Saturday, April 11, 2015

U.S. European Command (EUCOM)

Facebook If you click then you'll have Facebook cookies. This is what EUCOM says:
There are rumors and speculation floating around the Internet, but here's what we know about this incident: on the morning of April 7th, a U.S. RC-135U (similar to the one in this United States Air Force file photo) was flying a routine route in international airspace in accordance with ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) rules of flight, and was intercepted by a Russian SU-27 Flanker in an unsafe and unprofessional manner. You can be assured that the United States is raising this incident with Russia in the appropriate diplomatic and official channels.
How official sounding. Here's what we know: it was very unprofessional. I think that's funny.  It doesn't explain anything except to suggest they're messing with us.

7 comments:

rcocean said...

Based on the audience reaction to "Top Gun" i thought we liked unprofessional flying.

edutcher said...

The 1960s called.

They've been looking for their Cold War.

AllenS said...

Time to draw a line in the sand.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

The one being unprofessional, here, is EUCOM.

What happens in international airspace, stays in international airspace.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Russia shoots down whole passenger aircraft - killing hundreds of innocent people. Consequences?
Perhaps a shiny new reset button.

ricpic said...

That's either plane stroking or outright plane sex!

Chip Ahoy said...

Making this was fun.

I had the sequence finished. 18 frames is actually 18X4.

It takes 18 frames for the background clouds to move across the frame. That's the time I have for the blue jet to appear, go around and disappear from wherever it appeared so the thing can loop sensibly.

I ran it. The blue plane buzzes around like a bee.

Photoshop allows you to back out, but only so far. (or else I'd close up and reopen an earlier saved version) It backed out to 17 frames. Back to the original 18X4 and I'd have to do it all over again.

That one frame still had a little blue airplane in the corner. I took blue sky from that area in another frame and got rid of the blue airplane.

Then I doubled everything. Now it's a stack of 18 X 4 frames X 2, like a ridiculously tall ladder.

Half of them need the blue plane layer removed. A whole run of cloud background without the blue plane. Then the second set with the blue plane.

That's what makes it so cool.

18 frames for a background is a lot. You want all the action to occur within those 18 frames so that the file size is reasonable.

But now I doubled the 18 frames just to have a run of background clouds without the blue plane. In gif terms that is a lot of waste.

Luckily, an online optimization is able to take my 1.2M file and make it 535kb file a very nice reduction without much sacrifice in fidelity and that's better than I can do myself with several tries at reducing color and size and removing frames, noise, dither, diffusion and such.