Happy Father's Day 2017

Dads, you are terribly missed. But you live on in our hearts.

(Pics in Chronological Order)

Granddad (Left) Enroute to San Diego on the USS Langley's 1st deployment to the Pacific Fleet 1924.

Granddad riding with his buddy in SoCal Circa 1929-30 

Dad in 1952-3 Corpus Christi NAS, Texas

Dad hamming it up, Vung Tau SVN April 1966, A 'happening place'.

My late Father-in-law "Rusty" Wall, Da Nang SVN with the First F-4Es: 1969, 4th Fighter Sq, 366th Fighter Wing. 

The F-35: What Will Happen While Exploring ‘High Angle-of-Attack’, Part 4

‘Old School’ F-15: Entry to the modern world of ‘High-Performance’

Part 4 (and last) in a series of posts where we document The Profound Truth of High Angle-of-Attack (AoA) flight testing of high performance aircraft. What is “The Profound Truth”?

Discovery and rectification of undesirable aircraft behaviors during High Angle-of-Attack testing of High Performance Aircraft is not only the ‘Norm’, but those behaviors needing rectification/mitigation are usually complex, sometimes bizarre, and often ‘spectacular’.

The F-15 and AoA: A Surprisingly Short Story

My whole family had just moved to Antelope Valley to be near my Dad while he worked another flight test program at Edwards AFB-- only the month before the F-15’s first flight at the same location. I joined the Air Force before the whole family moved back to Texas six months later (Dad would often refer to himself as a “migrant aerospace worker” or “Aero Bracero”).



F-15 First Flight, July 1972 With Square Wing Tips Shown to Good Effect (US AF Photo)

I joined the Air Force before Dad’s assignment ended, but still got to see the first F-15s in the skies over Eddy and the AV quite a bit before I left. In a way, the F-15’s ‘career’ began the same time mine (paying anyway) did, and I got to watch most of the F-15’s maturation, successes, and evolution in ‘real time’ before and after I retired in 1993.

From knowledge gained going way back to the early 70’s and the heady days of the F-15’s flight test and OT&E, I thought I’d just be able to search up some early scholarly papers using a select few keywords like ‘F-15 flutter’ and ‘F-15 buffet’ and then just quote the source data as to what actually ‘happened’. But my research surprised me. There was almost NOTHING written in peer-reviewed or official literature on F-15 High AoA exploration and behaviors while they were being discovered that I could find in the public domain.

Some of this void could be due to the time frame: we were going toe to toe with Russian fighter designs in Vietnam until at least six months into the F-15’s flight test program, and the Cold War was still ‘freezing’. Absence of hard data could also be due to the priorities given to the challenges, controversies, and manufactured scandal surrounding the F-15’s engine development history. That was always in the news at the time, and the news was (usually) wrong about what was really happening with the F100 engine and why.

From forensic examination of the larger body of available ‘retrospective’ literature, it seems for the most part the Air Force was just extremely happy to be able to do what the F-15 design was intended to do: fly much deeper into the High AoA regions before onset of buffeting and stall at higher speeds than its predecessors.

In the past 10 years, U.S. military aviation has progressed from the generation of F-4/F-8 air superiority fighter to that of the F-15/16/18 aircraft, which are demonstrating significant improvements in maneuver performance. These improvements result from more sophisticated aerodynamic design, lower wing loading, and higher thrust-to-weight ratio, and they permit the newer fighters to maneuver as well at 7 to 8 g’s as the earlier aircraft did at 4 to 5 g’s. The limited assessment to date of the newer fighters indicates that they also track as well at 7 to 8 g’s as their predecessors did at 4 to 5 g’s. This is attributed largely to their improved aerodynamics and more sophisticated control systems, which permit them to operate at higher load factors with lower levels of buffet intensity and wing rock than their predecessors. – Precision Controllability of the F-15 Airplane, T.R. Sisk and N.W. Matheny, NASA Technical Memorandum 72861, 1979.

Sisk and Methany’s 'Precision Controllability of the F-15 Airplane' is particularly valuable to our examination because it recounts NASA’s experience exploring F-15 handling qualities using a pre-production F-15 (Airframe number 8). Sisk and Methany offers some insight into what needed to be ‘fixed’ on the early F-15s and why, when after 6 of 10 Gunsight Tracking tests, key systems had to be upgraded to ‘production standard’. The ‘Gunsight Tracking’ test involved making a windup turn from 1 g (trimmed) to the “maximum allowable load factor or angle of attack”.
That “adverse pilot comments concerning the airplane’s handling qualities” in the early tests drove the testers to upgrade the control system to “meet production standards with regards to friction, hysteresis, and breakout forces”, ‘replace roll and trim actuators”, and replace the ARI (Aileron-to-Rudder Interconnect) with a production unit, among other changes is a pretty good indication that the first F-15s were hairy (or at least hairier) beasts at higher AoAs.

