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USAF Seeks Air Force One Replacement
Tyketto writes "The United States Air Force has taken the first public step in the search for a replacement of the Boeing VC-25, also known as Air Force One, saying it is no longer cost effective to operate and modernize the two 19-year-old VC-25s, which are converted Boeing 747-200s. Airbus has already submitted data for the A380, and while Boeing has had the Air Force One contract for nearly 50 years, delays with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Boeing 747-8, as well as the KC-X Tanker competition, may see the USAF looking to Europe for its next presidential aircraft."
Oh please! No matter what the cost, no matter what the delay, no matter what they'll never look outside America to replace Air Force One.
I'm not saying Airbus is better than Boeing, but if you protect your industries from competition like this, you will end up with inferior products and services, and failing domestic industries.
Please do not use phrases like "military and civilian government." There is one government, and the military is a component of it.
Saying "military and civilian government" is the thin edge of a wedge, IMO, toward considering it acceptable that there would be a military not attached to the office of the executive. If you were so inclined, you should explore situations in history in which that has happened.
And we, the electorate who put into office the civilian government, are responsible for the military actions taken during their administration.
However, that's not a practical proposition and does contain some mutually contradictory requirements. The good news is that as aircraft get bigger, faster, more reliable and flexible the gap between the "do everything" that's being asked for is getting closer to what can be achieved.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Since most of the important modifications for Air Force One have to do with armor, EMP shielding, extra fuel storage, etc., why not start with a military plane that's already got some of these features by design, and just retrofit it with couches and stuff?
One added benefit would be that it could transport the presidential limo/tank in case there is fear of sniper fire at the airport. The president could just be driven from the cargo bay of the plane.
On the other hand, the Senate scolded the American Big Three for their corporate jets. Maybe the Air Force should be a better role model, and go for something smaller.
I understand the scolding in the context, but I still believe that after a certain point, a corporate or even personal plane makes sense. While a corporate plane might be a little slower in the air, it has the advantage that it can fly direct to anywhere in it's range, with extremely flexible takeoff times.
When somebody is that valuable, it makes sense. For the big three, a mid-point would have been if all three(and their assistants), had taken the same private plane.
For the president, he has to worry about presenting himself to 50 different states covering a quarter of the globe. He also has to represent the country to the world - adding in other areas. He's actually an active target for assassination, so security is very much a concern. He has to be contactable at all times for security and political reasons. You have to worry about the nuclear football.
This whole thing is that the current craft are 19 years old and pushing the uneconomical part of the maintenance spectrum; they have a lot of hours on them. Time to retire them and get new planes. Now they're doing the equivalent of new car shopping - which plane is the best for us?
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not sure what you mean by "hostile" EW. Interfering with broadcasts is more of a PsyOps kind of thing and I'm pretty sure that Air Force One will never have that ability.
I'm a former EW technician (F-15 TISS) and, while my knowledge is somewhat dated, I assume that AF1's EW will have the usual assortment of noise, RGPO and VGPO and PGPO jamming.
I call BULLSHIT!
Now, I'm not going to assume that all /.'ers are informed but there is enough use of the term POTUS, SCOTUS, DHS, FBI, etc. here to either flag you as a me-tooing-get-on-the-opposing-bandwagon type or seriously uninformed. Your choice.
Me thinks you were looking for something snappy to post that would put you somewhere near the top of the comment page and you chose this poor saps post.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I'm not saying AF1 isn't important, but it just seems like such government waste. It pisses me off that the president, OUR employee, can't make do with "adequate," that he's got to have a flying mansion with more amenities than most people will ever even see in their lifetimes.
I want the President to have his every need taken care of. I don't want him to have to worry about anything other than the business of the nation. Its why we give him servants, chefs, a $300 million house, and a state-of-the-art plane. The President's time is easily worth a million dollars an hour. True government waste would be for him to spend his time worried about any of the concerns which are now taken care of for him.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
You live too close to Hill AFB. The average layman dosen't know what POTUS means. You could have just said, "the president" which is only 4 syllables of smooth flow.
