Bye-Bye F-35

My first blog back in 2012 talked about this problem with the F-35, as an over priced piece of experimental equipment.  Too costly to put into battle, too unreliable to be available for battle and as I have said ever since these military contractors have been touting stealth, it just isn't so.  The Air Force has finally said that the latest Russian and Chinese technology is able to detect the F-35 under combat conditions.  What the Air Force didn't say, was the F-35 and all stealth aircraft have always been detectible under combat conditions.  Yes, since before the F-117.  

Do you remember when we flew into Iraq the 1st day of the war?  Well, the Air Force touted that the F-117 was the first aircraft into the combat zone around Baghdad.  But did you hear what altitude it went in at?  It was 50 feet!  If that thing was so stealth, why didn't it just fly into the combat zone, attack it's target and return?  That's because it isn't stealth and had to fly at extremely low altitude to be below the visible horizon.  Plus there were some that got shot down.  Here is a very simple method to determine if something is radar invisible (stealth).  Can you see it?  If yes, then it isn't stealth.  

We are able to see because light bounces off an object.  If light bounces off an object, then it is a simple matter of bouncing radar off an object.  It is the very same principle.  Once upon a time, I was sitting at a radar scope on an EC-121D aircraft on station south of Key West, Florida.  I picked up a track coming across the Gulf of Mexico from Mexico.  It had no flight plan so NORAD in Colorado Springs told us to have it intercepted and identified.  We scrambled an F-4B out of Key West Naval Air Station and sent him down and had him turn in behind this track.  It was only flying about 115 mph and around 14-15 thousand feet high.  When the F-4 turned in behind it, the F-4 could not pick up the target on it's radar. This never happens, as the F-4 had the top radar on a fighter aircraft.  As the interceptor got close, the target would just start breaking up and disappear off my radar.  

As the F-4 passed through the track would appear behind the fighter.  Immediate hard left bank and around for another pass.  This went on a couple of times, but on the third attempt, the pilot called and said that each time he got near our target he was approaching a flight of geese that would scatter.  We brought the Navy Phantom home to Key West and let the geese fly on into Florida, without a flight plan.  Do you have an airplane more stealth that a flight of geese?  Not likely.  

How about this one.  An engineer friend of mine was working for Motorola in Arizona.  They were designing a battle field radar to be used by the army.  Since it was a highly portable unit they decided to take it out of the building and over to an open field near their site and test it.  After getting it warmed up and checked they kept noticing interference on their radar scope about 200 yards away.  None of the engineers could see anything, so they sent a couple of guys down range 200 yards to see if they could determine what was causing something to show up on their radar unit.  

When the engineers returned from their "walk", they were asked what it was.  They pointed out that there was an alfalfa field that was in bloom and it was bees flying to and from the alfalfa field.  So they were tracking bees!  BEES!!  How large did you say your stealth aircraft is?  You build it and I'll track it.  

The F-35 has much larger problems than being non-stealth.  When the F-4 Phantom was introduced it set something like 17 world flight records.  When the F-15 was introduced it set a multitude of world flight records including time to altitude records.  Please provide me with a single world flight record in the almost 15 years of messing around with the F-35.  Not a single improvement, nothing.  Oh, it's the electronics on the F-35.  The F-15 can lift more electronics by weight into the air and to a higher altitude than an F-35.  So now you have a glimpse into why the F-35 will not be the replacement for the F-15's and F-16's or the Navy F-18's.   

Let's Buy a Fighter Plane

Welcome to America, the place where we buy things we don't need, mostly to show off to the neighbors and put them away in the garage or the closet.  That is all well and good if you are spending your own money, but we have had a very unusual thing going on in the military hardware business for many years.  This process is to build the most sophisticated and expensive piece of hardware the engineers can think of and sell it to our military.

An admiral was being questioned by a congressional hearing on the cost of Naval ships, the admiral said what the Navy needs was ships, ships that were usable, flexible and cost effective.  The admiral said, "If we keep designing ships without thought to cost, then we are going to end up with two ships, one in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific."  He makes an excellent point.

