Hubble Looks at Saturn
From NASA, a great view of Saturn.
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April, Cooler Than Normal
Coolest April in a hundred years for the U.S. of A. See the report here.
A-10’s Life to Extended with New Wings
by Tech. Sgt. Russell Wicke
Air Combat Command Public Affairs5/9/2008 - LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. (AFPN) – New wings are the answer to Air Force concerns on the aging A-10 Thunderbolt II, an airframe flying since 1975.
Air Force officials awarded a contract to Boeing last year requiring 242 new A-10 wings constructed and delivered to depots for installment on the thin-skinned airframes by 2011.
Not all 356 of the Air Force’s A-10s require new wings because more than 100 airframes were constructed in the 1980s with “thick skin,” giving them a stronger structure, said Master Sgt. Steven Grimes, A-10 maintenance liaison for Air Combat Command.
Those aircraft are rated for 16,000 flying hours, which is estimated to keep them airworthy sometime into 2030, according to Sergeant Grimes. The original thin-skinned A-10s were designed for 8,000 hours and were extended beyond that in the 1990s with depot repairs.Based on the rate flying hours accumulate, the extension is expected to expire in 2011, which is when the new wings are scheduled to be installed. The new wings will extend the thin-skinned A-10 fleet to 16,000 hours, keeping them flying until about 2030.
Replacing the wings saves the Air Force “a great deal of money over a long period of time,” said Lt. Col. Ralph Hansen, ACC A-10 program element monitor and pilot. The value of the Boeing contract is more than $1 billion between 2007 and 2018. Colonel Hansen said that equates to about $4 million per aircraft, a price far below what it would cost to recapitalize the A-10.
“You can’t buy a business jet for that price,” he said.
Maintaining the old wings would require repeated removal, inspection and installation of beef-up straps at A-10 depots, said Tony Mizar, an A-10 depot mechanic and maintenance scheduler.
According to Sergeant Grimes, continually repairing old wings, as opposed to replacing them, would cost approximately $1.3 billion more than the Boeing contract.
The A-10 was designed and produced by Fairchild Republic, which discontinued aircraft production in 1984. This created complications in reproduction of the wings because there are limited extant engineer drawings, said Sergeant Grimes.
For this reason Boeing engineers have developed a three-phase process for the contract, said Jennifer Hogan, Boeing spokeswoman. The first phase is in progress now. It involves modeling the wing and scanning it to duplicate the 3-D model of existing wings. Colonel Hansen said the new wing will be no different from the current wings and will be transparent to pilots and maintainers. The one exception is “incorporation of reliability, maintainability and (production) improvements learned over the years,” said Ms. Hogan.
The second phase is manufacture and assembly, and the third phase, set for 2011, is full-rate production and installation on the aircraft.
Wing installations will occur during regularly scheduled depot inductions which will preserve the mission capable rates, said 1st Lt. Nancy Dias, A-10 wing replacement program manager. The wings will fly 10,000 hours, or approximately 25 years, without inspection.
The A-10 is a valuable asset to the Air Force and Army because of its unique capabilities, said Colonel Hansen. It can deliver precision guided weapons at high altitudes, as well as surgical close air support at low altitudes. It’s also the only fighter wielding the renowned 30mm cannon, capable of firing about 65 rounds a second. Colonel Hansen said the 30mm Gatling gun is the commanders’ weapon of choice because it can be used much closer to friendly forces than bombs, and it is four times more powerful than the 20mm cannon (on other fighters).
A-10s also are undergoing modernization. The old airframe is midway through a major upgrade to a more capable A-10C by loading it with newer capabilities. It boasts the latest technology of smart weapons: GPS guided bombs, and all weather capability.
Furthermore, the sturdy airframe design enables the A-10 to operate from austere airfields and take battle damage without degrading capability.
Examples of its survivability include self-sealing fuel cells protected by foam, manual flight control systems that back up hydraulic controls, armor and a ballistic tub surrounding the cockpit.
“I’ve seen A-10s with very large holes in them that have survived just fine,” said Colonel Hansen.
U.S. General Calls for More NATO Troops in Afghanistan
I guess I’m the minority here, but Afghanistan is America’s war. Al-Qaeda, supplied and sheltered by the Taliban attacked the United States in 2001.
It was an attack on our soil, against our people. Why are we asking others do to what we should be doing?
