The news snippet in itself is highly debatable though. No identifiable persons or even sources, only a vague but essentially empty reference to a Kurdish website. The Iranian clergy is definately to blame for a lot of wrongdoings in Iran – but i’m sure Sauron can come up with something better? I’m not getting my anti-Bush propaganda from democraticunderground either.

I have to say I’m amused to see one in Japanese colours – I didn’t think any would have survived intact for them to fly, and I don’t know why they’d want to fly it.

The Buffalo’s used by the Japanese were, as far as i know, all ex-Dutch East Indies aircraft they captured when they invaded the archipelago.

On the contrary actually. The US gave the Saigon goverment F-5A/B, F-5C and F-5E. Will find a photo if needed.

At least two F-5E’s found their way to the Soviets, one each being passed on to Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the museums of Kbely (near Prague, Czech Republic) and Kraków (Poland) you can find Vietnamese F-5E’s.

I disagree.

Austria-Hungary DEFINATELY wanted to fight Serbia, they just didn’t really look forward to the whole plethora of other countries which were to get involved. The ultimatum Austria sent to Serbia as an answer to the Archduke’s murder was a very poorly covered-up declaration of war, nothing else. Don’t forget that just prior to his visit to Serajevo, Franz Ferdinand had been watching military maneuvres. And guess at which country those exercises were focused at?

With the Turkic empire slowly rotting away, Austria’s ambitions on the Balkans only grew stronger and stronger. Considering the Balkan Wars earlier on didn’t leave really satisfactory borders by 1913, i think it would have been a matter of time before Austra would have gone offensive towards Serbia. With Wilhelm’s eagerness to go out and show the Brits that he ruled a big country too i do think that WW1 was inevitable. Wilhelm didn’t build his Hochseeflotte for nothing (well, until the war broke out of course 😀 ).

Slovak Koffola is good stuff. And Mecca Cola has that lovely third-world overdose of cinnamon in it, which is nice.

Arthur, I’m very very sure that the very first MiG-31 introduced Intra-flight datalink systems, the ones of the MiG-31B is improved because:
1) It has nearly 4 times the range in air-to-ground networking
2) They can share info not only between a/cs but also to the ground (MiG-31 “a” detects a target and pass it to the other buddyies in the net and to the Rubezh-M station in the ground too, in the Rubezh-M station they can send the info to other a/cs derived in the MiG-31’s datalink info 🙂

You are probably right Pit, but the Tu-128M served along with MiG-31 regiments until 1990 exactly because of their datalink capability. I don’t know the details, but i think the R-846 acted as a sort of ‘server’ for the datalink of the early MiG-31s.

Ramon, i wish you good luck with your endeavour but remember that there already is an excellent Tomcat website made by Thorsten Anft, at http://www.anft.net/f-14/ which will be very hard to beat…