Cool Photo

Phantom Ray UCAV on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.  I could point out that the alternative explanation would be that we captured an alien space ship and are flying it to Area 51 for analysis.

The Phantom Ray was completed in 2011 as a tech demonstrator. It morphed from the X-45. You can also check out the X-47 Pegasus. They were all demonstrators.

United States Navy plans to establish Unmanned Carrier Launched Multi-Role Squadron 10 (VUQ-10) in October 2021 with “four Engineering and Manufacturing examples of the MQ-25A”, the grandchild of the Phantom Ray. 

 

Chinese AWACS

KJ-1, a Chinese AWACS project, based on Tu-4 turboprop conversion. Essentially they took a B-29 knock off, added Russian engines and tried to make the whole thing work, and it didn’t. This aircraft is now part of the Chinese Aviation Museum’s collection.

 

When will the Republican Party show some Spine?

The caption above is somewhat misleading because there is an implication that they have a spine to show.

 

What Will China Do?

China will provoke a confrontation to their advantage in the Taiwan Strait or (more likely) the South China Sea. It will be short, sharp, and meant to humiliate the USA and get us to back away from our defense commitments in the western Pacific.

Sadly, I think we are poorly positioned or prepared for such a scenario. If Old Joe had the football, and if the stewed prunes hadn’t done their job that morning, he might hit the button. That’s the wild card that the Chinese can’t predict.

Smuggling a Million Aliens – It Can be Complicated

(The Federalist) These operations are sophisticated — so sophisticated that smugglers are now requiring migrants to wear wristbands as a way to keep track of who has paid and which smuggling outfit is in charge of whom. Jaeson Jones, a retired captain for the Texas Department of Public Safety and owner of Tripwires and Triggers, which tracks cartel activity on the border, shared images with The Federalist of discarded wristbands on the U.S. side of the border that he says “represent a process that says which smuggler group has moved them,” as well as other information.

Every person who crosses the border, whether man, woman, or child, is supposed to pay a fee to smugglers. These smugglers operate with the permission and cooperation of whichever cartel controls a particular area, and the cartel gets a cut of every smuggling fee that’s paid. Think of it as a “cartel tax.”

The way it used to be done is that migrants would pay up-front for passage over the Rio Grande and beyond the Border Patrol checkpoints just north of the border. But now, cartels and smugglers have turned this into a lucrative black market industry with a tiered pricing scheme for different nationalities. Prices are so high that almost no one can pay it up-front. According to Jones, who says he verified these prices with a cartel source, Mexican nationals must pay $2,500, Venezuelans, Peruvians, Ecuadorans, and Hondurans must pay $3,000, Chinese nationals pay $5,000, and Russians and migrants from the Middle East must pay $9,000.

The system amounts to a form of debt-bondage, which Jones says is “really a modern form of slavery.”

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22 COMMENTS

  1. Why are you showing me pictures of aeroplanes when I can’t go on one? That’s mean. I’ve found out today that if I dare to set foot off this island that it’s a £5,000 fine.
    If they catch me, that is…

  2. First, The Stupid Party will appoint a committee to research what a spine is, then they will appoint another one to research where they can be found, then appoint one each to research the following:
    environmental impact
    disparate economic impact
    disparate gender impact
    disparate racial impact
    a couple others I can’t remember the names to…usw

    Results back any century now.

    • See, the Republicans think “spine” was just a euphemism for butthole, and they’ve always shown plenty of that anytime somebody throws them a dollar… so they figure they’re all good.

      -Kle.

  4. Interesting Chinese bird. I knew about the Tu-4, but not this one.

    Here’s another–

    https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/threads/b-17-turbo-prop.11788/

    Somewhere I have a magazine article about this ship. The engines were pushed forward on farings to maintain the center of gravity. The performance was quite impressive. IIRC, it was possible to exceed the maximum allowed diving air speed in level flight. It came to a sad end fighting a forest fire. Conditions were treacherous, and the crew made a down hill run on the drop. When they tried to pull out, there just weren’t enough molecules in that super heated air for the prop blades. All that power was for naught. The nose came up, but the plane pancaked into the ground.

  5. $5000 is a lot of lever to have on a poor immigrant. A lot of useful things could be done to discharge that debt early.

  6. Got a bunch of topics in this one…!

    I didn’t think I’d be around long enough to see robot aircraft used in combat, but it’s been going on for quite a while now. These new ones should be pretty hard to detect.

    The KJ-1 was put on hold several times, for the cultural revolution, and then the economic revolution. By they time they got back around to it, it was obsolete.

    I don’t think China would directly attack our ships. If they do, we do what? Stand down? I don’t know who else they’d pick on, though. Cause an incident that drags us in?

    So I guess now the “coyotes” have been taken in (or rubbed out) by the cartels. And while CBP is up to it’s eyeballs in “refugees”, the cartels will use the distraction to bring in tons of drugs. Win-win for them, and a lose-lose for us.

  8. Groundhog day for ‘President’ Xiden approaches. Where am I? Who’s that? (‘Doc’ Biden). Why is the Ho taking my papers?
    Perhaps the Chinese war will start when Creepy Joe’s stumbled a few more times and there’s even more disarray in the WH.

    • Biden will fumble and say that the dog ate the homework. Maybe he will blame Corn Pop (or is it popcorn?), “a bad dude.”

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