Explosion: Small Diameter Bomb

I almost forgot!  Continuing the military theme from last week, we've got another explosion.



The F-22 is pretty sweet. Too bad they are cutting back on it's deployment. I'm not a big fan of the F-35 (Joint Strike Fighter), it just seems to be stuck in development limbo--behind schedule and over budget. From Air Power Australia:

A mature production F-22A in the 2015 timeframe, one which has absorbed avionic, engines, materials and production technologies paid for by the JSF program, will incur its principal production cost differences against the JSF in additional structure, and an additional engine/nozzle. The order of magnitude difference in cost between mature JSF and F-22A could be around US$10M to 15M flyaway - this estimate fitting very closely to cited flyaway numbers for F-22As post the current build number cap, vs the more conservative JSF estimates. If the then JSF comes in at 50 to 75 percent of the flyaway/FMS cost of the then F-22A, buying the much less capable JSF would be a folly.

 Here they are talking about purchasing the fighters for Australian military, but you get the drift.

And now I'm probably going to be put on every security list know to man, for putting up something about explosions and airplanes right after talking about things that I can't bring on airplanes.  Oh well.  Perhaps I will hope that a real person with a brain reads it, instead of an automatic computer thing.

Oh, and here's some more info about the problems with the JSF.  Wow, I like that website.