Findings of particular note are 1) that the F-15’s buffet as experienced in the cockpit is considerably higher than that experienced in the YF-16 and YF-17 prototypes and 2) the F-15 wing buffet is “severe” at higher AOAs, with mild to moderate wing-rock at airspeeds of interest when the AoA is above “Approximately” 10 degrees.[This raises an interesting question: If the comparison holds for F-16s and F-18s, and the F-35 exhibits buffeting somewhere in between the spread, may we expect F-15 pilots transitioning to the F-35 to think of the F-35’s buffeting as “meh” and pilots transitioning from the F-16 or F-18 react to the same as “OMGWTFO!”?].

A key point to remember here is that the F-15 has no lift augmentation devices, either trailing or leading edge, so there is no way to alter wing high AoA performance without redesigning the wing itself or tweaking your primary flight controls.

Fighter Weapons Center F-15C with Conformal Fuel Tanks and Speed Brake Deployed. When I was at Nellis in the late 70s, F-15 Crew Chiefs were kept 'moist' with cases of beer that pilots would have to buy them after pushing their aerodynamic braking 'show' too far and dragging their tail feathers.

Obvious Changes as a Result of Initial Flight Test

The two most obvious changes made to the F-15 as a result of flight testing were the wingtip design and the speed brake design and operation. I can find no detailed scholarly or otherwise authoritative references to the hows and whys behind the changes were made, but the reasons seem to just be presented now in the ‘everybody knows’ matter-of-fact manner. It is common to find references to the raking of the wingtips due to transonic flutter after the third F-15 was built, but only some sources mention the flutter was occurring at higher g’s and AoAs.

The speed brake design changed at some time during the F-15’s fielding, but I haven’t found an authoritative source I can corroborate as to exactly ‘when’. It is now apparently common knowledge that the dual changes of increasing the size of the speed brake and greatly reducing the angle it can be raised on a different schedule allows the same effectiveness at higher AoAs without adding to the F-15s total buffeting.

Other Issues for Perhaps Another Time

There’s a lot more ‘back story’ on the F-15 development and later discovery of peculiar flight characteristics that have nothing directly to do with ‘just’ high angle of attack. There is the twin vertical stabilizer buffeting issue [1], that seems to affect ALL twin-tail fighter designs to one degree or another, but caused severe cracking and redesign of the F-15 vertical surfaces. There is the “Bitburg Roll” [2] phenomenon, whereby the effects of aerodynamic asymmetry caused by having the 20mm Gatling gun only on one wing root “first surfaced in 1990 as an uncommanded yawing and rolling motion on a F-15C at Bitburg” Air Base in Germany. The Bitburg Roll manifests itself as either an uncommanded roll “up to 60 degrees per second” to the right or yawing motions at higher altitudes between 250 and 350 KIAS. There is also the horizontal stabilator flutter problem [3] that was ‘solved’ by putting a ‘snag’ in the leading edge of the stabilators. The solution was found by trial and error in a wind tunnel, and only recently has the art of computational fluid dynamics reached a point where, 40 years later, it is believed the ‘why’ of the solution can be understood.

There's more back story, but the point is made that:

Operation and test has shown that aerodynamic performance can and will remain unpredictable to any exactness when aircraft are operated in regions where non-linear (the definition of ‘turbulent’) airflow occurs.

__________________

Note: Apologies for the posting drought. I've been way 'out of pocket' part of the time on business travel and been working killer hours at work and home catching up on priorities that could wait no longer.

[1] F-15 Tail Buffet Alleviation: A Smart Structure Approach; Georgia Institute of Technology; WPAFB Contract Number F33615-96-C-3204; 1998.

[2] An Investigation Into The Effects Of Lateral Aerodynamic Asymmetries, Lateral Weight Asymmetries, And Differential Stabilator Bias On The F-15 Directional Flight Characteristics At High Angles Of Attack; D.R. Evans; AFIT/GAE/ENY/96M- 1; 1996.

