Here are photos from my visit last week.

The open source flight simulator project has just released Flightgear 2.0.

...FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

It looks great and the price is right so check it out!

FlightGear Web Siite

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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.

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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

From the Saskatoon Control Tower as the crew of Avro Lancaster C-GVRA did a couple of passes at YXE.

Photos of the P-75 Eagle post restoration at the USAF Museum.

Photos of the P-75 Eagle during restoration at the USAF Museum.

Here photos from my recent visit.

I recently had a chance to visit the Kalamazoo Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

The Zoo is one of the best air museums in the midwest and well worth a visit.  The museum has expanded to include a nice collection of space related items in addition to its great collection of modern jets and World War 2 era aircraft.  Their web site does a poor job of communicating the size of their collection.

Photos from visit can be found here.

I recently participated in a podcast with author P.W. Singer about his new book, "Wired for War."

What happens when science fiction becomes battlefield reality?
An amazing revolution is taking place on the battlefield, starting to change not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. This upheaval is already afoot -- remote-controlled drones take out terrorists in Afghanistan, while the number of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero to 12,000 over the last five years.  But it is only the start. Military officers quietly acknowledge that new prototypes will soon make human fighter pilots obsolete, while the Pentagon researches tiny robots the size of flies to carry out reconnaissance work now handled by elite Special Forces troops.

Wired for War takes the reader on a journey to meet all the various players in this strange new world of war: odd-ball roboticists working in latter-day “skunk works” in the midst of suburbia; military pilots flying combat mission from their office cubicles outside Las Vegas; the Iraqi insurgents who are their targets; journalists trying to figure out just how to cover robots at war; and human rights activists wrestling with what is right and wrong in a world where our wars are increasingly being handed over to machines.

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