Valkyrie Vision
13
May
Trillion Dollar Trainwreck
Trillion Dollar Trainwreck is published worldwide by Valkyrie Strategic Solutions LLC via Kindle Direct Publishing.
This project snuck up on me. It emerged from some notes I had put together a few years ago, plus some research I started last fall. In part, the...
17
Apr
Counting The Legs
The last few days of F-35 news took me back in time. To a point two years after a well-remunerated pundit had declared that "if you don't follow the defense business closely, then you can be excused for believing that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is in trouble", followed a matter...
11
Feb
Just Don’t Call It A Flying Killer Robot
Uncrewed, reusable, weapon-carrying fast-jet aircraft have had many names since the WW2 and Vietnam-era idea was revived in the mid-1990s. Maybe 37, which is 37 more than the number of such aircraft that have been delivered to operational units. Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) is the latest. It's survived...
05
Feb
For Whom The Whistle Blows
A mid-cabin door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 on January 5 because it was removed at Boeing, to rectify faulty work by fuselage supplier Spirit, and improperly reinstalled. The bolts that hold the plug in position against its stops - as the latch mechanism...
28
Jan
The Cartman Gambit
"Screw you guys, I'm going home".
I have been working on a root-cause analysis of the F-35 project. As I got deeper into the subject, I realized that the impact of decisions taken in the early 1990s was not only colossal but largely unintentional.
22
Jan
Dreamland Life
The last big book on Area 51 was written in 2011 by Annie Jacobsen, previously best known for throwing a case of the screaming abdabs over some Syrian musicians on a 2004 Northwest Airlines flight. It would never have gotten past an agent but for the sensational ending,...