Well done !
Listen well the special noise of the Queen
To Langley AFB home of the 1st FW
related:...
... Here’s the full statement Cdr. Jeannie Groeneveld of Naval Air Forces gave us last night:
T-45C flights resumed on Tuesday, with only our most experienced instructor pilots flying, after being briefed on updated mitigations and operating procedures. Our primary goal is to learn how our pilots adapt to the new mask configuration and to identify potential concerns. Since resuming flight operations we have had one crew report minor post-flight symptoms (this was one flight out of 92 flown over the two days). During their flight, the two instructors flew to the maximum altitude allowed with the new mask (10,000 feet cabin altitude) and conducted dynamic flight maneuvers, surpassing 4 Gs, to better understand the limitations of the new procedures.
Our interviewed the pilots to understand exactly what they experienced and what may have caused their symptoms (minor headaches). After the in-depth interview and given that the aircrew’s symptoms subsided as they descended, the medical team has assessed that the discomfort was due to increased activity — pulling G’s at altitude, similar to what one would experience when climbing or performing intense exercise at higher altitude. They have found no indications that the symptoms were induced by anything related to the plane or its systems (based on the fact the symptoms cleared when they descended to lower altitude), but as a precaution we sent a team of engineers to Kingsville to inspect the aircraft.
Based on feedback from the Instructor Pilots, we have implemented further precautionary measures, to include:
Safety is our priority; we will ensure that all mitigations are implemented, required procedural changes identified and communicated with all our aviators.
- Maximum flight altitude of 5,000 MSL, pilots are limited to less than 2Gs when flying.
- We are reevaluating the new mask configuration based on feedback aircrew conveyed after their flights.
source:The U.S. Navy has further restricted flying in the T-45C Goshawk to 5,000 ft. maximum altitude and 2-g maneuvers after one instructor pilot reported headaches after performing dynamic flying in the troubled tandem-seat trainer.
The new flight restrictions come less than a week after the T-45C resumed flying, following a 12-day “operational pause” implemented by Navy leadership after a spike in hypoxia-like physiological episodes reported by pilots.
Instructor pilots were refusing to fly the jet, citing problems with the T-45C’s onboard oxygen generator system (Obogs). Flight operations resumed on April 18, but flying was limited to 10,000 ft. maximum cabin altitude to avoid hooking into the Obogs while engineers investigated the issue. Pilots were told not to perform sustained high-g maneuvers, but they now cannot go past 2 g.
Aviation Week learned of another hypoxia-related incident at Naval Air Station Kingsville, Texas, earlier this week involving one of two instructor pilots that were flying at those limits while testing a new oxygen mask configuration.
The Navy confirmed the incident, saying one pilot reported minor headaches and the symptoms had subsided as the aircraft descended. A medical team assessed that this discomfort resulted from the high g-forces that were being experienced at the upper edge of the 10,000-ft. altitude limit. The pilots had been conducting dynamic flight maneuvers above 4 g at 10,000 ft. with the adjusted masks “to better understand the limitations of the new procedures,” a Navy spokeswoman said on April 21. “This was one flight out of 92 flown over the two days.
“Based on feedback from the instructor pilots, we have implemented further precautionary measures,” she adds. “We [also] sent a team of engineers to Kingsville to inspect the aircraft.”
Instructor pilots have already reported concerns about the new mask configuration being used, a congressional staffer with knowledge of the issue says. Pilots are finding it uncomfortable to breathe through the modified mask. Another problem is that the new system requires the pilot to re-hook the Obogs if he or she needs to use the emergency oxygen, which is not ideal.
“We are re-evaluating the new mask configuration based on feedback aircrew conveyed after their flights,” the Navy says. “Safety is our priority; we will ensure that all mitigations are implemented, required procedural changes identified and communicated with all our aviators.”
The 29-year-old training aircraft, based on the British Aerospace Hawk, typically can fly higher than 42,000 ft. It is the Navy and ’ primary training aircraft for pilots destined to fly warplanes aboard aircraft carriers. The Navy has set up an Aeromedical Crisis Action Team to try solve the hypoxia issue.
