The latest issue of Air & Space magazine is out and it has some great articles.

I especially liked the articles on Mars rovers, the upcoming disposition of the remaining space shuttles, MiG vs F-18 war games, and the great Kelly Johnson. 

Check it out online

The attached video was filmed by some Air Force Joint Tactical Air Controllers (JTAC) in Tal Afar, west of Mosul, in Iraq

A marine unit got pinned down in the street. They set their video camera on the bumper of their armored HUM-V, which they were using for cover.
Keep an eye on the opposing van parked just down the street.

You can hear them shooting back and forth. The rounds you can hear are from the Marines, and the ones you hear pinging  against the side of the
vehicle with no accompanying pop are from the bad guys.

When the Marine says they just fired the "rifle," it means an F-16 aircraft just launched a Maverick missile. You can hear it come in and
see it strike the vehicle the bad guys were using for cover.

k6Air_Force.wmv (1.56 mb)

Continental and two former employees are on trial for involuntary manslaughter, for having allowed a piece of titanium known as a wear strip to drop off one of the airline's DC-10 planes as it taxied down the runway two aircraft ahead of the fateful Air France Concorde, on a hot July afternoon in 2000. Five minutes later, the Concorde, according to the charges, rolled over the debris, which pierced one of its tires, sending pieces of rubber flying. One piece of rubber apparently penetrated the Concorde's full fuel tank, which exploded in fire. As traffic controllers screamed "You have flames! You have flames!" to the pilots, the blazing Concorde plummeted into a hotel, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground.

...Investigators have also raised other concerns: the doomed Concorde appeared to be overloaded with luggage from its planeload of German tourists, who were flying to meet their cruise liner in New York City; one of two routine daily runway sweeps at Charles de Gaulle Airport had reportedly been cancelled that day; and Concorde workers had allegedly neglected to replace a crucial tire spacer on the aircraft in maintenance work four days before the crash. Continental is the only company charged, along with the firm's former welder John Taylor, who fixed the titanium strip to the Continental DC-10, and his supervisor Stanley Ford. The French are also going after their own. In the same trial, Concorde's former head of testing Henri Perrier and former chief engineer Jacques Herubel as well as France's retired civil aviation chief Claude Frantzen are also charged with involuntary manslaughter for having failed to detect and fix faults in the aircraft that investigators believe contributed to the crash. If found guilty, the individuals may face prison terms of up to three years plus fines of about $71,000 each. Continental faces a fine of as much as $520,000.

Full Article

As the yearlong campaign to clean its prized B-17 draws to a close, the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum has the next target already in its sights: the restoration of the Flying Fortress to a World War II appearance.

Full Article

Wow, you can't make this up.

"Don't worry, it wasn't with a nuclear bomb! Last week, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory accidentally blew up part of a building with "a gun which acts like a Civil War Cannon". Even crazier, in a way.

According to an "Occurrence Report" obtained by the non-profit Project on Government Oversight (POGO), researchers blew up their building with a powerful cannon used to study the types of forces produced by a nuclear explosion"

Full Ariticle on Gawker

An amazing achievement that shows the innovation of private industry.  I can't wait to see these aircraft fly!

Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceshipOne (SS1) designer, Burt Rutan, today reveal SS2 to the public for the first time since construction of the world’s first manned commercial spaceship began in 2007. SS2 has been designed to take many thousands of private astronauts into space after test programming and all required U.S. government licensing has been completed.

Full Article

The recent Shuttle mission to the International Space Station has brought ESA’s Columbus module a step nearer to beginning an ambitious experiment to track global maritime traffic from space.

Full Article- ESA Atlantis leaves Columbus with a radio eye on Earth’s sea traffic

Early in World War II, German U-boats were sinking alarming numbers of Allied freighters & oil tankers along the eastern seaboard of the United States, with a peak of around 80 ships being sunk per month. This was clearly a National emergency & we needed a technological miracle. Since noisy patrol aircraft could not “sneak up” on these enemy submarines in order to attack them successfully, a stand-off, glider-type weapon was proposed. Ultimately, the BATair-to-surface missile (ASM-N-2: Special Weapons Ordnance Device - SWOD Mk 9) was the first fully automatic guided-missile to be used operationally by any of the combatants during WWII (first combat drop: April 23, 1945; first combat success: April 28, 1945) and was active in the arsenal of the United States Navy from 1945 through 1953. During the latter parts of WWII, there were many wire-, radio-, and television-guided bombs, either glider-type or self-propelled, that were used by the Germans and Americans (e.g., Henschel Hs-293, GB-4), however, the BAT was the very first, fully-automatic, weapon system, the archetype of what we now term "fire and forget" weaponry. Once launched, theBAT went solo, guided to its target by an early S-band radar unit (see below), developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Family Tree & History of the ASM-N-2 BAT Glide Bomb

The secret is out. The U.S. Air Force has confirmed the existence of the “Beast of Kandahar” UAV that was seen flying out of Afghanistan in late 2007. The jet aircraft – a tailless flying wing with sensor pods faired into the upper surface of each wing – is the RQ-170 Sentinel, developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. An Air Force official revealed to Aviation Week Friday afternoon that the service is “developing a stealthy unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed combat forces.”

Full Article, Aviation Week U.S. Air Force Reveals Operational Stealth UAV