[3] Flutter Mechanisms of a Stabilator with a Snag Leading Edge; R. Yurkovich; 19th Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference, 4 - 7 April 2011, Denver, Colorado; AIAA 2011-1847

F-35 Supportability: Now THIS is Promising

From Second Line of Defense:

“We (USMC) decided that the Air Force model for maintenance training was the right way to do business,” said USMC Capt. John Park, 372nd TRS commander. “The Marine Corps, when we go to a platform, we stay there for our whole careers…so this is new to us. Having Marines move to the F-35 from the F-18 Hornet or AV-8B Harrier is unheard of, so it’s a big change in our training process.”

This will go a long way towards reducing F-35 sustainment costs if the maintainers of all the services can develop an ‘F-35’ modus operandi versus everyone all going their own way. I don’t think it is particularly important which service model influences the joint approach the most, as long as it is as common as possible. Of course we would obviously expect the ‘afloat’ part of the fleet to involve the most variation in approach from the program norm. There will be tremendous direct (“Hey! I see a better way!”) and cultural (“This is how we do it now!”) pressure to make the F-35 conform to existing maintenance paradigms.  But there are certain things about the F-35 (such as the nearly complete reliance on composite structures, and no scheduled depot-level repair operation) that make it so very different from the planes it is replacing, there is a very good chance a cultural change can be achieved.

Keep Maintenance Simple and Keep Them Flying. Source: LM Code One Magazine Archives 

My favorite part of the SLD article is the voice of the expert maintainer:

“My dad calls me probably every day and asks about the F-35,” said Air Force Staff Sgt. Jeff Kakaley, F-35 crew chief instructor. “I tell him I’m proud to work on it and he’s proud to have a son who works on the F-35 too.”

“Being around this aircraft on a daily basis, both here and at Pax River (NAS), has been awesome,” said Johnson. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”

 Students discuss a training problem during F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter training as Staff Sgt. Jeff Kakaley, right, observes during training at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Jul. 19, 2012. The 372nd Training Squadron Detachment 19 at Eglin, part of the 982nd Training Group at Sheppard Air Force Base, trains both Air Force and Marines on F-35 maintenance. Kakaley is an F-35 crew chief instructor(U.S. Air Force photo/Dan Hawkins)

We’ll have to wait and see if the usual F-35 critics follow their pattern and falsely disparage SSgt Kakaley as just positioning himself for his next job as an ‘evil’ contractor.  

BTW, the above photo is cropped from the original in an AF,mil article titled : " F-35 maintenance training spawns USMC's first air FTD".  It appears to be the source of the SLD article.

Same Old Scum Protest....UAVs?

This time at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

They're pretty much the same sh**head losers that pop up at all the anti-this-or-that "protests" organized in support of the far left and DNC (but I repeat myself) policies. This time, they got 'maced' trying to penetrate the confines of the museum with their 'protest' paraphernalia. Seems the museum has an exhibit about military unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), and the scum took offense. The museum had to close because some of it got inside, so I wonder how many tourists had their day or vacation ruined because of the petulant little sh**s? Way to build support there morons!

My biggest beef is with the press who 'somehow' fail yet again to mention one of the biggest drivers behind this foolishness: INTERNATIONAL A.N.S.W.E.R.

Who is A.N.S.W.E.R.? Per discoverthenetworks.org , they are/are about:

Anti-war front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party
A major organizer of the massive anti-Iraq war rallies of 2002 and 2003
Opposes embargo against Communist Cuba
Supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal

...frickin' COMMIES fer crying out loud. How.... 'last century'.

If you jerk any of these 'groups' chains they all go back to the same small set of leftards, whackos, and losers. It is not as if these morons keep it a big secret from the press - all they'd have to do is read the freakin' signs!

But the mainstream media seems to try to downplay the angle to the American public, and you have to pick through the more obscure (read 'local') materials to find any photos showing those signs
(photo WJLA):

 The two on the left want to 'feel' good about themselves and the two on the right just want to get laid. All four are 'tools', in more definitions than one.

You will still be hard pressed to find any references to the groups behind this idiocy in any actual texts of accompanying articles.

The one UAV on exhibit that the losers are probably most upset about is the direct descendant of a development program we (my unit) was involved with in the 1980's, Project Amber:

It was a brilliant design by Abe Karem ( I won't comment on the crowd he hired to build and integrate it.) and I'm proud to have played a very small role in it. The concept's strongest point was a phenomenal endurance that screamed 'surveillance missions'. I also will not comment as to how the follow on design was brought into the world by a privately held company that until that point had nothing to do with aircraft of any type.

One last shot (also from WJLA) of the Smithsonian yesterday. Visitors are leaving the building, having had their time at the museum ruined by the self-absorbed and hopelessly stupid 'activists.'

