Week on the Web: August 2011 Archives

On Asian Skies, Greg Waldron analysed Taiwan's fighter acquisition plans and commented: "Virtually every pundit, journalist, official, and industry executive I've spoken to privately feels that Taiwan won't get new F-16 C/Ds. Washington's fear of angering China is simply to great."

Look out for Waldron's upcoming Flight International feature on the subject.

The DEW Line carried video of the Sukhoi T-50-2 fighter's flameout at the end of MAKS 2011, and quoted an eye witness, namely our Russian correspondent Vladimir Karnozov: "Two bursts of flame erupted from the right engine and two loud bumps were heard."

Blog author Stephen Trimble also drew attention to footage from the MAKS debut of Sukhoi's Su-35S, which he billed "an air show stud".

And, in rare form, he managed to pen an analysis of the Lockheed Martin F-35's grounding in the style of Naughty by Nature's early-'90s rap hit 'OPP'. Yes, really.

The DEW Line had video of the moment when activist Medea Benjamin, co-founder of "women for peace" group CODEPINK, hijacked a press briefing by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International at Washington DC's National Press Club.

"We were a little disappointed by how quickly the protest was subdued," admitted Stephen Trimble.

As the Cro(ft) Flies carried a photo of the scene after "fatigue put a tired cropduster pilot in Buttonwillow, California right into the dumpster, literally".

Asian Skies featured a Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology simulation of a Taiwanese F-16 destroying a Chinese warship and ground targets.

And FlightBlogger ran a clip of Boeing's test aircraft ZA102 departing Everett: it "should give a good sense of the 787's acoustic properties".

Using FlightAware to track a Boeing 747-8F flight test FlightBlogger discerned "the unmistakable shape of the numbers 747 covering the states west of the Mississippi River".

The DEW Line carried video "from the world's least-secured runway for officially classified, experimental military jets", in China.

It shows take-offs by Chengdu's J-20 and JF-17, developed with Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, plus a surprise debut from the all-new J-10B.

The latter is powered by the indigenous WS-10 Taihang engine, which "symbolises China's ambition to become independent of foreign supply for its own tactical aircraft".

On Asian Skies, Greg Waldron explained how to tell a J-10A from a J-10B, and flagged an image that might show India's answer to the Boeing X-37B orbital test vehicle.