peaking at No. 45 in April 1984.
Their sixth album, Behaviour, was released in 1985 and included the singles, "Listen to Your Heart" and "What Do I Know?" (charted No. 57 in Canada).

 Widely considered Saga's best album (and certainly their most commercially successful), the album has become the band's most recognizable work to date. The first song on the album, "On the Loose" was a single that hit #26 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #3 on Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks in 1981, landing Saga their best chart performance. The single was helped with a music video which appeared on MTV during the station's inaugural year on the air. Videos were also made for the singles "Wind Him Up" and "Amnesia". The success of the album was also largely credited to an expanded tour roster which saw the band enter new territories and venues, particularly in the United States, to expand their musical presence. Worlds Apart has been certified Platinum in Canada and Gold in Germany, Denmark, the United States and Norway.