Dad: I don't know Son, I suppose it could have been human.

I've got a trip to DC coming up. Hope these A**hats have moved on to their next bath by then. 

Fathers: In Memoriam

The Chief and I went to put flowers on my Father's headstone yesterday, and all the (known) veterans in the cemetery had small flags already in place. While the 'Veteran's Section' was a sea of flags as one would expect, I was surprised at the numbers/percentages of flags placed throughout the cemetery.

In Memoriam, here's a couple of photos of our late Fathers.

First my Father-In-Law, 'Rusty' in DaNang Circa 1969, with the 366th 'Gunfighters' Fighter Wing, 4th Fighter Sq. 'Fujiins'. Another photo of him flying in a formation of F-89s was posted earlier.

Next a couple of photos of my Father. The first one is a group photo of the XH-40 flight test 'crew' during evaluations of what would become the ubiquitous 'Huey' in front of one of three XH-40s. Dad is third from left.

  

The second photo is of an H-37 with my Dad in the group of four in front of it, Dad is second from left, and the caption on the backs reads 'My first forced landing'. It looks like they did a little hedge trimming on an auto rotation. It was his first, but it would not be his last.

Thanks Dad

Here's my Dad in Vietnam, sometime circa 1965,1966, 1967 or 1968. He spent about 36 of those 48 months 'in-country'.(Thanks for the pic Sis!)

Nice (non-typical for him) 'hero' shot.

More about my late Father here.

I Still Can't Say Goodbye

Happy Birthday Dad
I've been looking for a certain Tommy Emmanuel CD for quite a while. (B&N has him in the 'Jazz' section, and the album itself is indexed as 'Jazz' for some stupid reason.) They didn't have the CD I was looking for, but I took a chance on this one. Glad I did, as it had a gem on it that is particularly meaningful to me on this day, January 30th. Here's Tommy performing it on You Tube. Tommy evidently first heard the song first as performed by Chet Atkins (also seen here on You Tube) who also, serendipitously, was a particular favorite of my Father.

The Father has 'Gone West'

My Father-In-Law has passed away.

In his honor, here is a photo of him in a fly-by from his tour in Keflavik Iceland, 1959. 'Rusty' is flying the left wing, second echelon.

We were in the 57 FIS, the Black Knights of Keflavik, 20 years apart.
Godspeed Dad.

A Good Man,
Philosopher,
Warrior.

Ron Howard: "Dopey Opie, Opie Dopey"

Whatever...

(H/T: Brent Baker)

If you are an Andy Griffith Show fan, or have just watched enough episodes over the years, you will remember the episode when the new kid comes to town and starts causing trouble with Opie and his friends by trying to lead them into what looks like a life of minor crime; stealing, vandalism, riding bikes on the sidewalk (Oh Barney Fife where are you now?!), etc. The interloper tries to dominate the Opie (Ron Howard) character and assume leadership of the group by making a fun of Opie's name, by various means including the use of a taunting rhyme: 'Dopey Opie'.

Now I admit, that as a kid I watched the Andy Griffith Show with more interest than most others (and it WAS the No. 1 show for years on TV) in part because I felt an affinity for Ron Howard and his character. We were about the same age and on the black and white TV sets we looked a lot alike as kids -- it was like having a near twin on TV, and I got a lot of "Hey! Are you...?, Well you look just like him" in the early years of the show. (Later in life , it would be the same, only with Drew Carey. But that is another story).

So I always had an affinity for Ron Howard and his work. Growing up I'd see him or his Dad on TV doing various talk shows/specials and other things and they seemed to be so common sense and otherwise 'Un-Hollywood'. As Ron Howard became a noted film maker, you had to admire and respect his transition from child-star to a powerful and successful movie maker.

Then, as they say, he had to "open his mouth and ruin everything".

It turns out that for all those years he only seemed to be 'Un-Hollywood' , while turning into some sort of BDS suffering, Obama-Idolizing idiot. After his Obama promo, I can honestly say I've felt no desire to watch any of his work and doubt if I ever will again. Since he produced that paean to Obama (and the whole Hope and Change 'thang) his movie "Frost/Nixon" was released, which from this quarter seems like an insecure attempt to endear him to the rest of the Hollywood set even more. Of course, it only helps that Frost/Nixon promotes the lefty view of the interviews, and the fact that the account of Frost interviewing the disgraced Former President is historical revisionism can only help his cause with his fellow travelers.