The temporary grounding of the T-45 comes on the heels of problems with the Boeing fleet. Reports of oxygen deprivation and cabin decompression sickness by pilots flying all variants, including the Growler, have increased in recent years. The Navy has yet to pinpoint the cause of the problem, but is investigating the oxygen systems of both the T-45 and F/A-18-series fighter.
Even if the port is unusable, the coastal oil delivery system that transports fuel from the offshore ship to the coast by pipeline
F-15E, F-16 alsoUS: First Test of Upgraded Nuclear Bomb a Success
Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories are claiming success with the first in a new series of test flights involving an upgraded version of a nuclear bomb that has been part of the US arsenal for decades….
An F-16 from Nellis Air Force Base dropped an inert version of the weapon over the Nevada desert last month to test its non-nuclear functions as well as the plane's ability to carry the [B61-12] bomb.With a mere puff of dust, the mock bomb landed in a dry lake bed at the Tonopah Test Range."It's great to see things all come together: the weapon design, the test preparation, the aircraft, the range and the people who made it happen," Anna Schauer, director of Sandia's Stockpile Resource Center, said in a statement.
More test flights are planned over the next three years, and officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration said the first production unit of the B61-12 — developed under what is called the Life Extension Program — is scheduled to be completed in 2020.The B61-12 consolidates and replaces four older versions in the nation's nuclear arsenal.
It's outfitted with a new tail-kit assembly and other hardware.
From airforce-technology.com: Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center (AFNWC) Air-Delivered Capabilities director Paul Waugh said: “The B61-12 gravity bomb ensures the current capability for the air-delivered leg of the US strategic nuclear triad well into the future for both bombers and dual-capable aircraft supporting North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).”The new B61-12 bomb will be compatible with the B-2A, B-21, F-15E, F-16C/D, F-16 MLU, F-35 and PA-200 Aircraft.
View attachment 38124
EC-130H Compass Call Used against ISIS communications
here's how the spin doctors handled ("handled") it:does anyone still follow
Aircraft Carriers III
?
Yesterday at 7:49 AM
or you've had enough after
'Powerful' USS Carl Vinson steams toward North Korea Published April 14, 2017
and the carrier on the Equator at that time?
... goes on in the subsequent post due to size limit:In early April, officials at U.S. Pacific Command were developing plans to respond to a sharp rise in tensions with North Korea. Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered PACOM Commander Adm. Harry Harris to come up with “robust and sustainable” options for North Korea if President Trump ordered a strike on the rogue regime, according to four defense officials who spoke on background.
Harris was traveling in Washington away from his Hawaii base of operations, something that he dislikes because, in his view, something always seems to happen when he’s not in his office. At one point that week, top PACOM officials called Harris to recommend that Vinson cancel its upcoming trip to Australia and make its way back to the waters near North Korea where the carrier had just been in March, thus serving as one of the responses to Mattis’s directive that they explore military options for the Trump administration.
The plan was to truncate a secretive exercise with the Australians near Indonesia, to cancel Vinson’s visit to Perth and then head the direction of the Korean Peninsula — meaning Vinson would be off North Korea by the end of the month.
Changing an aircraft carrier’s schedule is not a small muscle movement. Host nations expecting a visit from the mighty U.S. big decks have to do a fair amount of leg work to prepare for the visit. Furthermore, a good number of sailors had family flying out to Australia to meet their sailors. An Australia port visit is the holy grail for sailors on a Western Pacific deployment.
The easiest thing to do, PACOM officials decided, would be send out a press release announcing the canceled port visit — making it easier for families to get their money back from airlines and letting all parties know why the Vinson wouldn’t be visiting the Land Down Under.
And it would have another effect: it would put North Korea on notice by announcing the plans in a press release, which included language that not-so-subtly dropped that Harris had “directed the Carl Vinson Strike Group to sail north and report on station in the western Pacific Ocean after departing Singapore April, 8,” roughly the direction North Korea lies from Singapore. A press release, PACOM officials thought, was the perfect solution to wrap up all the loose ends from the carrier’s schedule change.