If a nation of 300 million people with a GDP of over 12 trilliion dollars can’t muster the necessary force for Afghanistan, then we are deep trouble.
Maybe if President Bush had called for a million volunteers to man the occupying army, we wouldn’t have this problem today.
U.S., NATO and Afghan forces’ efforts are preventing Taliban insurgents and transnational terrorists from regaining a foothold in Afghanistan, but more support is required from NATO and the international community, a senior U.S. military officer told members of a local think tank here yesterday.
“NATO has not failed, and I assure you that we are succeeding and we will continue to succeed” in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Bantz J. Craddock remarked during his speech at the Heritage Foundation.
However, NATO and the international community “can and must do more” to support the mission in Afghanistan, said Craddock, who wears two hats as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe and as chief of U.S. European Command.
NATO “has not yet completely filled” its agreed-to commitment of troops and capabilities to Afghanistan, Craddock said, noting there’s still a shortage of key military functions and skills such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; communications; and air support.
“Each nation has its own internal issues that it must address, but a completely resourced force sends a clear message to our adversary and to the Afghan people,” Craddock explained. “And, the message is: NATO is committed to achieving success.” Read more….
Time Says “Invade Burma”
So it is okay to invade a country because it is run by a bunch a jerks, but it isn’t okay to invade, cough, cough, another country that was run another jerk?
Consistency isn’t the hallmark of liberalism, is it?
That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the US to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the US has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan. Read more….
No posting due to Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day is a killer this year. Working 15 hours the last couple of days and probably the same through Sunday.
Be back Monday night hopefully.
Border Patrol Getting Them Coming and Going
The Border Patrol has started a new program where they are stopping illegal aliens heading back to Mexico.
Of course the usual suspects who don’t understand the rule of law are complaining, but for the rest of us, this is a great thing.
As these people now have a criminal record and should they return and get caught, they will face felony charges. This program will be a deterrent to illegal immigration.
The operation appears to be an expansion of a broader federal crackdown targeting illegal immigrants in jails, airports and workplaces across the country.
The checkpoints, which are not announced in advance, are set up on southbound Interstate 5 about 100 yards north of the border. Vehicles in all lanes must stop.
Vincent Bond, an agency spokesman, said departing immigrants are fair targets.
“If our officers come upon people who are here illegally . . . regardless of whether they’re leaving the country, we detain them, make a record of the fact they were here illegally and return them to Mexico,” Bond said.
Immigrant rights groups and other critics say the crackdown is a sad reflection of growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the country.
“The policies of the Bush administration are designed to make life so difficult for immigrants in the U.S. illegally that they’re forced to leave. . . . Now they’re arresting people who they are actually driving out of the country. . . . Unbelievable,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a Washington-based immigration reform group.
But some GOP politicians and anti-illegal immigration organizations praise federal authorities for widening their enforcement efforts. A spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) said agents were simply doing their job.
“Whether people are coming or going . . . checkpoints are just another line of defense that targets illegal behavior,” Joe Kasper said.
Customs and Border Protection, which typically provides detailed statistics on apprehensions, would not disclose details of the checkpoint operation. Nor would they say how long it has been underway.
The checkpoints have been randomly deployed since the Sept. 11 attacks, with inspectors typically looking for fugitives, stolen vehicles, weapons, drugs and other contraband.
Illegal immigrants became targets for arrest at the checkpoints only a few months ago, according to immigrant rights groups and human rights organizations in Mexico. It is unclear how frequently the checkpoints have been set up. Read more….
**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email brianbonner90-at-gmail-dot-com and let us know at what level you would like to participate.
Read what other members of CAII are writing about:
It’s your money, it’s your country
The Fallacies and Myths of H-1B Visas
Video From Burma
and
Running Battle with the Taliban
Oil at $123 a barrel
At what point do the Democrats allow us to drill in Alaska, and off the coasts of Florida and California?
For the working man my ass….
In energy futures, crude oil shot above $123 for the first time Wednesday amid worries about rising demand and falling distillate stockpiles. The department’s Energy Information Administration said in a weekly report that gasoline demand rose slightly last week while supplies of distillate fuels fell unexpectedly.
Light, sweet crude for June delivery retreated in early trading and then jumped to a new trading record of $123.56 a barrel on the Nymex. On Tuesday, the contract closed at $121.84.