Well folks, Opie is still digging. On Bill Maher's show this week Howard let lose some real gems, not the least of which is:

"at a certain point I don't think we'll be so consumed with being the pre-eminent super-power and, you know, driven by sort of militarism and this need to export, you know, democracy.”

Now THAT folks, is Hybris. After seeing the 'interview', I wondered what's keeping Opie from moving to Europe already?

Go to Brent Baker's and read the rest. The post and comments are well worth the trip.

"Where Y'all From?"

I get that a lot here at home...

I don't usually go for these online quizzes, but this one brought out my curious streak. I'm a Texan. My Mom was a San Antone girl with Texas roots back to the days of the Republic and who had never left the state until she married my Dad. My Dad's Mother was a West Texas Girl (believe it: there is a distinct sub-group) and she met my Granddad in Texas. I lived in North and South Texas for about half my school-age years, and have been back home now about 5 years, after trying to get back ever since I retired from the Air Force.

But because my Father was first in the military and then a 'Migrant Aerospace Worker', between my childhood and adult lives I've also LIVED in Oregon (Born there - a Texan born 'overseas' as it were), Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Kansas, Connecticut, California, Colorado, Nevada, Alaska, Arizona, Utah, and Iceland. I've visited Canada, Europe, and the Carribbean and have actually visited every state except Hawaii. Everywhere I've gone in the States EXCEPT the South, people usually assume I'm a local (But after five years my "Y'all" is starting to come naturally again).

THIS is what happens when you live everywhere:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Philadelphia
Boston
The Northeast
The West
The Inland North
The South
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

You sound like you are from anywhere.

My Wife is just as bad or worse. Born in Maine into a career Air Force family, she slips from one speech pattern to another as easily as anyone I've ever seen or heard. We visited my folks in England in the early 80's and everyone thought we were Canadian at first. After a month in the 'Shires', I think everyone we met assumed I was a Canadian who had married a Brit.

I do love answering local friendly cashiers who seem to doubt my Texian origins and who frequently ask us "Where are Y'all from?". I usually have to throw in a few gratuitous "Y'alls" and "fixin' to's" to convince them that I really am a local boy.

The only downside I've experienced as the oldest child and the only one who followed my Dad's 'Aero Bracero' ways, is I sometimes have to ask for a translation from my siblings who haven't moved around nearly as much or as far.

Happy Father's Day Dad

A Pic of My Dad (on the left) in 1958. This is one of the prototype (YH-40 #7) Iroquois "Hueys" on a layover at Bell Helicopter coming back from desert testing and on the way back to Fort Rucker. Dad flew on a lot of the exotic Army helos of the 'nifty-fifties', including all of the Huey prototypes, the U.S.'s first (a Boeing or Lockheed bird-I can't find the pic right now)[Correction 10/25/09- finally found the pic. it was a (should'a known)Sikorsky YH-39] and first U.S. production turbine helicopters (Kaman), and he even survived a hairy in-flight emergency on a prototype Cessna helicopter (I know, I had never heard of one either until he told me about it).

At the time of the photo, he was an 'old' Spec 2, having already done a hitch as a Navy 'plane captain' on PB-4Y anti-submarine warfare aircraft (a flying job in those days) over the Gulf of Mexico during the Korean War (looking for Russkie diesel subs, I guess-kidding! Corpus Christie was a training base) .

About two years after this photo Dad would be out of the Army (Spec 5 pay didn't cover the necessities of a family of 6-going-to-7) and shortly thereafter he would start a career as a "go-to" Tech Rep for Lycoming Gas Turbines: travelling the globe to keep food on the table for what would eventually become a family of eight. His travels included spending most of 1965-eve of '69 (my formative teen years) in Vietnam. He was home most of the time between 69-72 straightening me out. I'm sure his thumbprint is still on my back... and Thank God it is because Heaven knows I needed it.

I remember first seeing this picture a few years ago - right after my Dad passed away. As the oldest of six kids my mind's eye view of my parents is as they were when they were younger and this photo best captures how I will always remember Dad. He had two natural stances his whole life: this one and "Parade Rest".

I didn't think much about the other gentlemen in the photo until my Mom casually mentioned a month or so ago that Dad sure 'loved flying with that pilot'. Well, that got my attention fast. Dad was not too generous with praise when it came to pilots and there were very few he would ever say he 'loved' flying with, so I tried to find out more about the CWO pilot on the right.

