Brian Wagner

Maybe I'm getting old, or my PTSD is acting up, but I'm not fond of seeing our young brothers & sisters in uniform get killed for bullshit. Especially when the ones cheering for it never had to taste their friends blood in combat. Life's a bitch and death is her husband. Damn.

“The Strait of Hormuz is open and the sailors are having a wonderful time”

J’aimerais que le orange revienne à la mode.

I get that many hate Trump but you do realize that the alternative was this dope

Former Navy Seal and CIA Global Response Staff Operator Shawn Ryan in Afghanistan.

Only a few airplanes – like the C-130 – can refuel helicopters. The helicopters aren’t fast enough to keep up & the jets can’t slow down enough before stalling. Even the A-10, C-130 & CV-22 were a challenge in the KC-10. At high weights, it was technically possible but a nightmare…at the highest weights, it just wasn’t possible. We’d slow down, extending the slats & the flaps to 5. In level flight, the nose may be pitched up 7-10° while refueling. That sometimes wasn’t enough. In these cases, you “Tobaggan”, starting a slight descent at maybe 300’ per minute. This gave the A-10 just enough advantage to get on the boom, but you’d hit the bottom of your airspace in about 3 minutes, at which point you’d have to climb up & do it again. Thankfully, the A-10s usually didn’t need much fuel & our transfer rate through the boom was fast enough that we didn’t have to do it endlessly. Once you’d burned & offloaded enough fuel, things became easier but for these slower jets, deploying the slats were still required to avoid getting too close to stall.

It makes me sad that new Generations will never get to experience Physical Media like this

GM killed the Camaro in 2003. Sales had been falling since 1995, bottoming out at just 41,776 units sold in its final year. They shut down production entirely. Then Michael Bay walked through GM's design studio in 2005, saw an unreleased fifth-gen Camaro concept that wasn't going to hit dealerships for years, and cast it as Bumblebee. The car in the movie wasn't even a real Camaro. GM's team dropped Camaro body panels from the concept car's molds onto a Pontiac GTO chassis. Audiences fell in love with a car they couldn't buy yet. The first Transformers made $710 million worldwide on a $150 million budget. And it wasn't just product placement. GM got the lead role. Bumblebee had the second-most screen time after Optimus Prime. Every hero vehicle was a GM product: Camaro, Pontiac Solstice, GMC TopKick, Hummer H2. The main villain, Barricade? A Saleen S281, which is a tuned Ford Mustang, dressed up as a police car with "To Punish and Enslave" on the side. GM literally made Ford the bad guy. When the Camaro finally went on sale in 2009, GM had 14,000 pre-orders before a single car rolled off the line. They sold 60,000 that year. By 2010, they moved over 80,000. In 2011, they hit 88,000+, outselling the Ford Mustang for the second straight year. The Mustang had dominated that rivalry for over two decades. Yellow Camaros saw a 10% sales bump despite yellow normally making up less than 5% of any car model's sales. You could measure the Bumblebee effect by paint color alone. And each sequel was basically a new Camaro ad with a $200 million production budget someone else paid for. The franchise has grossed $5.4 billion across eight films. Hasbro turned the car into over 150 different toys. Chevy's global CMO said it out loud to Variety: "These movies have helped us get our vehicles in front of a younger audience around the world." The 12-year-olds buying Bumblebee toys in 2007 were the 20-somethings walking into Chevy dealerships by 2015. I think this might be the single greatest product placement deal in movie history. GM took a dead car, made it the hero of a billion-dollar franchise, made their biggest competitor the villain, and got audiences to pay $12 to sit through what was effectively a two-hour Camaro commercial. All while GM itself was going through bankruptcy in 2009, the Oshawa plant building Camaros was running at full capacity.

I come back to this video when life doesn't go as planned...

Several people and horses outside the historic Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone in the 1920s.

On my lunch break during recurrent class I went up to one of my favorite bird-watching spots along the north runways and this old lady rolled in. All sorts of modern jetliners and the one bird that caught my eye was this 1956 vintage Convair. Oh the stories she must have…

Wildfire from FL310(31,000')

@TonyBrunoShow @harrymayesTU @MissRobinAustin Awesome show today!!!

I never knew this story about Bam Margera’s family.

Reminder

In the business, this word be referred to as a “ duress code”

I'm real tired boss

Gross incompetence or theft? I’m leaning toward theft. Because this level of stupidity doesn’t even seem possible.

Quick shout out to my instructor pilot in pilot training. Columbus AFB, MS. Lt Chuck King, USAFA. I was not a good student in T-37s. I struggled at times, I succeeded at times. But I still didn’t know if I had what it took and if I really wanted to do this. Then I met Lt Chuck King. He was my T-38 instructor and brand new. I was his first student and he was the guy that turned the light on for me. Changed my life. Not only was he a fantastic instructor and leader of men, he became a good friend. T-38s turned out to be a whole new experience and I excelled. Thank you, Chuck! I hope you see this! You created the life I have.