Yea, it’s probably Wu. It’s kinda of hard to tell without seeing his name in Chinese characters. The Korean (hangul) letter in his last name is actually a “u” sound but is pronounced a little differently.

PBAR

LOL or they can take the gate guard from Dyess 83-0065 … her hoses are still wet 🙂

I flew the Star of Abilene on its fini flight. It was definately a hangar queen and IIRC it had among the fewest hours on it despite being built first and had a bad reputation. We often called it the “Scar of Abilene”. I’d rather they pull “Boss Hawg” from the AF Museum as that was our most reliable jet; it almost never broke.

PBAR

on a related note

There’s a good paper on how the Cessna U-27A Caravan would be a great COIN airplane from Airpower Journal (albeit the article dates from 1991).
However, one would probably be better off using the Harbin Y-12 instead as it’s cheaper and twin-engined.

Also, a US company has recently flown a new light COIN aircraft called the A-67 Dragon (http://www.flightglobal.com/Articles/2006/10/18/Navigation/177/210033/Picture+exclusive+A-67+Dragon+counter-insurgency+aircraft+quietly+makes+first.html) and it looks like it’s along the lines of the Fletcher Defender (http://www.chinalakealumni.org/IMAGES/1951/N90802%20FD-25%2011JUN51%20CLK%20NP45-039279.jpg) or the Yugo Kraguj (http://www.yumodel.co.yu/yugoslav_air_force/soko_p2_kraguj.htm).

For any of these aircraft to be viable you absolutely must have good IR missile defense against MANPADS, i.e. DIRCM or IR chaff (BOZ, etc.). I’d imagine that a DIRCM system would be a huge percentage of the cost of such an aircraft though.

PBAR

Oh, there is a video of the nominees at http://www.airforce.mil.kr:7778/news/onair/onair_1_1538.jsp and the winner is the third guy.

Block F was canceled. As for hardware upgrades, new radar LRUs on are on the way as are new INSes (and GSS), targeting pod, and a few defensive hardware mods and maybe some others I’ve haven’t heard about. New software blocks are in the pipeline too.

PBAR

It would probably help matters if we cut back on our low-level flying. TF operations really beat the jets up from what I’ve seen. However, we’re still clinging it to “just in case” the threat drives us low. In my opinion, any threat that would drive us low is probably a show-stopper anyways. In any event, I don’t think I’d like to fly low-level anywhere given the proliferation of MANPADS, etc.
A few years ago I was told that the B-1 was the 2nd most expensive jet in the AF flying hour wise (after the B-2) but if we dropped the low level mission we would drop to #10 or something. Can’t vouch for the veracity of that but I would think just the fuel savings would be huge.
I agree with ELP, the flight controls need to be fixed. It seemed like when I flew 80% of the maintenance issues I saw were either engines or flight controls.
One other factor plays into the maintenance issues of late and that is the merging of many maintenance career fields. For example, the defensive avionics techs used to only work B-1s or B-52s their whole careers and so senior NCO really knew the systems. Then they merged and can work on everything from the B-1s ALQ-161 to chaff launchers on a C-130. A lot of the experience isn’t there anymore.

PBAR
http://bonewso.net Flying the Bone

When I was at Dyess, they asked us B-1 students if we wanted to submit a design for noseart, but the noseart couldn’t have anything to do with “sex or death and destruction”. Death and destruction!?! It’s a bomber-that’s what it’s for! A couple of years later one of the crewchiefs wanted to name his B-1 Low Level Devil with a Warner Brother’s Tasmanian Devil on it. It was denied because it might be construed as satanic. Nevermind that that we already had a jet named Hungry Devil. Apparently,the noseart has been submitted all the way up to some colonel at Headquarters, Air Combat Command.