Quotulatiousness

March 29, 2010

Costs continue to rise for F-35B aircraft

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

Strategy Page has more on the increasing spendiness of the F-35 program, especially the part the Navy is most concerned about:

Denmark has decided to wait, until 2014, to decide what to replace its elderly F-16 fleet with. Meanwhile, 18 of the F-16s will be retired. But the other 30 will be refurbished so that they can continue to operate for the rest of the decade. Denmark had wanted to replace the F-16s with F-35s. But the F-35s keeps getting delayed (now more than two years behind schedule), and is becoming more expensive (nearly a hundred percent over budget). The Danish F-35 buy is no longer a sure thing. The delays have lots of users concerned. The U.S. Navy has been nervously watching as the costs of the new F-35C and F-35B carrier aircraft versions go up.

It comes down to this. Currently, it costs the navy, on average, $19,000 an hour to operate its AV-8 vertical takeoff and F-18C fighter aircraft. It costs 63 percent more to operate the F-35C (which will replace the F-18C) and the F-35B (which will replace the AV-8). These costs include buying the aircraft, training and maintaining the pilots, the aircraft and purchasing expendable items (fuel, spare parts, munitions.) Like the F-22, which recently had production capped at less than 200 aircraft, the capabilities, as superior as they were, did not justify the much higher costs. The F-35, at least for the navy, is headed in the same direction. The navy can go ahead with the more recent F-18E, and keep refurbishing, or even building, the AV-8. Politics, and lobbying by the F-35 manufacturer, will probably keep the F-35 headed for fleet service, no matter what the cost.

Another ally watching the F-35B costs rise with trepidation is the Royal Navy, whose aircraft carriers are not able to handle conventional aircraft (even the two large carriers under construction won’t have catapults for launching non-STOL planes). Earlier posts on the Royal Navy’s carrier worries here and here.

December 7, 2009

A Devil’s Dictionary for Copenhagen

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Tunku Varadarajan updates Ambrose Bierce for the Copenhagen conference:

A is for anthropogenic: (as in anthropogenic global warming, or “AGW”), a $10 word for “man-made” which global-warmists wield as proof of expertise — no one more so than Al Gore, who, after having invented the Internet, turned his prodigious mind to the conundrum of AGW.

[. . .]

C is for the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, the now-discredited source of much of the data used to fuel climate hysteria. In November, in an episode that was oh-so-predictably dubbed Climategate, a cache of leaked emails showed that researchers systematically hid or manipulated data that was inconsistent with the accepted narrative of man-made climate change. (Read John Tierney’s clear-headed critique here.) Don’t forget carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless gas once considered essential to life on earth, not to mention bubbles in Champagne. (Although it’s now regarded as a poisonous pollutant, you can, however, trade it.) Think also of consensus — the idea that science is settled by an asserted poll of experts after all objections from dissenting scientists have been suppressed.

Do as we say, not as we do

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

It will come as no real surprise to anyone that the Copenhagen gab-and-grabfest will “produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough”:

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports — or to Sweden — to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

I’d point out the irony, but the earnest types in the AGW movements don’t do irony.

October 26, 2009

QotD: Neither full veritas nor much lux

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:37

Notwithstanding all this, The Cartoons That Shook the World is an informative read. But you won’t find the actual cartoons in it. There’s a cartoon mocking George W. Bush; there’s a death threat against the cartoonists. But Yale University Press refused to publish Klausen’s book as she submitted it — with the 12 Danish cartoons. Yale ordered her to remove the cartoons, citing unnamed “experts” who claimed the book “ran a serious risk of instigating violence.” Several American newspapers, like The Philadelphia Inquirer, published the cartoons without incident. Yale has had no actual threats, but it pre-emptively surrendered. If Klausen wanted to live up to Yale’s motto — “light and truth” — she would have done what the entire editorial staff of the New York Press did in 2006 when their publisher vetoed their reprinting of the cartoons: They resigned en masse.

Given Klausen’s burning derision for Fogh Rasmussen’s decision to stand for freedom, it’s no surprise she collapsed immediately herself, academic integrity be damned. Her surrender — and Yale’s — is not a detail but a central part of the story, for it is exactly the outcome desired by the Danish imams, the Saudi diplomats and their chorus of rioters.

Ezra Levant, “Review: The Cartoons that Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen Cartoon logic”, The Globe and Mail, 2009-10-24

September 22, 2009

According to the Danish tourist agency, Danish women are easy

Filed under: Europe — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:25

The Economist reports on a badly thought-out (and recently withdrawn) tourism-boosting campaign by VisitDenmark:

The film, shot in video-diary style, purports to be the work of a Danish woman with a baby: she says that the child is the result of a one-night stand with a foreign visitor and that she hopes the father will see the video and contact her.

It’s nicely acted, gently affecting, completely fake and unintentionally hilarious. This official advertisement for Denmark, meant to be “a good and sweet story about a mature, responsible woman who lives in a free society and shoulders the responsibility of her actions”, instead conveys the message that if you come to Denmark, you can sleep with attractive locals. Is that really the remit of the tourism agency?

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