Now let's look at what the Air Force is doing.  They are trying to build a replacement for the F-15 and F-16 aircraft.  They have been in the process for over 10 years and what have we got?  Not one usable aircraft has been produced.  Let's say that our Air Force had acquired an aircraft.  Should we purchase it?  The answer is actually easy, the answer is no.  Why?  Let's go back in history and find out why we replaced aircraft.  One, they were outdated, their electronics could not be updated, the aircraft was too slow to protect a ship, a town or even itself, so they were replaced.

There was another guide and it was what is referred to as the "kill ratio".  This is the ratio of enemy aircraft destroyed in air to air combat compared to the loss of this model of aircraft.  For example; the P-51 in WWII had an approximate kill ratio of around 8 to 1.  The P-47 Thunderbolt had about the same.  What is the kill ratio of the F-15 Eagle?  Are you sitting down?  The answer is 104 to Zero, but we want to replace it.

We have long since reached the maximum speed at low altitude where a fighter aircraft operates and the F-15 Eagle bumps up against this limit already, in fact, we have been bumping into this since the late 1950's and early 1960's.  The F-15 is big enough and powerful enough to continue to have electronic upgrades to see that it has air to air superiority over any aircraft in the world.  Electronics is actually where the battle is now won, not in the airframe.  It comes down to our airplane is smarter than your airplane, not how fast and pretty it is.

So our Air Force is trying to sell the American public on the idea of spending something like $181,000,000 per aircraft for a F-35, when we are flying a F-15 that has never been knocked down by another aircraft, plus it can still be upgraded with the latest electronics.  We can have a lot more F-15's for the money, too.  Enough to defeat a lesser number of F-35 aircraft in air to air combat.  How smart is that?

Ripping Off the Young

Okay, young people of America, you know something is wrong with the economy because you either can't find a job or the one you have doesn't pay enough for you to live on comfortably.  You may think this is something new since we went through the financial meltdown in 2008.  This is not true.  The young people in this country have been taking a beating for years, for something like 30 or 40 years in fact.  You don't know this because you are too young to follow all the trend lines and the methods our financial system locked many of you into working, not for yourself, but their benefit.

Here is an example:  Fuel cost in 1965 was about 25 cents per gallon and I was making $2.88 per hour working in the summer in the moving and storage industry.  This was manual labor and a little driving of a truck, not an executive job.  Today that converts to around $4.00 per gallon for fuel and a corrected for inflation of $46.08 per hour wage, based on keeping up with fuel cost. Okay young folks, where is your $46.08 per hour job?

Try this one:  I lived on my own in the summer, which means I paid for housing, food, clothing, entertainment, fixed up my car and put enough money in the bank in three months to pay for a years education at a major state university.  The only thing I had to provide was meals five days a week by working at the university cafeteria.  On the week-ends I paid for my meals out of my own pocket.  All the cost for the university I paid for, no loans, including my dorm cost.  Tell me how much money you would have to save in three months to do this today?  What would your salary be to accomplish that little trick?  Keeping in mind, you could not live at home.

Now you can begin to see a couple of things.  One, no non-specialized manual labor industry has been able to keep pace with inflation.  Even specialized industries have not been able to accomplish this.  Who do you know making $46.08 per hour doing manual labor?  Who do you know who is earning $46.08 per hour?  No one in the neighborhood I am living in.

The next trick they pulled on you is to ask you to borrow money to pay for college.  How many of you still owe money on that drill?  How many of you owe more money than you borrowed on that drill?  Here is the double bad news on that trick.  First off there aren't jobs out there where you can work and pay off the bill and if you think the cost of fuel went up since 1964, you might want to check the rise in college cost.  Look at the pay for the executives in higher education, they are the only one's making money on a college education with few exceptions.  Yet young people by the droves head off to college and borrow money. This is going to cause a huge problem for this country in the not too distant future.

Now the federal government is asking the young people in this country to be forced into a health care system where they have to pay for services they don't need, at the same out of pocket cost as the rest of us.  When are you young people going to wake up and vote all these people out of office?  When are you going to elect someone who will actually look out for your needs?  If you don't this country will go down the tubes.  Get active in what is happening around you and see that some or all of these wrongs are corrected.  No one is coming to your aid except you.   
 

