Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt.
Jolly, especially at this time of year invaribaly invokes themes of red, usually a large gentleman with a flowing beard, red suit and a predilection for exotic pets…
A long time ago, in a country far far away, jolly was green, the Jolly Green Giant that came from afar to rescue downed airman, often deep into bad guy territory…
Evolving from the Jolly Grren Giant HH-3 to the Super Jolly Green Giant HH-53, and then into the SPECOPS MH-53 PAVE LOW
Heavily armed, but lightly armoured, relying heavily other aircraft to suppress enemy fire, Jolly Greens would push into unfriendly skies to locate and recover downed airman, many who were seriously wounded.
These operations would often involves dozens of aircraft….rescue helicopters, fighters and attack aircraft, tanker, command and control aircraft…and it was not unusual for one rescue to turn into another…
Anyone who is anyone knows that Top Gun is Tom Cruise’s principal contribution to Western culture and that TOPGUN is the place where real aviators do way cooler stuff than was ever in the movie…
Everyone also knows that movies like Top Gun are all about the toys and not about the boys…
Top Gun was released in 1986 and screened in New Zealand later that same year. I’m pretty sure it was 1986 because it was my first year in the Army and I used to crash on many weekends at my mate’s flat in Picton Ave…handily the corner with Riccarton Road on which the KFC sat…
The good thing about going to the movies in the 80s was that we were spared the torrent of media releases, spoilers, making-of, etc, etc, etc and going to the movie was actually the first part of the experience not the last…
At that time in NZ, Ready to Roll was the weekly TV Top 40 show and that was where we might get an inkling of what a movie was like from the music video. But in 1986, TVNZ had a falling out with the music producers who demanded a royalty for the screening of said music videos. TVNZ’s position was that it was providing free advertising for their product so no way…as a result, we missed some of the better music videos from the mid-80s, of which Top Gun‘s Danger Zone was one…
That Saturday night Top Gun was our movie night pick – we didn’t have great expectations, modern aviation based movies to that point topping out with Blue Thunder and hitting rock bottom with Iron Eagle. My mate Paul had other plans for the evening so I went with a chap named Dom Kelasih.
Now at the that time, our chosen mode of transport around Christchurch was motorbike. When I had come up from Invercargill in January for my infantry training, my first act, like very first, as soon as I rode into town, on arriving was to trade this…
…in on this…
I usually rode it with the side covers off as they were only thin ABS and used to keep cracking…this is it all packed for Christmas ’86…from memory, I was house-sitting for a friend in Christchurch and working over the holidays…this is probably just after the Top Gun incident…
Anyways…so Dom and I sent out in plenty of time from Picton Ave into the movies in the centre of town – from memory, it may have been the Embassy Theatre. The most direct route was through Hagley Park, and a road with some lovely gentle curves. Dom’s chariot of choice at the time was a 50cc ning-ning machine but he rode it like a maniac…right up to the point when the cop parked by the hospital waved him over – and then me,because we were obviously riding together…
We had been travelling a little over the 50kmh urban speed limit and this could have been expensive. I played the soldier card, good old country boy from the wilds from Burnham Military Camp just having a quiet weekend in the city but worried about getting lost and so my only concern was getting lost and keeping up with my guide. Many of these cops were ex-Army and/or Territorials and this was often a successful approach…as it was this time…for me…
Poor old Dom was not quite so lucky being somewhat deficit in some of the his critical documentation, like a license and maybe a warrant of fitness, and rode away a lot poorer…
As a result, we got to the theatre late, although this was the good old days of trailers and shorts so we still got to be seated before the main feature kicked off…seated right at the very front, in the veriest front row…so close to the screen that the action flew (literally for this movie!) beyond the extent of our vision…getting all that glorious ACM from neck-crickin’ proximity…
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Top Gun is probably the only movie that I have seen that was a pain in the neck in a positive sense – have seen many others that have been pains in the neck – and elsewhere – in more negative contexts…
Of course, we had to revisit it the following night…at a more sedate pace…and from seats more in the viewing sweet spot…
Top Gun…probably one of the best recruiting movies ever made…one of the first blockbusters that introduced an element – in a very Hollywood manner but who really wants to pay to see a military training movies..? – of what the military really does…
At the time it was also quite topical: earlier in 1986, there had been another misunderstanding between Libya and the US Navy over access to the Gulf of Sidra, one that had been resolved by naval aviation and ELDORADO CANYON was the follow on act to this later that year…As young soldiers, brought up in a Cold War environment (as close to it as you got down under), we wondered what these events might lead to, especially before the Challenger disaster was found to be the result of a cheap washer and not some Middle Eastern nutjob…
While I’m not convinced that it deserves its own day, Top Gun (two words, only first letters capped!), the movie, the soundtrack, and the ripper quotes, did shape and define our 80s…
This week, let the alphabet be your inspiration: find a string of letters. Try a multi-photo gallery to collect images of single characters. Find some beautiful typography, or look for letters hidden in natural forms.
