willedoo

I guess they think civilians are press ganged into driving the trucks and they want to give them a chance. It's not NATO. It's a coalition of countries and close to half of them just happen to be NATO members. As far as I understand it, it's a US led coalition, not under the umbrella of NATO. https://www.rt.com/news/323262-putin-downing-plane-syria/

Sometimes the Twittersphere can be misleading. Not knowing who Zaid Benjamin and Radio Sawa are, I'll see if I can find an official Turkish Government posting of the flight path depicted in the image. Vlad's not impressed; does that mean the pipeline deal with Turkey is off?

Thanks for the explanation; I figured as much, but as I said, do you have a link to the site or article associated with the graphic. It would be interesting to read a bit more about it.

That's just an image with squiggly lines, FT. Do you have a link to the parent article with some context. Cheers, Willie.

Can't see the image, FT. Is it my computer or did the upload not work? Cheers, Willie.

Watching the coverage live on Russian media is interesting. There's reports from Syrian rebels that one pilot has been killed by their ground forces, but it's unconfirmed at this stage. So far, they've had one Russian and two Australian analysts commentating. The bloke from the Central Queensland University seems to think it was brought down from the ground. The lady from Canberra seems to be very critical of Turkey, but not adding much to as how it happened. Russian FM, Sergey Lavrov, is off to Turkey tommorrow to sort it out.

Russia has said that it's one of theirs. They're claiming it was in Syrian airspace, and was most likely brought down from a ground strike. Two locals were supposed to be injured from falling debris. It must have been very close to the border as it has crashed in Syria.

Breaking news tonight that a Turkish F-16 has shot down an aircraft that violated it's border with Syria. I've watched the supposed footage of the aircraft going down and it's a Sukhoi Su-24 Fencer with wings fully extended. Russia is operating Su-24's in Syria and the Syrian Air Force has them as well, so it's not known yet which country it belongs to. Eyewitness reports say both pilots ejected. Cheers, Willie. http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20151124/1030636232/military-plane-crash-syria-turkey.html

Russian news agency, Sputnik, formery RIA Novosti, is running this article claiming that PBS has passed off Russian strike footage as American. Someone's right and someone's wrong, I guess. http://sputniknews.com/us/20151121/1030518092/pbs-newshour-russian-airstrikes-footage-us-lying.html

The UN couldn't organize a chook raffle. A year is a long time in politics. Last G-20, we saw Shirtfront beating his chest and a public, politician and media frenzy calling for Putin to be banned from attending. Come the 2015 G-20 and Vlad is everyone's new best friend. No wonder he doesn't lose any sleep over the dickheads. Cheers, Willie.

Dazza, the aircraft are incognito, but apart from that, a very serious security issue appears in the press PR photos. In a couple of shots, the pilots have their back to the camera and names are visible on the back of the helmets. Lucky for them the photos are fairly low resolution.

Some Syrian footage - not all that exciting, but history in the making. After all these years, the strategic bombers, Tu-95, Tu-160 and Tu-22 have seen combat.

That's interesting. Does anyone have any thoughts on the aerodynamics behind the large horizontal stabilizers. I can only think of the large dihedral shape being for roll resistance and to counteract the weight of all those engines, being mounted high and lateral. Even without the engines, is there an ever present roll instability in ground effect? I don't know much about ground effect forces. Cheers, Willie.

It's an interesting re-manufacture. I knew they were using the Honeywell turbo prop and modern avionics, but didn't realise the wings were to undergo such a transformation. Would be all metal, I guess. If I win the lotto, I'll buy one and we can take it for a spin, Phil. Cheers, Willie.

The new An-2MS ( TVS-2-DT)

The news item mentions modernizing the engines, but no mention of any other modifications. They quote a fair bit less fuel burn than the competitors, so maybe it will be economical. Seems to be part of the push to go back to more local industry. I think the sanctions made them realise how dependant on exports they were. Whether or not they're hoping for an export future for the aircraft is another matter.

