A Damn Good Read

How Special Paint On The Hood Of The World War II Jeep Protected Soldiers' Lives

“In order to provide for the detection of liquid vesicants, the following procedure is adopted,” the European Theater of Operations document reads. “When the national symbol is located in a position visible to the driver, the space between the points of the star will be painted with paint, liquid vesicant detector, M5, to form a circle around the star.”

“In the presence of a vesicant spray attack,” the document continues, “the detector paint will give warning by becoming discolored from its normal brown to red,” going on to say that the paint does not work if the vesicant is a vapor.

The document continues, saying that if the star symbol isn’t visible, a two-square foot blotch of paint should be painted on an area that the driver can see, and that the paint has to be renewed twice a year or “whenever it becomes checked and chalky.” The paint should be cleaned with a brush and water, and it should be kept away from leaded fuel, the document states.

(Jalopnik.com)

Grandpa & Grandson, Just Out For A Cruise

63 years of aircraft development

(CavemanCircus.com)

Pew, Pew, Pew

(BroBible.com)

How Much Military Aircraft Has Evolved

63 years of aircraft development

(CavemanCircus.com)

This Is A Great Read

How One Soviet Pilot Pulled The Sheet Off The Ghostly MiG-25

The MiG-25 Foxbat was an incredible rat rod of a plane—heavy, big and extraordinarily powerful—and it indirectly led to the development of Western planes like the F-15 Eagle. In the 1970s, the United States Air Force didn’t know much about it, until a Soviet pilot named Viktor Belenko decided to defect and landed one in Hakodate, Japan, 40 years ago today.

The fascinating story of how we learned about the MiG-25, as recounted by the BBC, starts with spy satellite footage that the West picked up, which showed a mysterious new Soviet jet. It had huge wings. It looked fast, from the blurry photographs we had of it. Nobody knew anything about it.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost.

Meanwhile, Soviet citizen and fighter pilot Belenko’s life was falling apart at home, a divorce looming. He also began to question the entirety of the Soviet system, and if the West was really as bad as he’d been told.

After realizing that the huge, new MiG-25 that he was being trained to fly was his ticket out, Belenko started plotting. The day he flew out for training—September 6, 1976—he also had a full tank of fuel and a route.

But it was really in the aftermath of Belenko’s flight that the full implications to hold, as the BBC notes:

Japan only really knew what they were dealing with when the MiG made its surprise landing. The Japanese suddenly found themselves with a defecting pilot – and a fighter jet that had so far evaded Western intelligence agencies. Hakodate’s airport suddenly became a hive of intelligence activity.

The CIA was scarcely able to believe its luck.

(Jalopnik.com)

A B-52 Comes To Play All The Time

Here's How Many Weapons a B-52 Bomber Can Hold

(Jalopnik.com)

Every Single American Combat Vehicle In One Huge Graphic

(Jalopnik.com)

1 Of Life's Many Questions Answered

Here Is What All Those Colored Shirts Mean On An Aircraft Carrier's Deck

Yellow:

• Yellow shirts are worn by aircraft handlers and aircraft directors that shuttle aircraft around the carrier’s tight and chaotic deck. Catapult Officers and Arresting Gear Officers also wear yellow shirts. Because yellow shirts are so involved with taxiing aircraft, they are often featured prominently in dramatic photos depicting carrier deck operations.

Green:

• Green shirts are worn by some of the hardest-working sailors on the deck, including ones who run and maintain the ship’s catapults and arresting gear. Hook Runners who make sure the ship’s cross-deck pendants (wires) make it back into position to trap another aircraft by coercing them with a five-foot steel bar wear green shirts. This is one of the most dangerous positions on the flight deck as the wires can snap across the deck at high speed, slicing through whatever or whoever they come in contact with.

Blue:

• Plane Handlers, who work under the direction of the yellow shirt wearing aircraft handlers, assist in moving aircraft around the deck. They also can operate the carrier’s massive aircraft elevators, drive tractors and work as messengers and verbal liaisons.

Purple:

• Purple shirts, better known as “Grapes,” are all about aviation fuels. They fuel and de-fuel the carrier’s aircraft, often on very tight schedules. Obviously, pumping fuel at high-pressure into jets loaded with explosives and full of hot electronics and mechanical devices is not exactly a low-risk proposition. One spark, caused by grounding issue or one of many other possibilities, could cause a real disaster.

Red:

• The red color is no mistake as the crewmen that wear this color are usually near very hazardous things or situations. Ordnancemen deal with building, moving and mounting weapons and arming the air wing’s aircraft. They use their own hardened elevators to move live bombs and missiles up to the deck before loading them on the aircraft, which can including literally lining up and heaving a 500 pound missile over their shoulders to get it attached to the aircraft’s weapons station.

Brown:

• Brown shirts are worn most notably by Plane Captains. Loosely equivalent to a Crew Chief in the Air Force, Plane Captains are responsible for overseeing the maintenance, launch and recovery and general well-being of their aircraft as well as the others in their squadron. The old adage is the plane captain is the one who truly “owns the jet,” and the pilot just borrows it for a couple hours at a time.

White:

• White shirts are worn by a fairly wide mix of deck crew. These include many quality and safety observers such as air wing quality control personnel, individual squadron plane inspectors, and safety observers. Yet probably most well known white shirt wearers are Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) who help talk down approaching aircraft while also making sure the deck is clear for their arrival. The LSOs are sourced from each squadron in the air wing and are usually pilots with historically high landing scores themselves.

(Jalopnik.com)

This Awesome Facility Has An Unlikely Location

This Is How The Pentagon Knows Its Combat Aircraft Can Withstand A Blizzard

While the East Coast turns into a less-than-wonderful winter wonderland, the Department of Defense can rest assured that even their most advanced and finicky aircraft left out in the cold will be just fine. This piece of mind comes from testing done at the U.S. Air Force’s one-of-a-kind torture chamber: the McKinley Climatic Lab.

This huge testing facility was built in 1947 as part of a World War II-era initiative to take cold-weather aircraft testing away from the control of mother nature in Alaska and into a scientifically controlled environment. Oddly enough, the facility was built in one of America’s warmest climates at Eglin Air Force Base near the beach city of Destin, Florida. The facility is named after the person who proposed building it, Colonel Ashley McKinley.

(Jalopnik.com)