Today, let a familiar shape inspire you…I wanted a broad theme that could be simple, fun, and festive, but also complex and introspective. And so, circle it is.
Circles, circles, circles…circles everywhere, doing my head in…that’s how it felt when I got to the undercarriage stage of the large scale TSR.2 I was building in 2014. Being a paper model, every shape is transformed into 3D parts from a 2D printed sheet…wheel generally mean lots of circles…
…painstakingly cut out with a circle cutter…
…and laminated…
…layer by layer…
…until something approximating a wheel is formed.
Normally the next stage would be to mount each wheel on a drill and apply a sanding stick to the spinning tread surface to form the necessary tyre profile, colouring the final product with a deep grey. On this project, however, I decided that I had reached a point where I couldn’t continue and still produce a model that would be worthy, so this was deemed a test/recce build with the real thing to occur this year hopefully before the Scale Model Expo in Wellington on ANZAC Weekend…
It’s a big build – 82cm long when complete – and generally well designed albeit with some areas for improvement and the scale begs for more detail to the added to the pilot’s cockpit – you can barely see into the WSO’s cockpit as the canopy is not designed to open…
Like a good book, some of the best movie experiences are those that we don’t want to end. Most times, though, it is best that they do end…we’ve all seen the series of hacked sequels that can follow a movie that makes money, that erode and diminish the original experience (did someone say George Lucas?). But there are those rare occasions where a story so well told begs for a sequel…
For me one of those such times is the 1964 classic 633 Squadron, based on Frederick E. Smith’s novel of the same name. Although hinted at in the book, the movie leaves the story of Grenville and Hilde hanging: she’s stranded in England, he’s seriously injured, possibly dying, in a Norwegian field…
Rather than succumb to the current plague of remaking of classic movies, I’d like to see that sequel that answers that question, that fulfils the expectation set at the end of the book (sorry, you’ll have to read it!). Smith wrote another five or six sequels to the original novel but I always felt that these were rather 2D products more focussing on paying the rent than developing the promise of the original. Only Operation Valkyrie comes close and possibly it would be a vehicle for the sequel that closes both the Svartfjord story and that of Grenville and Hilde, Adams, Hoppy and the other survivors; and whatever happened to Maisie (Rosie in the movie) the buxom lass who waved them all off from the bar of the Black Swan…?
I came across this article on the Information Dominance Corps Self Synchronization (yes, it is bit of mouthful) Facebook feed…once upon a time this argument may have mattered but now it is nothing more than ambient noise. We have far more important things to worry about in the UAS world than mindless semantic games…
Does it matter really if I call this a plane, an aircraft or an airplane?
Or this a helicopter, a whokka, a helo, a rotary-wing aircraft or a whirlybird.
Or this, a car, an automobile or a vehicle?
No…it doesn’t, not in normal colloquial speech and writing…many years ago, I remember great battles ranging over whether vehicles like LAVIII and Stryker were medium infantry, mech infantry or some weirdo thing called heavy infantry. This went on for months and about the points of agreement were that they were neither the light infantry or tanks so dear to our hearts. In the end, the general issued an all-points stating that he didn’t care if they were called the Third Pink Flying Pig Brigade and that he was more interested in what we could do with these things.
