{"id":186502,"date":"2014-01-05T21:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T02:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/01\/05\/why-we-cant-have-nice-stuff\/"},"modified":"2014-01-05T21:37:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T02:37:00","slug":"why-we-cant-have-nice-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/01\/05\/why-we-cant-have-nice-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Can&#8217;t Have Nice Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because our definition of &#8220;Nice Stuff&#8221; includes aircraft that <a href=\"http:\/\/defensetech.org\/2014\/01\/02\/b-2-returns-to-flight-nearly-4-years-later\/\">require 4 years of repair work after an engine fire<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Almost four years after the Air Force said a B-2 sustained \u201cminor damage,\u201d the aircraft returned to the fleet at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., on Dec. 16, according to the service.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">An engine fire grounded the \u201cSpirit of Washington\u201d in 2010. Since then, Air Force maintainers and engineers have worked to get one of the 20 B-2 stealth bombers remaining in the Air Force fleet back in the air.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The fact there are only 20 B-2s in the Air Force\u2019s fleet increased the urgency of the repair and helped Air Force officials to make the decision not to scrap the project even though it took three years and nine months to complete.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Maintaining the B-2\u2019s stealth qualities added to the challenge, according to officials. A particular challenge was removing the charcoal created by the fire from the aircraft\u2019s skin.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Maintainers created a process in which they used dry ice pellets to remove charcoal from the skin.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The increasingly exotic technology upon which The Pentagon relies have become unsustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because our definition of &#8220;Nice Stuff&#8221; includes aircraft that require 4 years of repair work after an engine fire: Almost four years after the Air Force said a B-2 sustained \u201cminor damage,\u201d the aircraft returned to the fleet at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., on Dec. 16, according to the service.An engine fire grounded the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1007,1211,1006,1025],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviation","category-defense","category-military","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}