F-117 Stealth Trainer?

A friend of mine (Dean Muskett) was out at the local airport today and shot this photo of one of Holloman's T-38 jet trainers on the ramp. What surprised me was to see the tail stripe adorned with F-117s and not the usual F-22 Raptors.

There have been many (recent) sighting reports of F-117s still flying - even though they were retired a few years ago. Could this mean the F-117 and a training squadron has been reactivated? Something to look into.

Click on the photos to enlarge them.


Normal Holloman T-38 sporting Raptors on the tail.
USAF photo.



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Space X lifts off!

(CNN) -- The SpaceX commercial rocket lifted off at 10:43 a.m. ET.
The first commercial spacecraft slated to orbit Earth and re-enter successfully was originally scheduled to lift off shortly after 9 a.m. but was delayed.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule had a 9 a.m. to 12:22 p.m. ET launch window.

A successful launch and re-entry would be the latest steps toward commercial space ventures that could eventually ferry astronauts and cargo to the international space station.

In July, a test launch of the Falcon 9 rocket was "essentially a bullseye," SpaceX officials said after the rocket successfully pushed past the earth's atmosphere and deposited a mock-up of its Dragon space capsule in orbit.
NASA has been flying shuttles in low Earth orbit and going to and from the space station for 30 years. The administration would like to see whether private companies can do it cheaper and more efficiently, as the shuttle program is about to fly into retirement.


NASA has selected SpaceX and another company, Orbital Sciences, to each develop an orbital vehicle because the United States will not have its own way to get to the space station. The United States will be renting space from the Russians aboard their Soyuz spacecraft.

But the competition is rabid. SpaceX is the first company to reach the launchpad. By this summer, it had spent almost $400 million to get there.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, said in July that if all goes well after a series of test flights, SpaceX will be ready to begin flying cargo to the space station next year.
Musk says they can begin ferrying astronauts to the space station within three years.

WikiLeaks Assange jailed

London (CNN) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was sent to jail Tuesday while a London court decides whether to order his extradition to Sweden.
The judge at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court refused to grant Assange bail, despite several celebrities coming forward and offering to pay his surety.

Assange, who was in court with security guards on either side of him and his lawyer in front, must now stay in custody until December 14. It was not immediately clear if the court would decide on that date whether to release him.

In making his decision, the judge cited the fact that Assange gave no permanent address and has a nomadic lifestyle, and that he has access to significant funding that would make it easy for him to abscond.
English socialite Jemima Khan had offered to pay surety of 20,000 pounds ($31,500) and journalist John Pilger also offered a sum of money.

At the start of the proceedings, Assange was asked for his address and at first gave a post office box. When told that wasn't sufficient, he wrote a location on a piece of paper and handed it to the judge; it was later revealed that Assange wrote "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on the paper.

The judge repeatedly said the case is "not about WikiLeaks," but about serious sexual offenses that allegedly occurred on three occasions with two women.
The media was allowed inside the courtroom initially but was later ordered to leave.
Assange appeared in court after turning himself in at a London police station. He was arrested on a Swedish warrant, though he has not been charged with any crime.


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Blades ...

Army Chinooks photographed at Rick Husband Airport in Amarillo.

Photo by Steve Douglass

Continental screw-up killed Concorde

Paris, France (CNN) -- The fiery crash that brought down a Concorde supersonic jet in 2000, killing 113 people, was caused partially by the criminal negligence of Continental Airlines and a mechanic who works for the company, a French court ruled Monday.

Continental Airlines was fined 202,000 euros ($268,400) and ordered to pay 1 million euros to Air France, which operated the doomed flight.
Mechanic John Taylor received a fine of 2,000 euros ($2,656) and a 15-month suspended prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

The aircraft manufacturer EADS was also found partly responsible for the crash and ordered to pay 30% of damages to victims involved in the case.
Air France has already paid an unspecified sum in damages to the families of most of the victims of the only crash ever of a Concorde.
Concorde crash verdict Concorde crash anniversary

The mechanic was the only person found guilty in the trial before a judicial panel in the Paris suburb of Pontoise. He was not present for the verdict.
His former supervisor, Stanley Ford, and three French officials were found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
Henri Perrier, Jacques Herubel and Claude Frantzen were responsible for the design, testing and certification of the Concorde.

The charges had said the engineers could have acted much earlier to correct well-known design flaws in the plane.
Lawyers for Continental and Taylor rejected the guilty verdicts.
"I am shocked by this verdict, Taylor's lawyer Francois Esclatine said. "I haven't had a chance to speak with my client yet, but I will tell him that he should appeal."

Olivier Metzner, a lawyer for Continental, said the airline "will not let itself be pushed around in this way and we will definitely appeal."
The airline called the verdict "absurd" in a statement.
Saying that the airline and Taylor were "the sole guilty parties shows the determination of the French authorities to shift attention and blame away from Air France," which operated the flight and maintained the aircraft, Continental said.

"To find that any crime was committed in this tragic accident is not supported either by the evidence at trial or by aviation authorities and experts around the world," the statement said.

Air France, which was a plaintiff in the Concorde trial, posted a statement on its website saying, the French national carrier "welcomed the decision of the criminal court which recognizes Continental's full criminal and civil liability in the Concorde accident."

The Concorde burst into flames and smashed into a hotel on takeoff on July 25, 2000. Air France stopped flying the supersonic jets in 2003.
A Continental Airlines plane that took off shortly before the doomed flight was found to have played a key role in the crash.

A titanium strip allegedly fell off a Continental DC-10 which took off just before the Concorde. Judicial investigators say the strip was improperly installed on the DC-10 engine, prompting the charges against the airline, Ford and Taylor.

A lawyer for the American airline had argued that Concorde's problems were apparent decades before the crash and that Continental was not to blame.
An investigation revealed a tragic chain of events that brought down Air France Flight 4590 shortly after takeoff from Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport: a tire under the left wing blew on takeoff when it struck the small strip of titanium on the runway.

The blown tire sent debris into the wing, causing the fuel tank to rupture and sparking the catastrophic fire that led to the crash that killed 100 passengers, nine crew and four people on the ground.