Some military aircraft pictures from my travels...

Personal with ordnance from the air is the only way to go! Get them any way you can. Now some Idiots are declaring him a US Citizen and it was illegal to target him by the Military.
 
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AF6872 said:
Personal with ordnance from the air is the only way to go! Get them any way you can. Now some Idiots are declaring him a US Citizen and it was illegal to target him by the Military.
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This is actually a VERY interesting Constitutional law question. He was undoubtedly a US citizen. Yes, he preached hatred, and supported "the violent overthrow of the US government by all means available including murdering citizens."

As a US citizen, he's due all the "due process" rights afforded him by the Bill of Rights.

The US targeted him for death and killed him (it may have been by the military or non-military, nobody is saying for sure and I doubt they will): no trial, no chance to rebut anything, present evidence of innocence, he's never been shown to have committed any "crime" per se, etc...so...is this "legal?

As I said, its a great legal question. And quite possibly, from a purely legal sense, this was probably illegal aka: murder.

But that's for the "legal beagles" to fight out...I'm not disappointed with the immediate situation.

Steve
USAFA ALO
USAFA '83


As I said, it's a great legal question.
 
He was an American citizen. If there's a groundswell of domestic terror cases from "lone wolves" this could be a much more interesting issue. Certainly an issue that needs resolution.
 
A great legal question.


http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Treason

Fortunately the respondent will not be able to make his case before the Supremes with a battery of government supplied lawyers. Treason as defined is punishable by death. His due process (if he was captured, returned and incarcerated in the United States) would probably be debatable. Since he was obliterated in a foreign country by forces unknown his judgment after all these years was a Hellfire from above. Case Closed.
 
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True, he had no trial.... does that mean he isn't guilty then? I read something about that somewhere....
 
Washington Post, January 27, 2010

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.
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Doesn't mean it's right. Don't get me wrong, glad he's dead, but it would be good to have a ruling from the courts on this. Maybe some supreme KYA.
 
Hey, remember when this thread was about aircraft? Yeah, me too.

It'd be mighty swell of y'all to take your barracks lawyerin' elsewhere. Thanks. :biggrin:
 
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scoutpilot said:
Hey, remember when this thread was about aircraft? Yeah, me too.

It'd be mighty swell of y'all to take your barracks lawyerin' elsewhere. Thanks. :biggrin:
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Excellent call! :thumb:

(Said one of the guilty!) :redface:

Steve
USAFA ALO
USAFA '83
 
IMG_2692.jpg


Also, Alliance Ft Worth and Ellington Field in Houston get a lot of interesting traffic!
 
Another of the initial "guilty" apologizes. Mea Culpa. It is an aircraft thread.
 
tpg said:
I must admit that I have found this thread interesting....simply put, I know nothing about how the things fly. I just know that I appreciated the skill and fortitude of the people in those front seats who took me from point "A" to Point what ever....

As such, I have a question that I have always wanted to ask a help pilot....how do you or better yet how hard is it to keep a flying object level and basically still while we infantry types used to speed rope out the sides or rear....I am just guessing that the weight change with the motion on the sides has to be interesting for the people in the front seats....

Or I could be wrong and there is nothing to it....Please explain if you will what it is like!

Thanks in advance! :thumb:
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I'll give you a typical officer/aviator answer: it depends.

First, let's discuss a few important underpinnings.

One thing to remember is that helicopters are always very concerned with power margin. Power margin is, in layman's terms, the difference between the power we need to use and the power we have available.

What is this "power" term? Well, specifically it's torque. Airplanes don't use torque as a measure, but in helicopters it's what really matters. Torque is essentially a measure of the power being sent through the drivetrain. Lots of factors affect torque available. The most notable are air temperature and air pressure. In aviation, we measure those in terms of "density altitude" (pressure altitude corrected for temperature). Density altitude (DA) determines how much torque your engine can safely produce.

In a perfect world, the torque would only be limited by the amount of power the driveline components can handle. In fancy pilot speak, we call that being "transmission limited." Realistically, high DA causes an aircraft to be "engine limited." Generally speaking, the pilots can only pull so much torque before the engine will exceed a temperature limit in such a situation.

In a power-limited situation, the amount of weight an aircraft can carry safely is reduced. More on that in a minute. First, we need to talk about weight in a general sense.

