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Sometimes even generals come to their senses. The notion of airborne nuclear reactors proved too worrisome even for the military, despite the brilliant failsafe plan of catastrophic ditching into water.
Original article here.
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Sorry about my inexpert cutting and pasting, but I think you get the idea.
I would pay good money to see this built and in action. For a clearer view and description, visit the link below.
Original article here.
If you lease a car for two years from any car company, you would still say it's "my" car. You wouldn't go around telling people "no that's not my car, it actually belongs to X company, I'm just leasing it." Of course you wouldn't, that would be ridiculous! But apparently the FAA has a very different set of rules. Case in point, the US Department of Transportation recently fined a non-profit air ambulance company (Mercy Flights of Medford, Oregon) $30,000 for saying that the helicopter they are leasing is "ours".
You can read the details here. Thank goodness our government has the time and money to keep such blatant violations under control!
I stumbled across
this essay quite by accident. I was laughing at the image to the right (seriously? snow globes? they must have watched that short by Pixar where the itty bitty plastic snowman tries to blow up his globe to reach the hot mermaid in the snow globe next to his and they thought it was reality TV). Under that image was a link to the following essay,
Terrorism, Tweezers, and Terminal Madness: An Essay On Security. It's not a short read, but it is definitely worth reading if you want a pilot's perspective on what airline security has become since September 11, 2001. Perhaps even more interesting is the list of air crimes at the end of the essay, sorted by date, starting in 1970.
With all this talk of ground-effect craft on WU recently, perhaps you feel like owning one, and not just a rusting cold-war relic either. Well now you can as self-taught New Zealand mechanic Rudy Heeman has decided to sell the pride and joy it took him 10 years to build, a flying hovercraft.
At low speeds the vehicle behaves much as any hovercraft would, covering most surfaces with the usual ease, but over 70 km/h the craft's detachable lightweight wings kick in and it takes to the air. But despite being surprisingly nimble in flight, Heeman's invention, called the "WIG", doesn't require a pilot's license to fly (in New Zealand at least) since like all hovercraft it is classed as a marine vehicle. Video in the link (
Sky News).
Category: Accidents, Disasters, Flight, Military, Atomic Power and Other Nuclear Matters, 1950's