The first thing you notice when 97-year-old Lt. Col. Richard Cole walks in the room is what’s missing: no cane, no eyeglasses, no old-guy shuffle. He locks onto a stranger’s handshake. “Let’s sit outside,” he says, eyes sweeping a vine-draped patio mottled by the midday sun. “It’d be a shame to miss out on that.” Cole [...]
A Turkish military helicopter carrying soldiers on a mission against Kurdish rebels crashed because of bad weather on Saturday, killing all 17 troops onboard, officials said. Thirteen soldiers and four military crewmembers were killed in the crash in a mountainous part of Pervari district in Siirt province, in southeastern Turkey, where the rebel Kurdistan Worker’s Party [...]
A Southwest Airlines jetliner slid off an icy taxiway at Denver International Airport Saturday evening without producing any injuries, officials said. Southwest Flight 1905 had just landed following a flight from Oakland, Calif., when the mishap occurred just before 5 p.m., KMGH-TV, Denver, reported. The 125 passengers and five crew members aboard the Boeing 737 [...]
A Fulton, Mo., Police Department investigation led to two major drug arrests Friday when $450,000 worth of marijuana was seized from an airplane that had landed shortly after midnight at Hensley Memorial Airport in Fulton. Arrested were the pilot, Russell Hansen, 56, Wynantskill, N.Y., and Jacob M. Beaty-Martinez, 21, Bakersfield, Calif. Both were taken to Callaway [...]
China’s second stealth fighter jet, the J-31 Falcon Eagle, looks remarkably like earlier models of a twin-engine variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Last week’s maiden flight of the JSF’s Chinese doppelgänger comes less than two years after the inaugural flight of China’s first twin-engine J-20 Black Eagle stealth fighter, built by Chengdu Aircraft. [...]
An Algerian military transport plane flying home from Paris crashed in southeast France on Friday, killing four of the six people aboard, police and fire brigade sources said. They said the other two people were missing after the plane crashed in a mountainous, uninhabited area near the city of Avignon. About 70 firefighters put out a blaze at [...]
Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Herbert E. Carter died Thursday at East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika, Ala. He was 95. Carter was a university alumnus and member of the original cadre of the 99th Fighter Squadron of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. He flew combat missions during the North African, Sicilian, Italian and European campaigns [...]
Although Veterans Day has the stated purpose of remembering the vets and those in uniform, in reality it means different things to different people. For some it is the half-off sales that surround us. For me, it reminds me of one of those could-of-should-ofs that will always haunt me: I never served in the armed [...]
