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Air Force Uses Falcons To Protect Falcons
coondoggie writes "Birds and high-performance jet aircraft don't mix. So at a base in Germany, the Air Force is fighting birds with birds — specifically trained falcons that patrol the base and help eliminate at least some of the feathered threat to the F-16 Fighting Falcons and other aircraft."
Yea...not about the Air Force using F-16s to attack poachers...
Wow, decades old news on the front page of slashdot
09-f9-11-02-9* (G^GCA_++{>. RV>>>>+++ NO CARRIER
Eagles to protect eagles? Awesome! Raptors to protect raptors? KICKASS! Warhogs to protect wart... wait.
Nothing new. Even at JFK they tested this nearly a decade ago: http://www.cartome.org/jfk-strike.htm JFK and other airports may still be using trained Birds of Prey to scare off feed species.
This practice is at least 30 yrs old. USAF bases in England were doing this in the mid 70's. If I could be bothered to look, there are probably references much earlier than that.
Nothing new, airports have been doing this and similar for a long time.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Yo dawg, I heard you like falcons, so I got you this falcon so you can use your falcons while you use your falcons!
Maybe You Mean Hobbits? :-P
Besides. It's a title, so convention is to capitalize all except the articles (like 'the'). Have you noticed that all Slashdot headings look like that?
The montreal airport also does that, nothing new here. :http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0325_030325_falconry.html
see
"Failure is not an option, it come bundled with the software"
So you have an airstrip full of sidewinder maverick armed planes and you use this... That's pretty boring, albeit cheaper.
it 30 yrs old practice
They bring in some falcon-eating gorillas. And in the winter the gorillas simply freeze to death.
I also heard they are using weasels to keep the lawyers away.
You want to tell the NY Times they've been wrong for the past century?
WTF?? Do you mean the 70s? What have you been smoking?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In the mid-1980s, I worked for a few months beside a guy whose hobby was falconry; he told me at the time that he had been employed by the Toronto Airport to use his falcon to help reduce the number of seagulls near the airport.
Yo dawg, I heard you like birds, so I got you a falcon for your falcon so you can birddog while you fly.
To paraphrase Twain: Outside of a dog, an A-10 Warthog is a grunt's best friend. Inside a dog, you have other things to worry about.
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Sheesh, if you'd cracked open a history book, Leonardo da Vinci was designing the things back in the early 1500s.
That's the trouble with kids these days: They think everything—helicopters, astronauts, digital watches—came from the last century!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Obviously you haven't been paying attention in history class. It's well known that Leonardo de Caprio's wood-and-graphite-composite corkscrew blade helicopter-Transformers were in heavy use during the early 1700s, especially in New Brunswick, East Anglia, and Muscovy. If only they had survived the onslaught of the steam-powered Brazilian Aero-Bombardment Fleet, we'd have a better historical record of those unbelievable flying machines.
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So why was "to" capitalized in the title?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The base's CO hates toy poodles.
Wow, a story about airplanes and airports from Network World, perhaps that should of been a huge clue that it wasn't really news, novel, or particularly interesting.
And the RCAF or Canadian Air Force routinely uses them as well for their airplanes as well.
I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing this: "They were doing this at helicopter bases in the early 1700s."
There's a fairly big gap between those two. I hardly think DaVinci ever got to the point he was worried about bird-strike. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
otherwise, I might have gone my whole life without seeing an RSS feed ad for Mike's Falconry Supplies!
Next time, on The Falconer!
You want to tell the NY Times they've been wrong for the past century?
Sure, why not?
"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933
"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18
"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13
I hear that The Audubon Society is using F-16's to protect Falcons in the mid-west - yikes!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To the people that matter (the drivers)
So that's why it's the crew chief's name that gets painted on the side, huh...
Because it's a preposition and not an article?
I think generally for titles: "important" words are capitalized by convention, and non-important words are optionally capitalized. For Slashdot, it looks like the 'a' does not get capitalized, but 'To' does. Which is a little weird looking in stories like: Fun To Be Had With a 10 Foot Satellite Dish
Standard passenger airports in the UK have used birds of prey for this purpose for decades...
I'm sure the same is probably true for airports all over the world.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
They actually got that one right; though they probably shouldve mentioned the salmonella risks...
First published on slashdot in June of 1983
Indeed, we've used birds at McChord AFB for at least the last 10 years that I've been here.
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From the wiki page, not that I'm disagreeing with you, but there may be a few extra factors in this particular case.
Conjunctions and prepositions are capitalized if they are 5 letters or more, usually, IIRC. For example, "under" (preposition) and "after" (conjunction) are usually capitalized in a title.
BTW, newspapers have printed things like headlines in larger print or with other obvious typesetting differences for hundreds of years. If we didn't get rid of title case in all that time, we probably won't do it now just because of the web.
Besides, the purpose of title case has nothing to do with setting it off from the rest of the document and everything to do with making it easier to skim. If the less important words are in lowercase letters, you can visually see what you can skip without losing much meaning. Thus, it's just as useful (if done correctly) today on Slashdot as it was in the 1800s.
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I once saw a bird that was so fat, that it waddled on the ground. It would jump up and try to fly, and fall back down on it's @$$. This bird lived outside of a donut shop here in Franklin.
I have nothing clever to put here...
This is nice and all but on the travel channel, I saw a guy whose job it was to ride around in a golf cart shooting off what looked like quarter stick charges and shotgun blanks to get the birds to go away right before a plane took off. That's not only smarter and more effective but definitely more fun. I'd practically pay them to have that job let alone doing it for like $30,000 a year lol. In fact, people on long layovers could be offered to go scare the hell out of birds for an hour or so to help their boredom. They'd never be without a volunteer.
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Okay, I couldn't resist. But when the best defense you have against falcons is to use falcons yourself, doesn't that mean the falcon is overpowered?
Damned ECM ships.
fuck the planet, as much as you can, while you still have time. its not like you will have to pay for it anyway ....... or ....
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It's called a Lawn Dart because it is Fly-by-Wire; there are no direct control links to the cockpit. If the computer shutsdown/locksup, your control surfaces freeze, and you have A LAWN DART. I have personally witnessed a T-38 trainer become a lawn-dart, and that is a two-engine plane. Sheppard, 2008.
On another note, the term "Viper" was adopted by F-16 pilots from the original BSG series.
Yo dawg we herd u like falcons...
If the computer shutsdown/locksup, your control surfaces freeze, and you have A LAWN DART.
According to my informants, and the material I've read about it, if the FLCC bricks, you don't have a lawn dart, you have confetti--the airplane exhibits negative static stability below Mach 1 and will pretty much depart aerodynamic flight and exceed structural limits in seconds at high subsonic speeds.
You're probably right about low-speed flight system failure, though.
That said, most of the "lawn dart" comments I heard were specifically from twin-engine (Eagle and Hornet) jocks and specifically about the single engine (and its somewhat unforgiving mid-air restart process). YMVM.
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