Instead of trying to make crap and nonsense out of this, the best you can say is the procedures are not the same as what you liked. Having small military planes land at commerical airports is not more dangerous than diverting large passenger aircraft to land there. If Americans say its standard practice to divert emergenices that need clearence to land at an AFB to commerical airports even for OUR own commerical aircraft, then WTF is your problem?

– Let me tell you WTF my problem is. The americans don’t usually store their fighters at civilian airports, neither does the french. This has to do with several facts such as; the security at civilian airports is generally not as good as at the military one and the mechanics working at civilian airports are not familiar with handling military fighter jets. Now, if these fellas were ‘foreign’ I could possibly understand that USAF didn’t want to have them wandering around at their airport – but these fellas were not ordinary ‘foreigners’ but allies.

u’ve hit the nail on the coffin..It wasnt that there was only one military base and nothing else for thousands of miles…without proper clearence the commanders at that base cannot allow aircraft to land..and getting that clearence requires a little bit of time (even if on an emergerncy u bypass protocol)..there was clearly a civillian alternative available which was exercized.

The thing here is that these french guys are your allies. I would also consider it as an extremely bad planned exercise if there were no american air bases capable of handling fighters that needs to divert.

Besides, my own personal experience serving abroad is that the french shows a lot more hospitality than their american counterparts. And I would say that hospitality is a key essence when it comes to successful cooperation, especially if you are to march into combat together. But that’s just my opinion, not a fact.

regards,
Cliff

hmm no, the swedish are the only ones who have spoken about it….its not too novel, my masters dissertation will be on this subject.

Well my humble opinion is that this little bird lacks quality and ease-of-use. It seems to require a lot of people to handle it, besides it seems to be a bitch to fly (go ask the canadians how many they’ve crashed). Am I right, or what have you heard Coanda?

Here is a neat Swedish? idea: Flying the UAV on a manned aircraft!

Hmm. Is that the best thing they could do about it – use it as a reconnaissance pod on MU-2’s? Very clever UAV system I must say. 😮

More info:
http://www.avrosys.nu/aircraft/UAV/970_Ugglan.htm

That’s just it! None of it IS constructive! It’s just one against the other,and goes on and on and on…………….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I believe you are wrong. From time to time there have been different discussions showing that at least some people on this forum have deep knowledge of aircraft operations or aircraft design and engineering. As an example I could point out Coandas post about composites and stress engineering where he talks about the pro-/cons- to have an all out composite airplane. He backs up his arguments in a quite technical way to show that his remarks are valid. That makes it so much more interesting to read than the usual fanboy-rants.

regards,
Cliff

And yes I read all the posts, but I find it hard to believe an airplane that is nearly 250 feet long can only carry up to 440 passengers. The 777-300 can carry up to 550!

There’s always a tradeoff between number of seats and amount of fuel. Where the 777-300 fly Los Angeles – Paris the A340-500 fly Los Angeles – Singapore. Here’s some more info:

http://www.airliners.net/info/stats.main?id=28 (A340-500/600)
http://www.airliners.net/info/stats.main?id=107 (777-300)

regards,
Cliff

See what I mean, Cliff? :rolleyes:

:D:D:D:D

Ah, got your point perfectly well! 😎

Ja, it happened at 20 000 feet, so I think your guesses are probably both wrong! My money is on a computer failure!
The pilot was in free fall for 10 000 feet before deploying the parachute, but was picked up very quickly and is virtually unharmed.

Delta wing fighters with high wing loading produces large vortices, and since this seemed to be dogfight training, I would rather suspect that he flew into the leading fighters vortices. In plain english – he got too close.

This was the reason to why they lost their first operative fighter in 1999 during a similar dogfight training. Nothing to get too excited about, combat training is dangerous. As an example, neighbouring Norway has lost nearly 15 of it’s 72 F-16’s during the past 20 years.