First in this post, to Switzerland.<\/p>\n
Land of the cuckoo clock (even though it was a German invention), numbered account and the world’s most secretive banking laws.<\/p>\n
And green – in an environmental rather than rural way.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has heard the TV journalist Jeremy Clarkson’s views on Switzerland will realise the country is an extremely green place.<\/p>\n
And an extreme place.<\/p>\n
The latest piece of green Swiss extremism is a proposal to ban the Swiss Air Force from low flying in Alpine areas.<\/p>\n
The Swiss Air Force is only a defensive force – Switzerland isn’t even a member of NATO – and it solely exists to protect the bankers and cuckoo clock makers.<\/p>\n
But the Swiss greens are saying that the noise of the Swiss F18s and F5s is harming the local economy and environment.<\/p>\n
Switzerland has many Alpine areas and it’s not a massive leap of logic that one would want the national Air Force pilots trained in that kind of landscape.<\/p>\n
The Swiss greens seem to think it’s not necessary.<\/p>\n
It’s probably not another massive leap of logic to surmise that the Swiss greens probably want to do away with the Swiss Air Force.<\/p>\n
I trained on exercise with the Swiss Air Force; it’s a service comprised of part-time, amateur servicemen and women.<\/p>\n
But their capability and professionalism is worthy of – and in the case of some nations, exceeds – the same standards of most professional aviators.<\/p>\n
Even though I have a very large video clip of a cockpit-filmed dog-fight that unfortunately shows 14 Sqn Royal Air Force comprehensively kicking Swiss backside all over their own airspace.<\/em><\/p>\n It would be sad if the greens became elevated to a place where they set national defence<\/em> capabilities.<\/p>\n And now, to Guam where…<\/p>\n The world’s most expensive air crash has just happened.<\/p>\n A United States B-2 ‘stealth’ bomber crashed just after take-off from Anderson Air Force Base, Guam.<\/p>\n Thankfully both pilots ejected (I’ll tell you a true story about Royal Air Force ejection procedures in a minute<\/em>) safely, but the aircraft is spread over a large area and will keep the wreckage-pickers busy for some time.<\/p>\n But at a cost of (count the zeros!) $ 1,200,000,000.00 each, this relatively unreported event masks the world’s most expensive air crash.<\/p>\n And now that anecdote…<\/em><\/p>\n The first time I flew on a low-level sortie as I was strapped in to my ejection seat the pilot said over the intercom:<\/p>\n And if I say ‘Eject, eject, eject’ I want you to reach down and pull that tag immediately, and if you say “What?” you’ll be talking to yourself’.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It crystalised my thoughts!<\/p>\n B<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First in this post, to Switzerland. Land of the cuckoo clock (even though it was a German invention), numbered account and the world’s most secretive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}