Sending the release with the thinly veiled language would be a message to North Korea and nervous allies alike: The Navy’s big guns were on the way so behave accordingly.
“A press release was really the only option,” one official said.
But that’s when things went haywire.
Over the course of 10 days, a series of gaffes and missteps throughout the entire national security structure to its highest levels would raise the specter of a nuclear showdown, send the U.S. and Chinese governments into crisis mode, and expose alarming communication deficiencies within the American military at large. The breakdown fueled a war frenzy at major newspapers and networks, running with the narrative that Trump was diverting the carrier personally to send a message, outlandish claims made without checking for facts until the crisis rhetoric had spun out of control.
This behind-the-scenes account is based on interviews with nearly a dozen defense officials in Washington, and in the Pacific, all of whom spoke to Navy Times on the condition of anonymity to relay in candid terms how the carrier's movement blew up from a routine Navy operation to a full-on crisis.
The war drums began beating on April 8, the day a press release came out from U.S. 3rd Fleet announcing the carrier’s move. U.S. 3rd Fleet has operational control of Vinson during its tour of the Pacific. But two hours before the 3rd Fleet's press statement hit the streets, Reuters news agency published a story that said the Vinson Strike Group, which was visiting Singapore at the time, would proceed from there to the waters off North Korea to send a message to the rogue Korean regime, which is poised to detonate the country’s sixth nuclear bomb test.
The Reuters story, followed by the unusual move from the Navy of discussing ship movements, created an initial flurry of press reports and speculation. Coming just two days after Trump’s surprising and widely praised decision to strike the Assad regime in Syria for its chemical attack on Syrian civilians, speculation swirled that the president was feeling emboldened. Maybe Korean leader Kim Jong Un would be the next recipient of a Trump-ordered barrage of cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, the Vinson and its escorts were not heading north. They were moving in the opposite direction, belying the conjecture that a strike on North Korea was imminent.
Nevertheless, by April 9, breathless news reports were proliferating through the press, including Navy Times. CNN and the other networks were beginning to get on a war footing. The New York Times claimed that “Rerouting the naval armada is President Trump’s latest escalation in force against a potential adversary,” although Trump doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the order at all.
“The media just went nuts,” one source with close knowledge of the situation said.
When asked about the Vinson’s movement during an appearance on Fox News, Army Gen. H. R. McMaster, President Trump’s national security advisor, said the step was “prudent” and went on to state the commitment by the U.S. to getting nuclear weapons off the Korean Peninsula.
McMaster seemed to be saying that Harris’s move was a logical one under the broader guidance from Mattis and Trump's team on the National Security Council to draw up military options for North Korea. But the interview was the first in a string of missed opportunities for senior defense officials to correct the record on what Vinson was doing. Instead, everyone from McMaster and Mattis to the president himself inaccurately stated what Vinson's intentions were.
It was at this early phase when things could have been corrected with an additional release from PACOM, according to defense officials who spoke to Navy Times, an assessment many experts agreed with.
It would have been a quick and easy fix if the military had simply sent out a press release detailing Vinson’s plans and clarifying the initial release, said Brian Clark, retired Navy officer who was a senior aide to former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A flawed narrative might have been stopped in its tracks and prevented rattling a region on the brink of conflict, he said.
“It’s really shocking that they let this go for nearly two weeks without trying to correct the record,” he said.
...
source:‘We’re sending an armada’
On April 10, President Trump threw gasoline on a growing fire by implying in an interview with Fox Business News that the administration had directed the carrier to proceed to Korea.
"We are sending an armada, very powerful," he said. "We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than an aircraft carrier, that I can tell you."
The confirmation of the misleading narrative from the commander in chief — as well as the allusion to nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines — sent the crisis into overdrive.
Governments in Seoul, Pyongyang, Tokyo and Beijing began reacting to what looked like an emergency with the speedy U.S. carrier beelining to the Sea of Japan. The situation became even more muddied when Mattis tried to tamp down the frenzy during a press conference, telling the reporters — inaccurately — that the announcement of the carrier move was not from a specific demand signal but was instead announcing the canceling of the exercise with the Australians, which the Vinson was at that moment participating in.
