Thursday, April 12, 2012

A Big Week for Things that Fly (or Don't)

This just in!!!  All or the debate over what to do about the North Korean "missile" launch has fallen to pieces. . .or rather, the missile has fallen to pieces. .

According to ABC news, the first stage of the three stage rocket worked as planned, but the second -and therefore third- stages did not fire.

This comes at the end of what has been a tragic week for military aviation.  Last Friday, a Navy F/A-18 crashed into an apartment building in Virginia, thankfully no one was killed.  To add to this, yesterday two marines were killed when an MV-22 Osprey crashed during a training mission in Morocco.

Amidst this background, headway is being made toward parsing the DOD's 30 year aviation plan.  It calls for replacement craft for the F-22 (and potentially the F-35) and the F/A-18, as well as a huge number of drones and optionally manned aircraft.  It is not surprising that the DOD is looking this far ahead, as one commenter points out, given that it took the F-22 nearly 35 years to go from paper service.

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