Sure, but then you'd have someone from Europe talking about how ignorant Americans/USians are for just saying "the president" and not being specific, since after all, other nations have presidents too. Then someone from the US would point out this is primarily a US discussion site, so people should just assume the US when not specified. Then someone from another country would say that slashdot isn't under ".us", and is thus global, and is globally accessible at any rate, so it is wrong to assume an original TLD is US-centric, and ICANN is evil. Then someone from the US will point out that the internet was invented by the US. Then someone else will point out that most of the internet is now outside the US, so it shouldn't matter, it's not like people respect the steam engine being from the UK originally.
So, in comparison, POTUS generated a pretty minimal debate.
Yeah, I've noticed that those of us who were actually in the military don't generally throw around acronyms like that at the drop of a hat. It's the Tom-Clancy-reading, FPS-playing, mil-porn 101st Fighting Keyboarders who never had the guts to get their hands dirty themselves trying to make themselves sound (they think) all tough and macho who have popularized the term.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"9/11 sucked, but it wasn't a national emergency. It was an emergency in NYC, D.C. and a Pennsylvania field."
We know that now. But at the time, I don't think it was especially obvious, especially given that the ultimate target of the UAL 93 hijackers presumably wasn't a field in PA. The government shut down all public US air traffic for three days, remember?
I think it's more likely that there was simply no useful message that could be put out on the EAS. Broadcast operators had already independently preempted practically every civilian broadcast channel for news programming. More to the point, there wasn't much individuals could do about it. In, say, a biological attack, you can give instructions like "boil water; avoid fresh food". What could have been said on 11 Sep 2001? "Planes are flying into buildings -- everybody duck!"?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Back when the Big three were profitable companies, and the CEO functioned much like the president, it made sense. Even now, assuming the CEOs operated like they're supposed to, they should/would be quite valuable.
The CEOs time would be, much like the president's, be spent in high level analysis to plot the future course of the company, also auditing and motivation. Time on the factory floor, for a manufacturing company like GM/Ford, should be expected.
For that matter - Consider this. You can expect about 250 days of work out of an employee a year. Traveling commercially, for the most part, you can figure on losing two days of work whenever you fly him, due to connections, air port security, lack of direct flights to many locations, etc...
Now figure we have an extremely well paid employee - $1M a year. Not shabby, but not 'overblown CEO' level. Each If a (rental) private plane costs $2k but cuts this in half, it makes sense to rent a plane to ship him around when you have to. Why? You're effectively paying him $4k a DAY. The plane's cheap in comparison. Scale down if you have to send a team, scale up as the employee gets paid more(more valuable). Then consider that the Big three are global companies, with holdings all over the planet, including Asia, Europe, and South America. Even more time & effort can be saved when the CEO has to visit a foreign facility.
I also figure that while they might be dropping the CEO plane, they're keeping a number of their corporate jets in a 'pool' - normally used by troubleshooters, managers and such. For a company that large and spread around, having a few planes makes sense.
The driving stunt was more about making the CEOs bow down before congress to get their money than saving actual money.
I don't read AC A human right
you'd have someone from Europe talking about how ignorant Americans/USians are for just saying "the president" and not being specific
Regardless of whether Slashdot is primarily a US-oriented discussion site, this particular story is about the American president. The only ignorance would be in not being able to derive, from context, which president is being discussed if someone were to say "the president". In a discussion about Russia's president, we'd all understand which presiednt was being discussed and I doubt you'd see any Americans whinging that we should say "POTRF" because it's too confusing or Russia-centric otherwise.
I realise you, specifically, didn't do this, but claiming that one must specify "of the United States" with every bloody reference to "the president" is absurd. Humans are allegedly good at contextual clues. Let's act like it.
When seeing acronyms in print, some people have a tendancy to read them as words, whether they should be read as such or not -- especially when the acronym is pronouncable, like "POTUS". Say it out loud and understand how silly it sounds. Beyond that, it just looks pretentious to use acronyms that are both non-standard and add nothing to the meaning. Using the ol' standby argument "it saves time" is just absurd -- we're talking about a few extra letters. If you can take the time to post you can certainly spare the additional milliseconds it takes to type an actual word, rather than barely-comprehensible acronyms, and come out looking a little more intelligent.
People who defend silliness like this are also some of the quickest to gripe about "txt speak", and really, what's the difference? Where do you draw the line?
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