Some reporters were getting it right. After the confusing press conference, USNI News’s Sam LaGrone and reported that Vinson was participating in the exercises before heading to North Korea. But in the larger media, major outlets were reporting what by now was accepted (but completely wrong) wisdom: that Vinson and her escorts were headed for a confrontation with Kim Jong Un.
On April 12, the media frenzy prompted a call from Chinese President Xi Jinping to Trump, with Xi urging all sides . At the same time, North Korean officials were taking to the airwaves to warn that “thermonuclear war" was imminent.
Behind the scenes at the Pentagon and out in the Pacific, officials were trying to put the brakes on what was by now a runaway train.
“Everyone who asked was told the same thing -- that the carrier was doing exercises with the Australians and then was proceeding north after that,” an official said, a statement that echoed what several other sources told Navy Times.
Many reporters, however, weren't bothering to check on the status of the carrier, multiple officials said. Across the world, U.S. military officials were watching the story spin out of control but didn’t know quite what to do about it. The carrier was, after all, getting to North Korea eventually.
“You know things have gotten out of control when CNN is playing the story on loop every 90 minutes,” a defense official said.
The story was everywhere, noted another official.
“You couldn’t walk by a TV screen without that story smacking you in the face.”
‘Preemptive strikes’: a crisis fizzles out
The come-to-Jesus moment for officials when NBC News filed an April 13 story cited to “intelligence officials” that said if Pyongyang moved to light off a nuclear test, the military was preparing a massive preemptive strike.
And while PACOM was forming options to present the President, the report described the situation as considerably more dire than it was, officials said.
“It was fake news,” one official said.
After the alarming report from NBC, more reporters began checking with media offices in the Pentagon and in the Pacific and it became clear that everything was not as it seemed. The story line, however, continued through the weekend news cycle despite the fact that many Pentagon reporters were telling their bureaus that the notion that Vinson was steaming towards Korea was wrong, multiple officials said.
The crisis came to a screeching halt on April 17, when Navy Times' sister publication Defense News published a story with a revelation that stunned governments and media worldwide: Vinson hadn’t gone north at all, but had headed the exact opposite direction to participate in exercises. The story was based on pictures posted on official Navy websites showing the carrier transiting the Sunda Strait, between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java: 3,500 miles from Korea.
In South Korea, the media pounced, calling the Trump administration liars on par with North Korea, which often exaggerates and bluffs to intimidate perceived adversaries.
“The 50 million South Koreans, as well as many common-sensical people around the world, cannot help but feel embarrassed and shocked,” said the spokesman of Korea’s main opposition party, .
Growing pains
With the benefit of hindsight, officials in the Pentagon and in the Pacific said they should have done more to nip the story in the bud before it got out of control.
“In my view, we shouldn’t have announced the port cancellation so early,” one official mused.
But many defended the decision to make the announcement, saying there was no way that they could tell 5,000 families on the Vinson that their port visit to Australia was canceled and it not get out.
“It would have lit up social media immediately and then we would have had to make the announcement anyway,” another official said.
Jerry Hendrix, a retired Naval Flight Officer and now analyst with the Center for a New American Security, said the fact that the announcement came on the heels of the Syria strike, and that subsequent use of the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, framed what was a reasonable and routine Navy move of sending the carrier where the crisis is seem like a bigger deal than it was.
“What you are seeing here is a reaction to a more activist foreign policy with the Trump administration,” he said.
Obama’s more cautious approach to foreign policy made moving a carrier into a contentious region seem less threatening than it does under Trump, especially since Trump has made seapower and growing the Navy a key part of his defense strategy, Hendrix argues.
“Moving a carrier means something very different today than it did under a more cautious, lead-from-behind Obama administration.”
A powerful pic from 1979 (L to R) Phoenix (SSN 702) launching, Florida (SSBN 728) partly out, Michigan (SSBN 727) & Ohio (SSBN 726) in water