The pilot's name is Cliff Turvey, and it was easy enough to find information about him. He was the Army Aviator of the Year in 1959 and was awarded the DFC for some of his flying on the Huey Test Program. He retired as a Major. I made contact with one of his sons, who wrote to tell me Maj. Turvey did one tour of Vietnam and was awarded a second DFC to boot. Like a lot of military pilots, after he retired, he never flew again.

I wonder now if Dad ran into him 'in-country'. I know, I know -- it was a big place and there were a lot of Helo pilots. But there were very few Lycoming Tech Reps, and Dad actually ran into a lot of guys from his early days in the Army. He was based out of wherever the biggest number of helos might be found, so he was usually living in a tent with the (and became "beloved" to him) First Air Cav, but travelled anywhere a helo powertrain might need some TLC.

IMHO, these guys are the 'original' Air Assault Troopers.

Again,

Happy Father's Day Dad!
(updated 7/19/07 to correct some poor sentence structure and clarify some points)

Priorities......

Can't blog today.

Youngest Daughter has Senior Prom tonight and I will be cleaning my weapons to present the proper 'Dad' effect when the limo arrives.

I should almost be finished when the limo comes back.

The Army of Davids, Gatekeepers, and the Global Warming Debate

Information is Royalty – Instant Access is Divinity

I experienced two independent events today that have a common element: Barriers to communication and information are disappearing. They are not doing so voluntarily, but are being forcibly knocked down.

First Encounter:

I looked at the newspaper rack as I went through the turnstiles to work this morning and noticed the top headline was something I had read all about online. Yesterday.
Before I went to work.
Again.

I immediately thought about Glenn Reynolds’ meme in his new book: Army of Davids. It’s not released yet, but the subtitle reveals the general thrust of it: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths. I’ll probably buy this one instead of borrowing it from the library, because it’s a concept with major implications in all areas where there is competition (which essentially means ‘everything’). There are also direct implications in my Military Operations Research work. Gatekeepers are potential chokepoints or 'centers of gravity': potential weaknesses that can be exploited.

There are a lot of constructs for thinking about how information (or anything else for that matter) is created, accessed, and distributed. ‘Stocks and Flows’ and ‘Producers and Gatekeepers’ are two of the more widely known constructs. The thought occurred to me (once again) that newspapers would be a lot better off if they changed their business model from getting incomplete or incorrect information out as fast as possible to a business approach that would provide more accurate detailed information on complex news. This would leverage their inherent advantage in research resources and production capability, and stop a losing battle against the millions of ‘Davids’ who have picture phones and camcorders and are on the scene everywhere. Let the ‘Davids’ get the ‘instant’ word out: Newspapers could give us the ‘meat’ of the story.

I don’t hold much hope of it happening though. It looks like the allure of the ‘scoop’ still holds sway.

Second Encounter:
(Sidebar for Full Disclosure: I am an Anthropogenic Global Warming Skeptic. I understand the difference between models and reality, data and evidence, anecdote and proof.)

So tonight I am researching the latest Global Warming news and I come across an interesting post at Climate Audit. What caught my eye, beyond the excellent article referenced, was this comment (#12, emphasis mine):

My father-in-law, Dr AB Hollingshead, a noted social scientist and department head at Yale in the 60s and 70s were [sic] discussed the weakness of the peer review processes over a couple of beers in my back yard in 1973. He pointed out that most shifts in scientific theory comes at generational boundaries, as those protecting 20-30 years of academic work die off, allowing the next generation to stake their reputation on new ideas and better information. He saw peer review as nothing more than a job protection mechanism, newly minted academics conformed to the current dogma, or they do not get published. In a [sic] publish or perish environments, this could have long term implications for young professors, but it was job protection for the old guard. In dad’s view when the old guard died off, there was a window of opportunity to introduce new ideas. Now, we have outsiders like Steve and Ross, who are not waiting for a generational boundary to identify the errors of the old guard and providing new insight to the problems of calculating past temperature trends from cherry picked tree rings.

That last sentence aptly identifies the Climate Audit authors as the ‘Davids’ of this little corner of scientific controversy.

A little later in my daily reading on the same subject, I came across this excellent opinion piece, highlighting the point that (from my POV) Climate Alarmists seem to think as little of the ‘Anti-Alarmist’ Davids, as the MSM does of theirs:

Phil Maxwell makes the snide comment that “most of the Global Warming Deniers are elder members of the scientific community desperately carrying on a rearguard action”. It is indeed true that a large proportion of these independent scientists are retired people. They can afford to be independent.

Thus, from the news of the day to pressing scientific issues, the Army of Davids are on the march.