Omega Tanker skids -catches fire at Point Mugu NAS

LA TIMES: Three crew members escaped from a civilian refueling aircraft that exploded into flames Wednesday evening during an attempted takeoff at Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

The Boeing 707 aircraft was nearly filled to capacity with 150,000 pounds of fuel that stoked intense flames and thick clouds of dark smoke that billowed for miles as firefighters tried to control the blaze, officials said.


A base spokesman said the crew members — a pilot, co-pilot and navigator — worked for Omega Aerial Refueling Services, which contracts with the Navy to refuel aircraft. They were taken to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, according to the Ventura County Fire Department.

The blaze broke out about 5:25 p.m. as the aircraft skidded out of control on the far end of the main runway, said Vance Vasquez, a spokesman for the base.

Fire crews on the ground were being aided by a helicopter that made repeated water drops as flames consumed the crumpled fuselage. Base fire crews and the Ventura County Fire Department were on the scene.

According to Omega's website, the company uses a Boeing 707-300 model. Boeing Co. built the planes in Renton, Wash., from 1959 to 1982.

Although the exact age of the downed aircraft was not known, aerial refueling tankers have been a sore subject for the military for years. The massive aircraft, which are used to refuel warplanes while in flight, have been heavily criticized for being run-down and corroded. .

The Air Force has been trying to replace its fleet of aerial tankers — many of which were built during the Eisenhower administration — for more than a decade.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT THE LA TIMES

Area 51 book author Annie Jacobsen's lack of credibility ...

Note: The following is an excerpt from an article about "Area 51 The Uncensored History Of America's Top Secret Air Base." author Annie Jacobsen.

I post it because it speaks to the credibility of this "investigative reporter" who theorizes that the "Roswell Incident" was actually a elaborate scheme cooked up by the Russians - using - genetically engineered (with the help of Joseph Mengele) little green pilots to crash saucer-shaped aircraft (designed by Nazi aircraft designers the Horten Brothers) into the New Mexico desert to convince America we were under risk of alien attack.

INMHO, If you are interested (and who isn't) what really is going on in Area 51 - don't buy this book.
Visit Dreamland Resort instead.

-Steve Douglass


The Hysterical Skies

She survived a flight with 14 harmless Syrian musicians -- then spread 3,000 bigoted and paranoid words across the Internet. As a pilot and an American, I'm appalled.
BY PATRICK SMITH

In this space was supposed to be installment No. 6 of my multiweek dissertation on airports and terminals. The topic is being usurped by one of those nagging, Web-borne issues of the moment, in this case a reactionary scare story making the cyber-rounds during the past week.

The piece in question, "Terror in the Skies, Again?" is the work of Annie Jacobsen, a writer for WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen shares the account of the emotional meltdown she and her fellow passengers experienced when, aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, a group of Middle Eastern passengers proceeded to act "suspiciously." I'll invite you to experience "Terror" yourself, but be warned it's quite long. It needs to be, I suppose, since ultimately it's a story about nothing, puffed and aggrandized to appear important.

The editors get the drama cooking with some foreboding music: "You are about to read an account of what happened," counsels a 70-word preamble. "The WWS Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared ... Here is Annie's story" [insert lower-octave piano chord here].

What follows are six pages of the worst grade-school prose, spring-loaded with mindless hysterics and bigoted provocation.

Fourteen dark-skinned men from Syria board Northwest's flight 327, seated in two separate groups. Some are carrying oddly shaped bags and wearing track suits with Arabic script across the back. During the flight the men socialize, gesture to one another, move about the cabin with pieces of their luggage, and, most ominous of all, repeatedly make trips to the bathroom. The author links the men's apparently irritable bladders to a report published in the Observer (U.K.) warning of terrorist plots to smuggle bomb components onto airplanes one piece at a time, to be secretly assembled in lavatories.

"What I experienced during that flight," breathes Jacobsen, "has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats."

Intriguing, no? I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover?

Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee.

READ MORE HERE

New Area 51 book epic FAIL ...

Bloggger's note: I don't even have to do a detailed review of Annie Jacobsen's book "Area 51 Uncensored" to advise you - if you are tempted to by it to discover the "truth" about the worlds worst kept secret - secret base - just keep walking. You wont find it contained within.

What you will find is a book rife with historical errors and "insider information" that makes Bob Lazar "aliens at 51" stories look plausible.

But don't take my word for it. Just read this excerpt from a recent NPR interview and you'll quickly understand why this book is yet another epic FAIL!

-Steve Douglass

start snip > "The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. ... There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

"The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there's a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, 'Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.' And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there's no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg."

On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about


"The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman's bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn't compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. ...

"What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin."

On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax


"The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack." < end snip.

You can read the FULL STORY at NPR HERE.

DREAMLAND RESORT DISCUSSION ON THIS BOOK HERE

Super Guppy back in Amarillo --

Photographed Tuesday night flying into Amarillo/Rick Husband International Airport. It is ferrying V-22 fuselages for assembly at the Bell/Textron Plant here.

Click on each photo to enlarge:











Photographed Tuesday night flying into Amarillo/Rick Husband International Airport. It is ferrying V-22 fuselages for assembly at the Bell/Textron Plant here.

Photos by Steve Douglass & Frank Murphy

LINK TO INFO ABOUT SUPER GUPPY!

US apache helicopter exchanges fire with Pakistan ...

By MARTHA RADDATZ (@martharaddatz) , NICK SCHIFRIN (@nickschifrin) and LEE FERRAN
May 17, 2011

A U.S. helicopter exchanged fire with Pakistani troops near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan today, resulting in injuries for two Pakistani soldiers, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

Accounts differ as to what exactly prompted the firefight, but the incident may further strain already fragile relations between the U.S. and Pakistan following the American unilateral military raid deep in Pakistani territory that killed Osama bin Laden May 1.

The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force said U.S. helicopters were in Afghanistan near Forward Operating Base Tillman when they responded to incoming direct and indirect fire from over the border in Pakistan, presumably from militants. The helicopters initially did not return fire, but when a second round of incoming fire began, they did fire in response.

The Pakistani military, however, said that two NATO helicopters caused the incident by violating Pakistani airspace before being fired upon by Pakistani troops.

"We know for sure the [Apache] helicopter was fired upon -- we got rounds inside the helicopter," Campbell said. "The helicopter returned fire and we are working through just exactly what happened... If [American soldiers] are taking effective fire, then by all means they have to take all measures to safeguard themselves and the other people around there."