Thanks for that info, FT. It also carries about 10 less passengers. As said, it's roughly the same class, or more precisely, designed to perform roughly the same role. Fairly old design now, though. Cheers, Willie.

It looks like Russia is going to resurrect the Il-114 as a short haul aircraft. Roughly the same class as the ATR-72 and Dash 8. http://sputniknews.com/russia/20151115/1030137648/russia-civil-aviation-industry.html

It's seems to be a tangled web these days. Who wears the white hats and who wears the black hats is increasingly dertermined by the media. But there appears to be a lot of grey hats there, that no-one on our side will acknowledge the existance of. I would tend to think that if the bomb theory is right, explosive residues would be fairly easy to detect in the wreckage. That still doesn't determine who did it. If it wasn't IS, it would still be in their interest to claim responsibility for it. There could be a lot of potential candidates if the downing of the airliner was a terrorist act. If it was militants linked to the troubles in Syria and the reason, in theory, was payback for the Russian intervention, then it could only be IS or al-Nusra. It couldn't be any of the other foreign supported groups, as we're told that they are 'moderate' groups and 'moderates' don't do awful things like that. So if it wasn't IS or al Nusra, who else would stand to gain from it, and how would they expect the spin off to harm Russia. If a Russian airliner was brought down, it would be directed at that country and not done to scare infidels in general.

F-104 at an Italian scrapyard.

Interestingly, the Russians use the Roman 'N' to signify 'Number', eg: our No.1 is N.1 in Russia. Cheers, Willie.

Thanks for posting that story, poteroo. You should write a book about the experiences one day. Cheers, Willie.

There it is in a nutshell. The press would have everybody believe that there's all these individual issues causing great concern and a threat to us. But it's all about one thing - independant foreign policy. Any country pursuing an independant foreign policy is by default, demonised. What have Russia, China, Iran, Syria and the former administrations of Iraq, Libya and Cuba have in common. Independant foreign policy. Look at the number of countries around the world that have done things as bad as these countries and worse, and we turn a blind eye because they're part of the team. Basically, if the puppet won't dance, you smack him. No wonder the world's in a continual state of war.

Some good advice there, Don. With global ADD, and the 24 hour news cycle, we're an easy target for news to be presented in a not so accurate version. If the Western press (or any other, for that matter) want us to believe something for the purposes of sticking to the narrative, it's not hard to do. Sometimes it's what they don't tell us, as opposed to printing outright untruths. Another disturbing trend of late is to quote 'anonymous sources', 'persons familiar with the matter' or 'according to social media reports'. One recent trend is to state ' We have conclusive evidence'. When challenged to provide that evidence, the standard answer is ' We cannot release the evidence as it would compromise our national security'. What a matrix we now have. Both sides have professional trolls and bloggers on the payroll. The theory is - throw some mud and it will stick because most people blindly believe the limited news sources that they access. I can guarantee that most people with a hardline stance against Putin have never read one of his speeches, ever. The reason our press doesn't publish them, is that they make a lot of sense. And we can't have that. As far as decimating the economy, economics is above my head. I guess only time will tell. The Chinese have said that they will back Russia financially, and Russia still has 370 billion US curency reserves. The sanctions are hurting Europe as much as Russia, so maybe they'll pull through it. Cheers, Willie.

Nev, Chechnya is not a neighboring country. It's part of the Russian Federation and has the same relationship with the RF as Queensland has with the Commonwealth of Australia. It's been a part of Russia for about 250 years and has a mainly Muslim population. Sections of it are pro Moscow and others are separatists, with a section of Jihadists also wanting independence. Whether any country has the right to fight separatists to maintain the integrity of their borders is another question, I suppose. The American Civil War comes to mind. I think if half of one of our States tried to separate by violent means, our Prime Minister would be seen to be strong and in control by putting the rebellion down. I guess there's two distinct camps in Chechnya; whether it's Sunni against Shia, I don't know. When the Russian intervention in Syria first started, Chechen Muslim forces tried to volunteer to fight Islamic State as ground forces, but the federal Government declined their offer. Cheers, Willie.