Yeah, for any number of reasons much of the pickup gear delivered to England was removed, pre-Normandy, and few tow pilots trained. It wasn't until post-Market Garden that the European theater got serious about glider recovery, probably because they were needed for the last big operation to cross the Rhine. Burma used snatch pickup a lot, Pacific and Arctic a little; Med was offered to recover out of Siciliy but declined. I would love to talk or write to your glider pilot for the when, where, and how many he witnessed. My research has stagnated. PM to lg_glidr on the army air forces forum, http://forum.armyairforces.com/tt.aspx?forumid=162

Do you have any records of gliders damaged by snatch pickup? An overused towline would, on rare occasion, snap while the glider was still on the ground, and go through the plexiglass windscreen, making the pilot duck. Only in the Dec '48 Greenland rescue did this happen to an airborne glider for an exciting return into the snow. http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/Stranded.html

I’ll be driving the author of that article next week to the annual WWII glider pilot’s reunion. It was called snatch pickup or “the snatch”. About 1-in-8 WWII gliders were launched this way: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA516653 The tow plane’s winch grew out of airmail pickup in the Alleghenies, with the goal posts first used by the Marines in 1927 (there’s a display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps). The physics of a 1946 launch of a 25,000-lb cargo glider into flight: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-3584.2009.00190.x/abstract A towed variation retreived telemetry tapes off tracking ships after rocket shots in the 1950’s, and a mid-air version caught spy satellite film. Today only aerial-towed banners are picked up this way.

Sounds like a real-world honeypot for evil geniuses.

Maybe the preventative application of a patch saves skin from any damage in the first place!

Predator ceiling is 25,000ft according to wikipedia; only the recently canceled Global Hawk flies at 60,000ft. Methinks this is an attempt to revive a canceled program.

One summer I was doing 5mi/day without (serious) stretching. That fall soccer season started 12 years of Iliotibial band syndrome, ending only after a combined effort of heavy anti-inflammatory, physical therapy, and acupuncture. I can still feel it coming on if I lay off the daily stretching, so it's a lifetime of recovery for me. I wouldn't wish that pain I experienced on anyone.

governmental agency lobbying? I'm pretty sure it is unlawful already.

the impressive math to prove that airline software operates correctly, obviating the familiar testing found in most software development efforts, is also not popularly recognized.

Y'all started out with adult crowd and somehow got into kid's songs. (My daughter's a big fan). Which is easier: songs for the alphabet, math, or science?

I had to use Windows and Monte Carlo my sim "locally". I sat two Optiplex 790s w/ 3.4GHz i7-quad cores on a rack shelf for under $3000. Their small form factor is a sweet chassis (can't say that about their Precision desktop). I moved the boot disk into the optical drive's bay, and installed a sub-$190 3TB 3.5" drive internally. No power supply for a serious graphics card but native is good enough for my sim. Many-hour runs are 20-25% shorter than my older X9650 and E5540 so I'm happy.

For me in Virginia, the damage continues to accrue at $30/day for gas in the generator. 48 hours after it hit, exactly half of all traffic lights in the county were dark, with only three places to even buy gas.

A broadside trajectory sounds spectacular and does the greatest benefit, but any error at all is a miss. There's no way to fly enough sensing gear, thruster fuel, etc for a hyper-high speed, broadside intercept. There can also be unpredictable out-gassing shifting Apophis' course. Rather, going up the tailpipe matches vectors so the time of intercept can be off by a lot more.

Technically no, other than testing, development, and integration, a payload is a payload. However nukes involve military infrastructure and there's treaty protocols like international observers and bases were nukes are supposed to be and not supposed to be. For instance Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral are where ballistic launches always occur. Violating these "norms" is an "escalation in tensions" and also means the other sides can do it too. Not tantamount to war, but a clear step away from controlling all the possible mistakes associated with nukes. So as long as this hypersonic glider is never associated with or launches from a known nuke site, PGS thinks that all the other players will treat it as yet another weapon in our inventory and not a destabilizing game changer. Tomahawks have been down this path for decades.

a twice-daily tide from a binary system like ours could have a significant influence on vertebrate development. I bet there's a lot of inverts out there awaiting discovery, but it's a lot harder to evolve critters the rest of us would find interesting.