National Health Care

The ongoing battle to bring affordable health care to all Americans has had it's ups and downs.  Looking at the driving forces behind the rising cost of health care in this country brings me to a sobering conclusion.  The total cost of health care will not be reduced by the new law, even if it clears the Supreme Court.  There are several reasons it will not reduce total health care cost.  Now it may reduce the individual cost of health care, because we will basically tax the young and healthy people in this country to pay for the old and unhealthy people, under the president's new law. 

The first reason it will not reduce the total cost is the Federal Government controls or allows others to control things like; the number of doctors coming into the workforce each year.  That therefore, controls the total number of doctors in the country, which dictates the demand for each doctor, which raises doctor's income.  They also restrict foreign doctors from coming into the profession by their laws, too.  There is also a restriction of the number of hospitals in a given area, the type of special equipment they have and the special health care they can provide.  An example is the number of MRI machines in a community is mandated, therefore providing no incentive for a hospital to lower the cost of a scan.  They do not have a nearby competitor, so they keep the cost high.

Where is the nearest hospital that can handle a serious burn?  When you find it, locate the next nearest one.  Here is a suggestion, don't get burned.  The problem is, this applies to many specific illnesses and injuries.  How about a specialist?  These are controlled by the numbers also, plus the insurance companies will force you to see a specialist on some injuries or illnesses or they won't pay.  For you to see some specialist you will need a reference from another doctor, you just can't walk in their door, also your insurance company may not pay any of the bill either.  Why is this?  It is because this is the most highly regulated business in America.  Where did all these regulations come from?  Well, federal and states have passed them "for the welfare" of the people.  The truth is they were passed because of pressure from the AMA and the insurance companies. 

How do we get out of this mess?  The very same way one of the other highly regulated industries got out of it and lowered the net cost of the whole industry.  That industry was the trucking industry starting in the 1930's until the early 1970's was regulated.  One trucking company, Leeway had a stupid sign on the back of every truck, it read: Regulated Rates, Routes and Service.  Well, your local hospital and doctor should have a sign on them that says: Regulated Cost, Location and Service, because they are.  Translated into layman's language it reads: High cost, Few locations and Poor service.

The only method of lowering the total cost of health care is to deregulate it, wow what a novel idea?  This idea when applied to the trucking industry saved billions of dollars each year.  Today the United States has one of the lowest cost trucking industries in the world.  Was it painful?  Yes, but it was worth it.  Only the companies who knew how to control cost and provide good service survived.  This will increase the number of doctors, pass a test and you are approved, it will increase the number of hospitals and equipment.  It will lower insurance cost and reduce the number of health insurance companies.  None of the parties involved except the paying public will like this program.  Wake up America, put pressure where we can get this done.

The Supreme Court

Life is full of surprises and the Health Care Act going before the Supreme Court is one of them.  Everyone thought this would be a slam dunk for the new health care law, but after the public hearings there were some second thoughts.  Now even the president is getting into it with his latest push to show that Congress knew what it was doing and shouldn't be interfered with when it comes to making laws for the country.

The president isn't correct in this, as the Congress has in the past pushed through laws that did not pass muster before the Supreme Court.  This one is on the borderline when it comes to whether it is constitutional, the arguments go both ways.  There are a couple of things to consider, whether you are a Supreme Court Justice or a layman.  One, our health care system is truly fractured.  If you don't believe this take a few minutes and get sick or injured and you will discover this for yourself.  Two, it needs fixed and not tomorrow, but today.

There are some great things in this new law, but 2,700 pages?  Give me a break, I would agree with the justice that enlisted the 8th amendment, that is cruel and unusual punishment.  This law wasn't passed in any normal way, especially when the state senator from Nebraska forced through reductions for Nebraska's payment percentage compared to the rest of the states in order to get his vote.  A great way to get your favorite law passed.  I think that is unconstitutional, why should Nebraska get special treatment just to get their senator to vote for this law?  Make them pay up, too.

