Thomas Ross

@rawlimark Just stay outside, you should be fine

@Birdie18th @AdamKinzinger @IngrahamAngle It would have passed in Texas, but they did not trust us

@AdamKinzinger @IngrahamAngle Texas leadership refused to let their voters decide they either don't like them or don't trust them, or both

Total travesty!!

@AdamKinzinger @IngrahamAngle And we did not get to vote on new map either

@IngrahamAngle Texas lit the fuse

@rawlimark Will the media broadcast the info on the internet? Living in Texas, I do not have the same media access as over there

@BexarCOSW So that is what woke me up

KEWX - Super-Res Reflectivity 1, 12:02 AM

@rawlimark Have you driven it yet?

@rawlimark When president Bill Clinton said “It Depends on What the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. You have to be careful with some lawyers

@scottiebateman A350?

Had the most amazing day in the Mile High City today bimbling along the Cherry Creek Trail. I needed this… a day listening to music whilst thinking about the next media projects. Lots of pontificating to come but next years book may be locked in. Any ideas what it might be ? #aviation #avgeek #Denver #colorado

@MCCCANM Flying into San Antonio (SAT) from Santa Fe (SAF) on Tuesday. I saw three groups of young people about to fly out for basic training (I think Army). Lots of volunteers

Calm down. Nothing has really changed, you just don’t have to fill out the form anymore. That’s it. There has been no draft since 1973 – 53 years. As I explained earlier, it would take the apocalypse for the draft to return…the military doesn’t want those people.

@MCCCANM Flying today. They have made announcements that power banks are not allowed in the cargo hold

Power Banks on airplanes worry me the most. Never pack them in a checked bag. The cargo compartment has a fire detection system, and a gas fire suppression system (like halon, but I don’t recall if that’s it). Still, we can’t get into it in flight to fight a fire. For carry on, pack it where it’s easily accessible. The idea will be to remove it & put it in a “fire bag” which are pretty effective at containing battery fires. That’s harder to do if you’ve packed it beneath a bunch of stuff that may now also be on fire. If you drop your phone in the seat & can’t find it, do NOT move your seat. You may crunch the phone & ignite the battery. Ask a Flight Attendant for assistance. A cabin fire is at the top of most of our worst nightmares. The Oxygen masks won’t drop – they don’t seal, so it won’t keep smoke out & now we’re feeding pure oxygen to a fire. We’ll be diverting immediately, but it will take time to get on the ground. If the smoke gets too bad, we can “dump” the cabin pressure if needed & clear it out pretty quickly, but that’s a last resort & wont work well below 10,000’ or so. I’ve been told China is starting to ban power banks on airplanes. We may eventually get to that point here. If you have to bring one, make sure it’s in good condition. If you have one of those suitcases with a built in battery, just be aware you’ll have to remove it before checking your bag. If it’s carry on, make sure you can get it out of the bag quickly if needed. Thank you & fly safe!

@rawlimark I do not think he means nukes. He wants to use a secret weapon that only he knows about. Sigh

@scottiebateman The book was very insightful. I throughly enjoyed it. Thank you for writing it.

@scottiebateman I am reading that book now

Refuelling an aircraft… without an airfield. Recovering a pilot… without permission. That’s the reality of modern air power. Forward Arming and Refuelling Points (FARP) are one of the Hercules’ most quietly impressive capabilities. Land on a strip of dirt, engines running, props turning, and within minutes you’re pumping fuel into helicopters, extending their reach deep into places they were never meant to go. Fast. Exposed. Unforgiving. From the outside it can look chaotic, rotors turning, dust everywhere, fuel hoses stretched across a makeshift strip. But it’s anything but. It’s tightly choreographed, built on discipline, trust, and the understanding that everything depends on getting it right. And sometimes, that capability becomes something far more consequential. Yesterday’s Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) mission in Iran, to recover the crew of a downed F-15, was exactly that. A high-risk operation deep inside hostile territory, involving helicopters, special forces, and Hercules aircraft establishing a forward strip to get in and out. Reports suggest that during the extraction, aircraft became stranded on that improvised strip and were deliberately destroyed on the ground to prevent them falling into enemy hands. That’s the reality behind the headlines. FARP isn’t just about fuel. It’s about options. And CSAR is the sharpest edge of that. It’s also one of the most dangerous missions in aviation. Crews go in knowing the risks, low level, hostile airspace, limited margins, because the principle is simple: “That others may live” The Hercules has always been more than a transport aircraft. It creates capability where none exists. Turns remote ground into operational hubs. And, when needed, becomes part of missions that most people will never see, and few would fully understand. I have thousands of hours at the helm of the most capable military transport ever built and loved every second of it. It’s a world I explore in my book HERCULES, the operations, the decisions, and the moments where everything is on the line. Available now. #C130 #Hercules #FARP #CSAR #MilitaryAviation #AvGeek #AirPower #SpecialOperations #AviationLife #OperationalFlying #HerculesBook #IranWar‌

@rawlimark When I win, I want one

@jegastoc @simongerman600 @toddrjones There are a lot of towns and cities in the Lower Rio Grande Valley

@simongerman600 @toddrjones The Brownsville area has more than thr Corpus Christi-Aransas area?!?!

