COLORADO SPRINGS- The complicit media accepts the Army’s characterization of the 1:30AM crash as a “hard landing” and neither the condition of the Apache Longbow aircraft nor its occupants is being revealed; even though emergency vehicles reached the downed Apache via Gold Camp Road and the crew were rushed to Memorial Hospital, civilian jurisdiction. The citizens of Colorado Springs are being kept on a need to know basis, as Fort Carson increases its flight training for choppers being deployed to Afghanistan, even as the training battleground becomes the skies about our neighborhoods.
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Yeah, they do that in Dallas too, which is a considerably larger concentration of (mostly poor) people than the Springs.
Bell Helicopter does training and research flights over areas that are, surprise, heavily black and hispanic populations. South Oak Cliff, Grand Prairie, Arlington, Desoto…
One of the “birds” they fly (nice imagery, they’re giving us “the bird” at least figuratively) is this airplane that takes off and lands like a helicopter. VERY Rube Goldberg engineering.
Thing is, a Helicopter steers far differently than a fixed wing craft. So it starts with the rotors/propellers in “Rotary wing” mode to take off and land. Then tilts the rotors down to become standard propellers.
That also has to shift the steering mechanisms.
There IS one type of plane that has a rotary wing, but it’s not used to take off or land, it takes off like a fixed wing. Only with a lot shorter runway. It also steers like a Helo, by shifting the mass under the rotary wing. It’s kind of unstable in the current form but really really maneuverable, and is mostly licensed as Experimental Aircraft. It’s called a Monogyro. Those who watched Road Warrior got a chance to see it in action.
I could see the same concept, you know, using twin rotors. Only not tandem like the big Cargo Helicopters the Air Force and Army typically use, but parallel. That would give it the stability and load bearing capacity the Army (but mostly Navy and Marine Corps) have been paying a couple hundred billion dollars to Bell-Textron to develop and deploy, and at a frightening cost of Marine Corps lives, without the Rube Goldberg band-aid-on-top-of-patches engineering they keep crashing the sucker with, vis a vis switching from Helicopter controls to Fixed Wing controls and back.
Now, IF I were to put one of my theory models together, using scaled Remote Control of course, I wonder if Ft Carson or Peterson AFB would allow me indiscriminate use of their airspace to test it? Not, you know, flying it around their flight lines, just over the Housing Areas and the Administration buildings…
And of course, do it on a timetable that suits my schedules and do it without having to ask prior permission.
You know, like the way they do US with testing their gadgets, gimmicks and tactics.
The Air Force “zoomies” just did their legendary super-sonic low level overflight of my ‘hood. I can tell that it’s SS because the planes have already passed before the sound hits you. They’re doing a helicopter flight right now, at least two birds.
You know, the helicopter refers the wing, the rotor, but the part that hangs under that, where the pilot and passengers and payload and landing gear etc. are… that’s suspended from a part called the “Jesus Bolt”.
Because if that sucker snaps, you call on the name of Jesus. Those of it that it’s going to fall upon won’t have any such warning.
If the rotor is still spinning as it hits the ground, the vanes of the rotor are going to snap off near the hub, and go flying off in whatever direction the centrifugal force is pointing at the time. Kind of like a hundred or two hundred pound spear bouncing around erratically in search of something or somebody in which to land. Nice Image, yes?
So tired of the military flights going over our neighborhood also, BJ. I speculate they are traveling between Peterson AFB and the AFA. Just imagine how the people of the world feel seeing the black helicopters and planes flying overhead and killing the innocents.
Yeah, I had that thought at Lackland during Basic. They were landing a flight of B-52 bombers and them flying low over the base sounded like Hell descending. And that’s without them dropping anything. Their usual tactic is to dump their bombs from 50,000 feet, about 10 miles up in the sky and all you would see is the contrails from their engines from the ground. They don’t fly super-sonic but pretty fast, faster than I could flap my arms and fly. But they’d make it almost to the horizon before the bombs hit the ground.
Now they have so-called “smart bombs” that are only supposed to hit where the “targets” are, in other words hit the houses, schools, mosques, temples, churches, etc instead of about 20 square miles of mostly empty farmland without many humans in the area to kill.
I was in shortly after VietNam, where we had used the “peace through superior firepower” dumping more high explosives over South VietNam, technically our allies, than over Laos, Cambodia and North VietNam combined. So much hi-tech firepower, at least at the time, and of course all of it more advanced than what the guerillistas on the receiving end had.
There had been, a generation earlier, and most of the men in the Pentagon had been in that particular war, an alternative decision to using the atomic bombs on Japan, which was “isolate them and bomb them back to the stone age” kind of what the bombardment of Afghanistan was all about. They were boasting that by the first day’s end they had pounded it into rubble and on the second day were stirring up the rubble.
Shock and Awe in action. Yep, really taught them Talibans a lesson.