Aircraft are delicately balanced systems, so how much weight an aircraft is carrying is no less important than where it is carry it. Imagine a helicopter hovering. Think of the rotor disc as a wing (hence "rotary wing"...see what I did there?). The aircraft is suspended below the rotor like a pendulum. In order for the aircraft to be controllable, the center of gravity must remain within a certain range directly below the mast. If the CG were to fall outside that range, the aircraft would become uncontrollable. Thus, prior to each flight the pilots must compute the CG based on the weights of the cargo, weight of the fuel, and the location of each.

So how does this crap all come together to answer your question?

When an aircraft has a slim power margin, the amount of weight it can carry is reduced. Troops weigh a lot. So a fully laden aircraft may be operating close to its allowable gross weight based on its power available--that reduced torque limit we discussed. So there's the first factor: high relative gross weight.

When troops get on fast ropes, or exit the door on a jump, or go off the ramp, they cause a CG shift. The CG was calculated based on Joe weighing X amount and sitting in X seat. When Joe leaves, he takes all his weight with him. That affects the CG.

What you're left with is an aircraft that is power-limited dealing with rapid and unpredictable shifts in CG. The shifts are within the allowable range, but as the CG moves around the pilots must alter their control inputs and power setting to keep the aircraft in a nice, stable position. Since we're power-limited in this situation, pilots have to be very careful not to make control inputs that will overtorque the aircraft. That can be a tricky thing.

By now you're thinking that I've explained a lot of extraneous stuff but haven't answered your question of "is it hard?" When we factor in all the aforementioned mechanics, we have to consider one more important factor: the aircraft. A Chinook or a CH-53 is much, much larger than a Blackhawk, which is larger than a Huey. In much the same way that 3 passengers riding home from football practice slowed down my buddy's Pinto a lot more than they slowed down the team bus, the size of the aircraft relative to the size of the weight moving about also plays a role. The smaller the aircraft, the more Private Snuffy's clambering departure will makes things squirrelly (or as we like to say, "increase pilot workload).

Lastly, remember that the days of the simple Huey are gone. Modern airframes have advanced stability systems. Complex hydraulics damp the rotor system, requiring the pilot to make fewer inputs to maintain a stable hover.

So...here we are back at my original answer: it depends. In general, on a perfect day, in broad daylight, with lots of power, flat terrain and a large, light aircraft it's not too hard. At night, on a mountaintop, pulling max power? Well, that's why pilots get the chicks, right? Seriously, though, it's not terribly hard in many situations. In a few, it can be really hairy. But it's a mission the airframes were designed to perform.

And we didn't even mention wind... :wink:
 
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Scoutpilot:

So It Depends!:biggrin: On every variable we have no control over it but can hopefully compensate for it. Just like everything else in this world. Great rotor flight explanation though.:thumb: Learned a lot from that. Thought it was bad in a private aircraft with two pedals a yoke and throttle looking out the windscreen and trying to line it up. Now I know why my friend (Huey Pilot) became a better golfer. I guess he could do three thousand things at once.
 
Glad to be of service. Most of our old IPs from flight school were retired Vietnam-era warrant officers. They smoked in the cockpit and didn't have much patience for our pathetic antics.

Though this video is old, there's some good flying in it. Note how stable the UH-60s are during fastrope insertions.

http://youtu.be/16_43Pnynxo

And in case any of our young folks have any illusions about what business we're in here, this is reality. Day in and day out.

http://youtu.be/K1SrwjE8xxE

http://youtu.be/XNPUPDy87vs
 
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Hey Scout what do you think about these guys

“It's a year since Lockheed Martin won the contract to provide an unmanned cargo delivery system to the US military and now its first K-MAX helicopter is just about ready for duty.”

Saw this article on a tech blog I read. Here’s the link to the full article and it has video. Engadget K-MAX article

From what it sounds like in the thread you have to have a feel for the aircraft but you won’t get that with the unmanned version is it worth the effort when it come to rotary and the role in which they’re performing.

Edit: Oh yeah it made me kind of laugh a little when they showed the person controlling it with a Logitech PS3 style controller. And yes I play games and yes some people think I’m too old to but hey I grew up with an Atari 2600
 
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