Dictionaries have already added the unmanned aircraft definition of ‘drone’ so there is not much point arguing the toss anymore. What is important is that we use the correct terminology when we talk about unmanned aircraft within our community and when we engage with external audiences. The general public can quite happily refer to them as drones, just all of us equally happily refer to cars, planes and choppers…
Personally I think that we need to stop treating UAS as something mystical and special and start to treat them simply as what they: unmanned aircraft…aircraft that do not normally operate with an onboard pilot…and within unmanned aircraft, we have , in our technically correct lexicon, remote-piloted aircraft, optionally-piloted aircraft, remote control aircraft, drones (in the technical sense), etc,etc…
The more that we treat UAS as something special, the harder we make it employ properly and integrate them in to our airspace. Do we really need Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle or UCAV, or would unmanned combat aircraft suffice? …and unmanned fighter, unmanned bomber, unmanned transport etc? Hmmm…
In the not too distant future…the offshore patrol vessel, HMNZS Otago, slips silently across the moonlit Pacific, her destination, a small island nation experiencing unrest. Her mission, the recovery of an family of expatriate Kiwis being held for ransom…
P148, the offshore patrol vessel, HMNZS Otago
In her hangar, RNZAF and special operations support personnel are assembling a dozen unusual-looking devices, scarcely worth of the title ‘aircraft’. This is the first operational deployment of the Martin ‘jet’ pack – which is not actually a jet at all but two ducted fans able to carry soldier in combat equipment over 100 kilometres – after a period of evaluation and experimentation by the New Zealand Defence Force.
Otago had sailed four days previously, as an option should other alternatives to recover the family fail. Although she could deploy with a RNZAF SH-2(G)I Super Seasprite helicopter, the ‘Sprite was unable to carry a full recovery team and was considered too noisy for the level of stealth and deniability needed for this mission. The reef around the objective rendered it difficult to deploy and recovery a force using small boats. Enter the jetpack…
Although New Zealand had introduced a fleet of all-new military helicopter in the early mid-2010s (twenty-tens? twenty-teens?), the problem it faces is not so much that it does not not have enough of them but that it does not have enough or big enough flight decks to operate them from in the vastness of its South Pacific area of responsibility. One solution to this problem comes from classic Kiwi ingenuity: since 2004, a small company in New Zealand’s South Island has been working on development of a jet pack that would fulfil the promises of 1960s engineers for a personal aviation capability.
After a two year period of evaluation, experimentation and innovation, the partnership between the Martin Aircraft Company and the Defence Force has evolved the Jetpack into a stealthy reliable vehicle that not only meets all expectations for operational and technical airworthiness but which is also able to be operated by soldiers after a short but intense four week training course. The heart of the Jetpack that enables it to be operated by relatively inexperienced (from an aviation perspective) personnel is the New Zealand-designed flight control system. Although the operator can take control of the jetpack when necessary, especially to avoid potential obstacles and other hazards on landing, for the most part of their journey, they are passengers as the Jetpack flies its preprogrammed course under the control of an external remote control station. Full military operator certification is awarded after a three month course conducted at the Central Flying School at RNZAF Ohakea.
Late the previous day, Otago had surveyed the operations landing zone with one of its two RQ-84K UAS and conducted a final daylight reconnaissance over the objective. The data from this mission has been processing into a high resolution 3D dataset that updates the recovery force’s mission planning and rehearsal system – a simulation on some seriously bad steroids; and also allows flight planners to identify and avoid any potential hazards along the ingress and egress routes. As the mission preparation progresses, the two RQ-84s maintain a tag team watch over the landing zone and objective, monitoring any changes that may affect the mission. Powered by a lightweight hydrogen fuel cell, each RQ-84 has an endurance of six hours which provides an on-station period of four hours, with the remaining time for handover between aircraft and the transit from Otago’s over the horizon location.
RQ-84 – Kiwi tech – flying now
At 0300, twelve jetpacks stood ready on Otago’s flight deck: one for each of the ten person recovery team and two to carry additional stores. Each soldier completed a final check of their own and their comrades’ equipment…it was time and the ground support crew assisted each to strap into his jetpack, their personal weapons across their chests for ease of access, just in case…at 0320, the hand signal was given for engine start and each soldier, slipped their jetpacks master arm switch to the ‘on’ position, signifying that each was ready for launch. The control station operators authorised the launch and each jetpack first hovered above the deck and on completion of flight systems checks, lifted off into the darkness, the only sound a deep hum that quickly faded into the darkness – reducing the lawnmower-like sound signature of the original Martin jet packs had been on of the major challenges and successes of the Defence Force programme.
