Some great behind the scenes images from the production of Airwolf were sent to me by the son of A. Mac Queen who was one of the stunt pilots on the show. Here Mac Queen and another on the crew are troubleshooting something on celeb chopper while in hover.
These guys were having a ball supporting Airwolf and a number of shows like A-Team and movies like Blue Thunder that had modified helicopter stunt flying in huge demand.
Blue Thunder on deck!
Bell 222 door gun mod!
They did some crazy destructive set pieces too:
The crew absolutely loved The Lady according to Mac Queen’s son, they all wore their custom Airwolf flight jackets around LA.
I put this in the wrong thread, so I will put it here too. Yes that’s The Lady sling loading!
Dressed up Little Birds and Jet Rangers were almost always the villains
Blue Thunder’s cockpit
The great Ernest Borgnine on set!
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Absolutely nothing that has happened in terms of drones over US bases is a surprise. The DoD and other agencies totally failed on this and my team have documented this in extreme detail for a decade+.
Thank you 60 Minutes for giving us the credit we deserve.
It took Langley AFB to get invaded for them to really wake up (and we broke the Langley story just like all the other incursion stories, but it was later stolen/repackaged without credit by WSJ months later). This should be very alarming and troubling.
We have more coming on what can be done. The problem is about to get far more complex as well. For a primer on what I mean by this, read: twz.com/news-features/…
Posted this in January. You don't need a 'kill switch' to severely hamper the utility of an exported weapons system, you just stop providing support for it and it will wither away, some systems very quickly. The more advanced the faster the degradation. This is in addition...
the impact from being locked out of centralized cloud-based system like F-35's ODIN (ALIS) that does so many things, including mission planning w/threat intel integration. Your jets would be far more vulnerable to loss without it...
let alone all the other stuff it does to keep the F-35 flying. Israel has invested in and made a deal for cutouts regarding these vulnerabilities. Nobody else has this deal or capabilities.
As we noted in our story last night on the H-60/CRJ collision, the Capital Region is the most highly surveilled area of sky in the United States. Beyond radar, including ATC, military fire control, CUAS microwave radar systems, electro-optical/infrared sensors and passive detection systems also thickly blanket the area. There is nowhere else like this in the United States. So the data on these flights, specifically off-board telemetry, will far more detailed and plentiful than in a normal accident investigation. Stories for background... 1/X
It was vastly people reporting airplanes and helicopters and a few drones (hobbyist, LE) mixed it. This was either very poorly worded or very carefully worded, either way it avoids the bottom line reality.
Another glaring case of massive domain awareness and basic knowledge set gap by those that don’t like to admit that kind of thing. Same old story with this topic and the feds/mil going back many years. I’m a broken record I will leave it there.
Just a reminder that the U.S. military has one of the most advanced aerial surveillance capabilities on planet earth, the latest and greatest, sitting right there in New Jersey — literally an Aegis destroyer's sensor suite on land. twz.com/40718/heres-wh…
And they would not see anything of scale because this is a silly farce. YES, U.S. military installations have had sporadic but very concerning drone incursions. Positive ID's objects. NO, New Jersey is not being invaded by mystery drones. YES, the news media is a joke on these issues by and large and you are being swindled by engagement farmers on social media showing you airplanes and mundane garbage with spooky captions.
YES, local gov officials seem to have no idea what they are talking about. Sorry, if there was evidence of this being credible you don't think we would be all over highlighting that? We broke the NJ base drone incursions story and ALL THE OTHERS over many years. All of them.
You want to see a glaring example of how some of mainstream media has totally lost its credibility, look at the drone story. They aren't even trying to get it right because the answers are not very exciting and you can't keep slapping the red button that is drawing audience.
Also understanding any of it takes work. Same reporter that covered a dog show or a car crash yesterday is covering this today. It's bad. Really bad. And the UFO angle means they don't even have to take it seriously at all, which is an unfortunate thing we have seen forever.
Really makes you think it's a futile exercise at this point.
And YES, the federal government has been absolutely atrocious at messaging on this, but that is not new at all, they denied their domain awareness gap for years until it was literally a top news story. They blew the drone threat until it was literally a deadly thing happening on a battlefield. There is a long track record of this, we have been reporting on it for over a decade in extreme detail.