The truth is, the reason this law passed was because we do need a fix for the mess that our health care system is in.  Another truth is, this is the largest tax increase in the history of our country and our federal representatives and senators could not pass up seeing that much money come rolling in to their control.  Even the Supreme Court Justices asked why it wasn't called a tax and we the American people ask, too.  We know why don't we?  They couldn't have looked us in the eye and said they were doing us a favor, when they take all that money from us if they had called it a tax.  They make you buy insurance or "pay a penalty", translated into English it is, "pay a tax" or "pay a tax".

This thing will pass because unfortunately we don't have any options here.  We need something better than what we have and this is as good as it is going to get until it is fine tuned.  Look for the Supreme Court to back Congress on this, which will come as a great surprise to many.

Real Americans

It is ironic that my previous blog mentioned what the news says about fear in the American public.  You will note that within a day or two there was a flight that left New York for Las Vegas, flight 191.  There was a problem with the captain who was having difficulty determining what was real and what was not.  The co-captain who's name I do not know, is a hero in all this, as he convinced the captain to leave the cockpit.  Surely, that took a lot of skill to accomplish that feat.  The professional crew did there part, as well.

There was another component of this that falls exactly in line with my previous blog and that is the fearless American public.  The passengers restrained this flight captain, without being asked.  They knew instinctively what had to be done and they accomplished it.  You will note there was a video of part of this event that should be watched over and over to prove my points about Americans in general and ones in an emergency specifically.  One, there was no yelling and screaming from the passengers.  Two, there were male passengers lined up in the isle waiting their turn, if need be, to make sure this captain remained in a position where he could do no harm to the aircraft and passengers.

There may be another air hijacking of an aircraft in America, but from my experience it will not happen because the "fearful", to hear the news reporters tell it, American public will no longer allow "their" aircraft to be taken over without a massive fight.  It will be them or us and my vote is with us.  Everyone that was involved with that incident was referred to as a hero by the news services the day of and the day after flight 191 was diverted and landed safely.

But as is their method, several days later the newspapers talked about the fear of the passengers in stories.  Here goes; Hello news services and newspapers, we are not afraid.  Yes, we are concerned when something like this happens, but the one who will be afraid will be the one we feed isle carpet to on an aircraft they try to hijack while we are on it.  All you reports give up the fear factor, it is not us the American public, speak for yourselves.  If you want to be shaking in your boots, go for it, but the American public will just keep doing what it has always done, take care of business and move on.  Report the facts guys, that's all we ask.

Selling Fear

It's is strange to note in the news how afraid we are supposed to be?  No matter what newspaper, TV news cast or financial report from Wall Street, the words fear, fearful, afraid, terror or similar descriptions of the mindset of the American people is included in the story.  The journalism industry as a whole for years and for exactly how long I couldn't tell you, but from September of 2001 forward this tactic has become widely used.

It may come as a huge shock to the news industry, but Americans are not afraid as a group.  Yes, you do have those people who are holed up in their house expecting the sky to fall tomorrow morning.  You also have those who aren't holed up, but go about their business each day looking up expecting the sky to fall, these people are few and far between.  Us Americans as a whole go about our business each day doing a good job trying our best to provide whatever service we can for the community and country as a whole and we really aren't afraid of scratching our finger, catching a cold, afraid to drive, afraid to fly or breath.

Would you news people please quit telling us that we are afraid.  The financial community is particularly bad about this process.  An example: "Banking stocks down for fear of backed up drains."  If these people reporting the reasons for these stock being down know so much, why didn't they short the stock the day before and make some money.  However, we know they didn't because we get to read the same foolish stuff the next day by the same people.  They also give the reasons for the stocks being up, too.

You news people are giving the wrong signals to people around the world.  This may come as a shock but a bully will not bully you or punch you if he knows you aren't afraid.  He will be even less likely to bully you if he knows you will track him down and put knots on his head or worse if he hits you.  We Americans respect the power of nature, but walk around afraid?  Sorry, but that isn't most of America.  Start taking those crazy statements about being afraid and fearful out of your news stories.  Report the facts, and if you the reporter happen to be afraid, either keep it to yourself or report it in a editorial, but don't report it as news.

You would increase the circulation of your publications by just doing good reporting of the facts. So as a reminder, fear is not selling very well in America.