Other energy futures also rose Wednesday. June gasoline futures added 1.6 cents to $3.1224 a gallon on the Nymex, while June heating oil future rose 7.70 cents to $3.4305 a gallon. Read more….
ICE Plans to Deport Criminal Aliens
Imagine that, our government is actually going to deport convicted criminal aliens held in our state and local jails.
They call it a plan, others might just call it enforcing the law.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is improving community safety by transforming the way the federal government cooperates with state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, detain, and remove all criminal aliens held in custody. Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens, will change immigration enforcement by using technology to share information between law enforcement agencies and by applying risk-based methodologies to focus resources on assisting all local communities remove high-risk criminal aliens.
Although ICE has made considerable progress over the past several years in identifying and removing criminal aliens through its Criminal Alien Program (CAP), a fundamental change in ICE’s current approach is required to reach the goal of identifying and removing all aliens convicted of a crime. ICE currently screens 100 percent of all federal and state prisons, but has full coverage of only about 10 percent of the approximately 3,100 local jails throughout the United States. Leveraging integration technology that shares law enforcement data between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, ICE is now able to expand coverage nationwide in a cost effective manner. Interoperability between the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and DHS’ Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) will help ICE and local law enforcement officers positively identify criminal aliens in prisons and jails.
Given that a nationwide jail/prison reporting system does not exist to determine the total number of criminal aliens in the United States, ICE extrapolated from various sources and estimates that about 300,000 to 450,000 criminal aliens who are potentially removable are detained each year at federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Criminal aliens who are potentially removable include illegal aliens in the United State who are convicted of any crime and lawful permanent residents (such as holders of a U.S. Permanent Resident Card) who are convicted of a removable offense as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Last year, ICE charged approximately 164,000 aliens in jails and removed approximately 95,000 criminal aliens.
Strategic Goals for Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens:
- Strategic Goal 1 – Identify and process all criminal aliens amenable for removal while in federal, state, and local custody;
- Strategic Goal 2 – Enhance current detention strategies to ensure no removable alien is released into the community due to a lack of detention space or an appropriate alternative to detention;
- Strategic Goal 3 – Implement removal initiatives that shorten the time aliens remain in ICE custody prior to removal, thereby maximizing the use of detention resources and reducing cost; and
- Strategic Goal 4 – Maximize cost effectiveness and long term success through deterrence and reduced recidivism.
The following three levels are illustrative of the plan’s risk-based approach. These levels will be used to allocate appropriate resources to identifying and determining the immigration status of aliens arrested for a crime that pose the greatest risk to the public.
- Level 1 – Individuals who have been convicted of major drug offenses and violent offenses such as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and kidnapping;
- Level 2 – Individuals who have been convicted of minor drug offenses and mainly property offenses such as burglary, larceny, fraud, and money laundering; and
- Level 3 – Individuals who have been convicted of other offenses.
Ensuring the identification and expedited removal of so many criminal aliens on an ongoing basis will require a sustained effort. Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens will: (a) strengthen partnerships with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies; (b) improve technologies and processes to share national, state, and local and law enforcement data; (c) streamline and expedite procedures for detaining, processing, and removing aliens; (d) expand the use of incentives to reduce sentences for non-violent offenders who cooperate in their removal; (e) engage foreign governments to emphasize their commitment under international law to accept the return of increased numbers of their citizens; (f) increase efforts to deter those who would come to the United States illegally; and (g) create greater disincentives for recidivism. Read more….
Impeachment of Dann Full Speed Ahead
Ohio’s tarnished AG looks like he is going to make history.
Nobody really knows exactly how impeachment proceedings would work in Ohio because it hasn’t happened since the early 1800s.
Gov. Ted Strickland and other Democrats have told Attorney General Marc Dann that if he doesn’t resign, they will seek to impeach him. Read more….
House Speaker Jon Husted, R-Kettering, yesterday asked Rep. William G. Batchelder, a Medina Republican, former judge and 31-year legislative veteran, to review the impeachment process because “he is respected by members of both sides of the aisle on matters of great importance.”
Under Ohio’s constitution and laws, there are two ways to remove a statewide elected official: impeachment by the legislature, or through a complaint signed by at least 603,413 qualified electors that is filed and tried in court.
A majority of the 99-member Ohio House would have to vote to impeach Dann, much like a grand jury indictment, and 22 of the 33 Ohio senators would have to convict Dann after a trial.
