It was a Nothrop Prowler, not a Grumman Tomcat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_(1998)
They were flying too low and based on maps that did not mention the new aerial tramway. They were court martialed in the U.S.A., acquitted, then trialed a second time and were sentenced to a short prison time.
The latest carrier based drones have airborne refueling capabilities just like the manned jets.
If you're talking about Northrop Grumman's X-47 UCAV, it is only developmental and has not yet flown off a carrier... But yes, drones having refueling capability, buddy refueling even more so, are going to set a new standard on mission duration.
But manned jets have to contend with pilot fatigue.
UCAV too in a sense : they are constantly monitored by one or two operators (sometimes even flight-rated pilots), who DO have to manage fatigue; the good thing is they are in a facility where crews can rotate without the aircraft having to provide accommodations for all those people. These aircrafts are unmanned in the sense that there is no man ON BOARD, but there is of course a man (or woman, one or more) in the loop. This is why they are sometimes called "remotely" piloted aircraft.
One of the latest tests off a carrier was a 55 hour non-stop single drone mission. There is not a pilot in the world capable of handling missions of that length. Even the existing manned B-2 bombers that launch missions from the mid-west to targets in the middle east are pushing the limits a pilot can handle.
Wikipedia states that a B-2 mission has lasted 50 hours with round-trip flight from Barksdale AFB to the Middle-East, but I cannot find any reference of it in the official U.S. Air Force website, which states that B-52s during Operation Desert Storm used to undertake missions of 35 hours. In both cases, these are bomber aircrafts which are designed for long duration missions : the B-2 has two pilots, is thoroughly automated, and of course has a toilet. Lockheed's U-2 Dragonlady pilots are not so lucky on their 9 hours mission (see http://www.blackbirds.net/u2/u-2mission.html) at 70k feet in their astronaut-like full pressure suit.
In my opinion a stockholder should not have so much control over the company.
Parent said:
"Get off my lawn!"
I am afraid you have not kept up with XMLHttpRequest and the whole scripting activities currently involved in developing a modern website. It is even said that website development is so complex nowadays[citation needed] that separate professional functions have to divide up the work: designers, programmers, testers, moderators and, of course, trolls.
I too long for the good ol' days of websites being displayed equally "beautifully" in NCSA's Mosaic or ISC's Lynx. STOP vomiting flashing text, animated gifs, flash ads and floating DIVs, DAMMIT!
They have a point, we should shut down the sun to protect us from all that harmful radiation. As a bonus Global Warming will no longer be an issue.
Mod this UP! We should also shut down the universe which emits so much of these damn radiations, and eventually 'live' in an absolute zero absolute maximum entropy state.
Still this is good news for Algerian separatists, foreign spies etc
I think Algeria is independent and separated from France since 1962, July 3rd.
We have the "Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire" (Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute) and the "Autorité de sûreté nucléaire" (Nuclear Safety Authority) which are the official organizations for the safety of the nuclear installations in France. They are supposedly independent from the industry and the government. Their credibility suffers from a precedent during the Chernobyl catastrophe when the Health ministry's central bureau of protection against ionizing radiation director, Pierre Pellerin, consistently and continuously said the radioactive cloud would not have any impact and no safety precautions should be taken, while all neighbor countries (even Spain and Great Britain which were further down the route of the cloud) had measured elevated radiation on produce.
The CRIIRAD "Commission de recherche et d'information indépendantes sur la radioactivité" (Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity) is the most independant organization since it is not official and uses publicly available data and measures made by independently owned detectors.
About the intrusion by Greenpeace, I find their action disingenuous: the Genarmerie Nationale has now dedicated special groups to the protection of all nuclear plants since this summer, but this takes time to be put in place; other Greenpeace activists have tried to break into several other facilities but were arrested by the local law enforcement (or possibly the said special Gendearmerie groups); furthermore elected officials and experts conducted a live and surprise safety exercise not weeks ago to assess the measures put in place against floods and earthquakes (operation Opera during the night of December 1st).
The problem the Fukushima events showed evidently is that you do not have to make the nuclear reactor go critical and explode to cause a major radiological catastrophe: you just have to cut the power to the control room and safety system that prevents the reactor to sustain and limit its heating-cooling cycle.
Therefore protection against any intrusion or incident is paramount to the safety of the plant, therefore security should be airtight.
Parent post has it right: the Gendarmerie Nationale is in charge of the protection from intrusion into nuclear plants and other facilities and even NBC protection.
Nuclear plants are also surrounded by restricted air zone enforced by SAM and fast jet interception. See this (french) animation:
Interesting idea: what if "time is money" was put to the test? What would the rich do with their time and what would it mean for the poor to have so little?
At first I was a little distressed at the idea that time would run against you since the day you were born but fortunately the film shows at some point that babies (even those born in poor districts) have a clock showing "0": the clock starts ticking at 25. What do people do until they are 25? Well poor people, even poor children as sh
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
