Bobby_Batronic

Sorta. The Airbus, and I suspect Boeings as well, is certified for one full control movement below maneuvering speed (speed below which such a movement can be made without causing structural damage). In other words, you can stomp the rudder to the limit of its travel, and it’s travel limited based on speed on the bus, without anything breaking. It is not certified to withstand several such control inputs which is what happened to that A300 after the wake encounter. That was a common misconception instilled in pilots in primary flight training. It is now explicitly stated in the limitations that its not certified for that.

I don’t think there’s really even a huge explosion. Fire? Yes. But pretty much everything is obliterated at impact. Like the difference in a head on collision with your car and running it into an embankment at the speed of sound.

A vehicle designed for frontal assault against defined enemy lines. It puts the most APC between incoming fire and the fuel tanks with that line of thought. Set piece battle thinking instead of guerilla combat. Also, if you’ve ever seen Russian hardware you’ll quickly notice that they think differently.

Yes. Bus driver.

Stupid? Yes. But I could see it in a panic situation. Our upset training shows just how easy it is to over stress the plane once you get it unloaded and right side up if you pull too hard. The different between a nice 2 G recovery and snapping something off isn’t much. I’m sure you’ve seen the same But I stated that before seeing the vertical speeds involved. I would lean toward suicide at the moment.

Didn’t see the initial descent rate. That’s extreme. Maybe. I would suspect that at high speed things are stabilized and anything not playing along departs the aircraft.

Thanks to auto correct my original thought was corrected from uncontrollable dive to in controlled. Btw, in the bus we don’t have everything hanging out. Just full boards which may or may not require the autopilot to be off.

Second thought, emergency descent or in controlled dive, structural damage in the arrest thereof followed by structural failure and final plummet.

Possible emergency descent, level off and pilots overcome by smoke, fumes or other issue?

…real gangsta ass n****s can't run for shit, cause real gangsta ass n****s can't run fast.”

I mean, how would we know if he hit it or not?

Este carne es de rata.

This is what the majority of everyone’s armed forces looks like age wise. If there’s anything I hate about war movies it’s the preponderance of 30-40 year olds taking the place of the teenagers and early 20 somethings that actually did most of the fighting. My grandfather was 26 when WWII started and everyone in his Seabee unit referred to him as some derivative of grandpa. Also, you were right to fear the Soviets in the 80’s. The current Russian military is only a shadow of the Red Army.

Crash our power grid? Shut down our pipelines? F with our banking system. There’s a lot of options on the table that don’t start with mushroom clouds. Russia’s conventional military is hurting. They are not toothless in non conventional ways.

All relevant military objectives can be accomplished electronically these days. Other than China annexing Taiwan there really isn’t a case for securing land or resources in the immediate future that couldn’t be done through more subversive and less overt means. I’m not saying that major land or sea battles are no longer a thing, but they’re less of a thing than they used to be. Russia is spent. They will not be able to raise another effective fighting force for decades. Europe will not want to be under their thumb with regard to oil, gas and nuclear energy, but those aims can be handled by domestic policy or regime change. Destruction of the Russian state is about the surest way to start WWIII conventionally and end it in a nuclear fashion. Honestly, your passions are ahead of your reasoning in this matter imoho. There is no ideologically driven, genocidal horde hellbent on world domination romping around Europe. And the Empire in the East is well established with little thought of expansionism beyond that troublesome island. China might look West to a de-clawed Russian state, but there’s simply no need to start a global war. I think the desire to settle all accounts now while we have the wherewithal to do it has some merit, but it’s likely the end of all things if we pull that lever.

That requires a leadership change and a few oligarchs deciding that they want their toys more than they want the west to have them. Not destruction of the state. BTW, I’m relatively sure that WWIII is already underway, and it largely won’t be a kinetic fight.

Yeah, Russia isn’t giving up their nukes. Their conventional military is spent. They have nothing left to keep everyone i their respective lanes, and a s**t tone of land and resources to protect from anyone who might want them. They might trade in 1/2 the arsenal or something and still have a couple of two thousand warheads left, but they’re not drawing down to zero. Tradiational Russian paranoi probably has them looking at China’s arsenal and saying we need at least 5x that, and we’re not doing it unless the US draws down to that amount too. A significant win, but still enough end mankind several times over.

An excellent point. I wonder if such weapons have fingerprints on them such that we could say that it was produced here or that we don’t use such chemicals etc.

Unless the biomedical research lab is actually a chemical weapons facility. I don’t know either way, but for the pentagon to make such a stretch suggests to me that it’s more than just pathogen research.

I would look a lot further East if I were you.

I used to work with one of the weasel pilots who commanded a squadron heading into Desert Storm. They picked beer brands as squadron call signs, bribed the Air Force weather weenies to not forecast freezing water for the transatlantic crossing so they wouldn’t have to wear survival suits on the way over with cases of beer and serviced many SAM sites with some of their own medicine. Somewhere there’s video of CNN interviewing him after the first mission.

If only there were lessons from history regarding winter invasions and poorly supplied troops for the Russians to draw from.

Perhaps not, but they have a Triad much as we do, and their air portion of that nuclear triangle is minimal. They’re going to win the ground war in Ukraine if they want to, but grind down their forces in the process. I suspect they’ll want to maintain their nuclear shield and means to deliver it. Otherwise they risk becoming a….Bi….ad?

Russia has something like 10,000 tanks, and plenty of conscripts. They don’t have a lot of front line aircraft, certainly not a lot of true bombers, and they probably aren’t just flush with cruise missiles anymore either. So they use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.

They’d lose most of their bombers. And they only have 300 or so operable front line aircraft.