The dozen jetpacks hummed through the night a hundred feet over the swell, almost invisible as they flew towards the moon and the island. The ingress route stayed over water for as long as possible before cutting across the reef and the shoreline to the landing zone. Though their night vision goggles, the soldiers could see massive trees, all mapped to within centimetres by the UAS imagery, slipping by to their left and right as the jetpacks dropped to twenty feet and autonomously navigated along an overgrown logging track at 30 knots. Overheard the circling RQ-84 tracked their thermal signatures, confirming the the operators saw on their screen. Approaching the landing zone, the jetpacks slowed to a hover and gently touched down in the clearing selected as the landing zone.
Hitting their quick release connections, each member dismounted their steed and set the flight control to ‘return to base’, sending each jetpack back to Otago; the two cargo jetpacks were unloaded and also RTB’d. as the recovery force moved to its objective, the jetbacks would be refueled on Otago and readied for the extraction phase of the operation.
The recovery force moved swiftly through the low vegetation, the direct thermal feed from the RQ-84 confirming the absence of any people along their – it wasn’t considered likely that they would encounter any thermally-stealthed adversaries on this job. At the perimeter of their objective, each team members took up positions where they could observe the low bungalow and its approaches – they would maintain this observation for the hour before sunrise. Through thermal imagers they could identify one large group that was the two adults and two children that were the object of the recovery, and the individual signatures, two sleeping, two moving around the building, of the criminal elements holding them.
Just before dawn’s first light, advancing in the ‘special ops duck walk’, two teams approached the building, entering it from two directions. The thuds of 40mm less-lethal rounds put down two criminals to be quickly bound and secured; another signified the less-lethal neutralisation of one of the sleepers. The last sat up, pistol in hand, to be greeted by the spitting muzzle of a suppressed carbine – lights out. Secured, the hostages are checked for injuries and escorted from the house to the beachfront extraction area, still tracked by the unmanned aircraft overhead.
A kilometre away, a car roars into life and starts to move towards the extraction area – innocuous or not, this is a threat to the recovery phase: the RQ-84 locks onto the thermal signature of its engine and releases a Smart Dart from under its wingroot. Tracking the engine’s heat and boosted to terminal velocity by a small rocket, the Smart Dart brings the vehicle to a grinding halt as it plunges through the engine block. The driver sits surprised but unhurt behind the wheel.
Smart Dart
As the assault had commenced, Otago had relaunched the jetpacks and now their hum could be heard as they skimmed above the waves on a direct course for the extraction area, landing on the beach. The hostages were strapped into jet packs, the two children flying with soldiers, and launched back to Otago, which was ‘steaming’ at full speed towards the coast to reduce the flight time. The hostages on their way, and with no sign of a response to the raid, the remaining members of the recovery team ‘saddled up’ and launched themselves back to the waiting naval vessel…
All fiction, of course, and all totally implausible, of course, everybody knows that there’s no military application for things like the jetpack or RQ-84, of course…
But these are the types of devices that modern militaries need to start coming to grips with, either for introduction into their own forces or countering them when their adversaries start to employ them…individual air transport is coming – how are you going to deal with it? There only room in the sand for so many heads, you know…small UAS with extended endurance combined with state of the art ISR and kinetic payloads are coming...”Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you..?”
