A salute to the B-52H.
Not many people (or things) can achieve steady employment for 50+ years.
The B-52 has seen newer, sexier, faster, stealthier machines come and seen them retired.
There are pilots flying this thing today whose grandfathers flew it too when it was a new plane. The way things are looking, some of these current pilots will have sons who will fly it, too.
Where does time goes? Back in 1996 I was a senior at Ohio State (Mechanical Engineering) and although not a big Trekkie, a friend of mine convinced me to go watch Star Trek First Contact. I think it was very lucky as First Contact ended up being one of the better Star Trek movies, but the reason why it is so dear to me almost 20 years later is that...
So last night I was watching a documentary called "First Man on the Moon" in PBS and it was mainly about the life of Neil Armstrong. As Neil Armstrong and his crew came back from the Moon, they were celebrities touring the world (I think they mentioned 20+ countries in 40+ days) and they mentioned how taxing it was for them and how invasive of their privacy it became. That...
Hey! This weekend being the Memorial Day weekend is my personal-annual-Saving Private Ryan-Band of Brothers- screening weekend. Hope you all have a good, grateful and thoughtful holiday. Just for Trivia: The biggest and heaviest American single engine airplane was the P-47 Thunderbolt (or jug). It used the same engine that the Corsair and the Hellcat (both fighters used in the Pacific and carrier based), the Pratt and Whitney R-2800...
Maybe I am getting old (I am in the first half of my 40s) but suddenly after holding this model on my hand, I now have fallen in love with the Volkswagen T1 Bus. As I grew up in Honduras, I remember that when I was 6 or 7 years old, these buses (VW T1) were used for public transportation. I particularly remember once sitting in front with my brother...
The Chinese are coming!!! (not really, just wanted to say/write that). The Chinese made J-15 is a very interesting bird. First of all, it is a carrier based multirole aircraft so it would represent (it is still fairly new) the front line air/naval power projection of China. As such, it would potentially be the machine facing off with the American F/A-18E/F Super Hornet (since it replaced the F-14). Secondly, for...
No, this is not the Eurofighter Typhoon. (Well, it is, actually, only that one that is made in China.) The Chengdu J-10 is supposed to be an indigenous fighter developed in China. Although it is similar in looks to the Eurofighter, it has a lineage closer to an Israeli fighter called Lavi, which in turn resembled a little F-16. It turns out that Israel stopped development of the Lavi (it...
Since Pear Harbor in 1941 to the end of the war in 1945 the Japanese fielded one single fighter (other than the Oscar), that being the Mitsubishi Zero. By the end of WWII, the Americans in the Pacific Theater and in particular the Navy/Marines had fielded at least 4 different type of fighters; the most capable one (in my personal opinion) being the F-4U Corsair. The Corsair made use of...
Indeed it is true, dress dark and you look sexier.The F-15E is a variation of the pure fighter F-15. This thing is designed to go deep behind enemy lines (preferably undetected or jamming the hell out of the enemy), bomb the targets and then come out fighting (if needed) as the air superiority aircraft that it is. Having said that though, I always wondered why in 1981, then Israel took...
The A350-500 is the best looking A340 around. With more "muscle" (bigger engines) than the A340-300 and fitting right between the A340-300 and the A340-600 (looking at bit too long) the A340-500 was fit to fly very specialized missions. Singapore Airlines was operating two of the most extreme (nonstop) city pairs:- Singapore - New York (Newark) at 8,285 nautical miles, the longest by distance) passing through China - Siberia -...
The model from NewRay does not specify the scale of it, so I had to do some quick calculations and came up that the scale is about 1/132 (the real thing being 99 ft long which translates to 1,188 inches and the model measuring 9 inches long). So in terms of model size, it is a pretty good size model (quite noticeable). However, the B-29 although being a bomber turns...
One of the fondest memories I have as a child was the summer of 1982 during a trip to Hong Kong. We were in New York and supposed to board a flight to San Francisco to connect to another flight to HK. As it worked out, the NY-SF flight was overbooked by PanAm (yeah, even in those days they overbooked) but instead of losing time, we actually came ahead. PamAm...
