Late in the Carter Administration the USAF considered a proposal to adapt 747s as cruise missile carriers. It never got far, though.
Somewhere, I have some photos of AGM-109s in a rotary launcher at Edwards AFB. (I think they were AGM-109s. Could’ve been AGM-186s.)
These folks JetZero are probably going to actually build something. USAF is dead set on getting something along these lines and Boeing is kinda on their shit list right now.
Should be fun to watch. Another bit of game-changing tech whose time is just now coming.
I dunno. There’s almost nothing on the internet to suggest they could build a better coffee maker at this point.
Boeing has had flying RC test models for years.
Please. ‘Fecal roster.’ Thank you.
Gripped by this Twitter thread:
My flight leaving Houston is delayed because bees have congregated on the tip of one of the wings. They won’t let us board until they remove the bees. But how on earth will this happen? Won’t they leave the wing when we take off? pic.twitter.com/DhodBz0m5n
— Anjali Enjeti (she/her) (@AnjaliEnjeti) May 3, 2023
Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.
Strange. I mean, the winglets are for efficiency, not for lift per se. Maybe fear that instead of being blown clean off, disturbed and angry bees might get involved in more critical components like flaps or engine fan.
That’s not some bees, that looks like an entire hive.
1 Airport Fire Dept. foam truck
5 minutes (including clean-up)
Bees are necessary to our ecosystem and they are endangered. Just because they don’t understand airplanes is not a reason to destroy them.
“If I don’t make my connection in Memphis and miss my daughter’s 8th birthday party, you’ll have a bigger problem than bees, bucko!”
-Every passenger on the flight
The current foam used at Part 139 airports is loaded with PFAS - every airport fire department I know of is under orders to not discharge foam unless there’s a legitimate fuel fire - and even then, think about it first. AFFF is amazing for killing insects, though.
That said, we had a relocating honeybee hive settle on a jetbridge in the couple of hours between flights. We called the state’s beekeeper association president (I had his number in my phone after having had a similar issue in my yard a year or two earlier). He connected us with a local beekeeper who was escorted onto the AOA about an hour later and recovered the bees. Everyone was happy except for SWA who couldn’t use their gate for 90 minutes or so.
And the bees have an opportunity to fly in formation up to about 35 knots at which time they can go about doing what bees do.
I just checked. There is exactly zero guidance in our thousands of pages of FAA-approved books about bee infestations attached to the airplane.
We seem to have a bee infestation gap. General Turgidson is doubtless upset.
I for one would simply launch off and ignore our Apical Overlords. They’ll shed soon enough. I can’t see how they could have any adverse effect on our people or our machine. I might have been nervous had I been a ground crewman though.
Story time …
When I was in USAF living in Panama in the early 1980s one afternoon I came home to my quarters and it was strangely dark in the bedroom of my two-room apartment.
I went to look closely and about 80% of the bedroom window, some 4 x 5 feet, was solidly covered with a swarm of bees. Panama was then in the throes of a first wave of migration of the so-called “killer bees” or “Africanized bees”. Yup I had caught me a few thousand of them. Wild. I took a bunch of mildly unnerving pix with my then new-fangled 35mm film camera. They departed overnight as mysteriously as they had come and the day dawned normally.
Thats not my only “killer bee” story, but it’ll do.
How 'bout if one of them goes into a pitot tube?
It’s about a hundred feet straight line from the wingtip to the nearest pitot tube. And about 50 feet due upwind once we’re in motion. So it’s kinda implausible one of the swarm could end up there. But not categorically impossible.
A foreign object in one of the three tubes would be inconvenient and should result in a low speed rejected takeoff when their respective airspeed indicators don’t pass the “Do all 3 agree?” check as we get rolling.
But most of the bees will have been blown off by then, so the rest of the bee management problem is solved. And the one cooked inside the pitot tube probably doesn’t have much fight left in it.
I’d definitely bee concerned about that issue if the bees had chosen to swarm on e.g. the radome. Then again, with a bee swarm on the radome I guarantee that even if I wanted to push back & go, the ground crew who has to work right there would inside the building with their arms folded. And those dudes are much bigger & stronger than I am and with a better union to boot. Not gonna persuade them of anything. 
I know there’s some distance from the wingtip to the pitot tube, but the bees didn’t just materialize on that wingtip. In the process of accumulating where they did, there must have been hundreds of them flying around near the airplane. If there’s anything they could get into and cause a problem, it might be worth checking before the next takeoff.
Hadn’t thought of it that way. Good point.
Though IME Africanized bee swarms tend to be pretty dense with not a lot of stragglers wandering away. They behave more like a herd of sheep than a herd of cows. Very cohesive.
I would want to check a lot of stuff on that plane, I think. Wheel wells, pitot tubes, etc. The winglet seems like an odd place for the hive to go.