Population of Texas beautifully visualised by @toddrjones.

@rawlimark I thought you were joking

@rawlimark Will they let you drive it?

@TracesofTexas I was thinking of the engineers who designed the bridge and the people who built it

The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day: The first train crossed the Pecos High Bridge 134 years ago today, on March 30, 1892. The bridge, had been completed on Feb. 20, after only 87 working days. The bridge crossed the Pecos River at a deep and narrow gorge, with the rail-bed 321 feet above the river and supported by 24 towers over its 2,180 feet of length. At the time, it was the highest railroad bridge in the United States. Can you imagine being the engineer of the first train to make the crossing? You'd be sweating, praying, and trying to think skinny. Fortunately, there was a photographer on hand to capture the scene, as the photo below shows.

@MCCCANM When is your book coming out?

New thing: “Poorly Explained Aircraft Systems”. Let’s do electrical… The engine has a special shaft it uses to connect to a generator if you “flip the right switches”. It’s unclear if this is enjoyable for the generator, but soon lots of electrons are born. The electrons are very excited & wish to explore, but there are paths they should stay on. Occasionally, some stray a**hole electrons decide to go on an adventure like Hobbits. “Let’s check out the fuel tanks!” the Pippin Hobbit electrons say, and the movies would have like 75% fewer problems for everyone if Pippin had stayed home. The jet doesn’t like this. It wants to keep the Pippin Hobbits in the Shire, so it closes the gate. We call the gate “Circuit Breakers”. The engineers have put them on the back wall of the cockpit. And on the ceiling. Sometimes on the side. Also, some at your feet. There might be some outside, but I don’t go out there. This is very clear to Engineers, who write a map of them in the flight manual which requires a Rosetta Stone every time you open it. To make it very clear to pilots which breakers have “popped”, they tell you the body is white, so when it sticks out it’s easily visible among the all black array. This is a lie Engineers tell pilots to make them feel stupid when they can’t find a popped breaker. That’s OK; when we find a popped breaker & are bored, it’s sometimes a fun challenge to see who can hold it in the longest before it gets too hot. I’m pretty good at this, but it took years of burning my hands to desensitize. Some breakers are fake; Engineers call them “Remote Breakers” because the real breakers are in a place called the “Avionics Bay”. This is a mythical place where computers & lots more circuit breakers are said to exist, but it’s not really that. It’s an empty space Maintenance stores beer & goes to screw off when I ask them to fix something. I haven’t confirmed that because it’s accessed from outside on the ground & it can be hot or cold or rainy or windy outside, but I have high confidence in this theory. Maintenance doesn’t like to be seen doing their work. I have to give this one to them, because pilots will see a malfunction, then say “I saw Maintenance fix this once like five years ago, they pushed this button, then I think this one” and now the flight is cancelled. The jet senses when electrons stop being born fast enough & “sheds” loads to keep things it likes running. It does this in an order designed to piss off Flight Attendants, like shutting off the seat-back TVs & the Galley (the WiFi doesn’t actually run on electricity, it runs on fairy dust, anger & profane language). The Flight Attendants immediately call me to report this, and while we’re at it the wing looks like it’s on fire. Other than me, the battery is the laziest piece of the puzzle. It does next to nothing until there is nobody left. Then it acts like a teenager, complaining it will only do like 6 things, and only for 30 minutes, tops. After that, it screams “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO BE A BATTERY THESE DAYS!” and quits. I don’t want to give a false impression, though…there is always Airbus. It’s built by the French, so you KNOW it’s lazy, thinks it knows better than you & wont do what you ask it to. Anyway, some jets have a little windmill you can lower into the wind, called a RAT. The RAT exists to exacerbate electrical fires caused when you flipped the wrong switches, but the jet fixed it automatically & you undid that with some more switches & buttons because you passed that systems test 3 years ago that you had the answers to. The electrons for your seat’s phone charger are an unknowable mystery, wrapped in an enigma. I assume solar powered, but haven’t found the panels yet & you are being punished for your sins when it doesn’t work. (It’s Twitter, so I have to put a disclaimer here that this is SATIRE & I respect my colleagues – I made fun of myself. I hope you had a laugh!)