Martin jetpack test flight – more Kiwi tech
Testing the ballistic safety parachute on the jetpack – this activates if for any reason the jetpack becomes unflyable
Please note that these images show the early versions of the jetpack with the shoulder mounted ducted fans. The latest iteration of the design, known as P.12 for Prototype 12, has shifted the fans to a waist position that can be seen in this test flight:
Tonto used to say “We? White man..?” I haven’t seen the new version of The Lone Ranger so I’m not sure if Johnny Depp resists the temptation to weird this classic out…
The first thing that I like about this article is that it starts with “…drones, ships, and planes have all taken part in the bombardment...” and avoids the tendency of the uninformed to focus solely on the drone aspect of these attacks. Yes, for sure, we all know that ‘drone‘ isn’t the right word from a UAS geek perspective but as has been pointed out to me, the nice people at Merriam-Webster (the dictionary you use when you can’t afford real English!) still include as one of the definitions of drone “…an unmanned aircraft or ship guided by remote control…” Unfortunately, that definition is more apt than its other two definitions of drone as either “…a stingless male bee (as of the honeybee) that has the role of mating with the queen and does not gather nectar or pollen…” when we all know that the modern use can both collect and sting; or, and I had not seen this one before, “…one that lives on the labors of others…” although one might offer than a number of commentators on the so-called Drone Wars may be doing this.
The author asks why AQ continues to grow if this campaign has been so apparently successful – wasn’t it just not so long ago that victory in the war on terror was declared? Just as all the US and UK Embassy’s slammed the doors behind them as they knuckle down for yet another AQ-inspired assault? His answer? “…Faulty assumptions and a mistaken focus paired with a resilient, adaptive enemy…” I think that he is absolutely right and to these I would add reliance on resurgent but disproven ‘shock and awe‘ doctrine – we will so dazzle them with our technology that they can not fail to be overcome…yup…hasn’t worked for the last two decades and it’s not going to now…
Among the faulty assumptions are a demonstration of a total lack of grasp of military operations, culture and human factors – that, today, there are still people in power that believe that what work in one place will, without any supporting evidence work somewhere else: Yemen is not Pakistan is not Afghanistan is not Iraq. This is the same fundamental hubris error that the US made attempting to translate FM 3-24 from its successful implementation in Iraq to the total basket case that is Afghanistan (at any time).
Another is that there is some sort of subtle but vital distinction between launching strikes from an unmanned aircraft and launching them from a manned aircraft or a naval vessel or sharing the luff with a special operations team. Apart from avoiding the potential for inconvenient bodies to be displayed during News at 6, strikes from unmanned aircraft are really, as we all know deep down inside, just another form of national power employed in support of national objectives.
But…there’s always a but…might we assume that an inherent reluctance to be seen to put blood on the line by using drones further undermines national credibility especially in the absence of a declared or properly recognised or accepted conflict? Would the kinetic cross-border campaign against proponents of terror be more credible if it was conducted with manned resources i.e. to be specific, if human resources (a term I generally hate as aren’t resources things to be exploited?) aka nationals of the nation waging the campaign were actually doing the border crossing bit and not, as in the case of unmanned aircraft strikes, sitting back in the relative safety and comfort of an undisclosed top-secret location?
Although his model was flawed and needs further development, David Kilcullen was right – the accidental guerrilla not only exists but is created by precisely this sort of heavy-handed, poorly-formulated use of force. As the author of the article points out, the current campaign in Yemen is focusing on individuals and not on countering or neutralising the actual network in which they exist: control the water and the fish are yours for the taking…continue to play a short game and you are destined to play the short game forever – sort of like Happy Gilmore Hell…The article concludes:
The United States can do a lot of good in Yemen, but it can also do a lot of harm. And right now it is playing a dangerous game, firing missiles at targets in the hopes that it can kill enough men to keep AQAP from plotting, planning, and launching an attack from Yemen. After this terrorism alert that has sent America’s entire diplomatic and intelligence operatives in nearly two dozen countries scrambling, it may be time to rethink that approach in favor of a strategy that’s more sustainable — and more sensible too.
When you consider this statement – which I totally agree with – you might see the fundamental flaw (and irony) of a campaign strategy that employs shock and awe to conduct attrition warfare. As I recall, after the bloodbaths of WW1 and its sequel, we decided that we could do this war-fighting thing a lot smarter and developed concepts of manouevrism and asymmetry. It looks like the only ones that read all those books were the bad guys…
Top Gun was released in 1986 and screened in New Zealand later that same year. I’m pretty sure it was 1986 because it was my first year in the Army and I used to crash on many weekends at my mate’s flat in Picton Ave…handily the corner with Riccarton Road on which the KFC sat…
The World According to Me... 