If you can not receive HTML e-mail
properly please contact me. To unsubscribe see instructions at the
bottom.
Contents:
- Word from the Webmaster
- Updates and changes
- Military aviation news
- Quiz results
- Picture of the month
- Future plans
First of all I wish you all a HAPPY NEW YEAR! All the best for 2003,
let's hope it will be a year with lots of aviation fun. Of course I will try to
contribute to this by expanding my website.
Updates and
changes
Less than I was hoping to achieve this month...
Removal of Top 50 list
The most important change of this month is the removal of the
MILAVIA Top 50 websites. The Top 50 was hosted by a third party. Unfortunately
their server seems to be very slow. Secondly people voting for
members of the Top 50 by clicking on their vote button were brought to a
seperate web location for the list, and not the MILAVIA website itself. The Top
50 was just a list of websites that were submitted and listed by popularity. And
not the best 50 websites on the net of course. So I'd rather spend my energy on
a good link directory with all the good websites and more populair top site
lists. If you are interested in Top 50, 100, etc lists visit the 'Website
rankings' category on my links page.
New section: ARTICLES
A new section has been added to the website. In this
section you will find articles, reports, stories, interviews related to military
aviation. For now there are no articles yet. But I will work on
it.
Other changes:
- removed 'advertise' link, added 'contribute' link to the
submenu instead
- Updated MiG-31 Foxhound section - new information and
pictures
- Revised/Changed AC-130 Gunship information
Military Aviation
News
Small selection of military aviation relates news
items from December:
Poland opts for F-16
27 December 2002 - A final
decision for the next generation fighter aircraft for the Polish Air Force has
been made. Lockheed Martin has won the $3.5 billion contract for 48 F-16 Block
52 advanced multi role fighters. Competition consisted of Dassault offering
the Mirage 2000-5 Mk.2, which is the latest multi-role upgrade of the
Mirage 2000 equipped with the RDY-2 radar (same as the Rafale), and the
Saab JAS-39 Gripen by Gripen International (a consortium of Saab Aerospace and
BAE Systems). The delivery of the new F-16s will start in 2006 and the new
NATO-compatible fighters will be operational in 2008 enabling Poland to start
phasing out its ageing fleet of MiG-21s and MiG-23s. The MiG-29 fighters and a
number of Su-22 strike aircraft will be overhauled and upgraded to extend
service life.
Germany to scale down Eurofighter
purchase
Because of the serious
financial status of Germany, German government decided to cut projected
deliveries of Eurofighters. The German Eurofighter purchase originally consisted
of 140 air defense and 40 ground attack dedicated variants. A plan has now been
issued to reduce the total number of the order by at least 69 aircraft. This
will lead to esimated initial savings of ?1.3 billion (about 1.3 billion US
dollars). Germany already reduced the number of Airbus A400M (European
consortium medium transport aircraft to replace the C-160 Transall) from 73 to
60 aircraft.
Two T-37s collide in
mid air
12/20/02 - SHEPPARD AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFPN) -- Two T-37 Tweet
trainer aircraft assigned to the 89th Flying Training Squadron here collided in
midair about 9:20 a.m. Dec. 20. The incident took place during a training
mission near Lake Waurika, located about 40 miles northeast of Wichita Falls,
Texas. Each aircraft had an instructor pilot and a student pilot on board. The
crew in one of the jets ejected safely from the aircraft before it crashed, and
they were picked up by local authorities. The crew of the other aircraft
returned to Sheppard and conducted a wheels-up landing. They safely exited the
aircraft and were transported to the base hospital for observation. Air Force
Link
Quiz
Results
A total of 15 visitors entered the competition and
14 answered the quiz correctly. The correct answer for the December 2002 quiz is
the F-4 Phantom II. Visit the website for the new quiz and view the full size
picture of the F-4. On the previous quiz page you can comment on the quiz about
the difficulty.
The winners are:
|
Robert Arts (Netherlands)
Caspar Smit
(Netherlands)
Vedran Marsanic (Croatia)
Michel van Put
(Belgium)
Roderick Bokdam (Netherlands)
SHORAD Benny
(Belgium)
Martin Wendl (Germany) |
'name withheld' (USA)
Marc Eichler
(USA)
trigger (United Kingdom)
'name withheld' (USA)
Ian Ross
(Canada)
'name withheld' (USA)
Michel Koster
(Netherlands) |
Unfortunately there are no prizes
involved, only the honor to have your name on the website. I hope you enjoy
this month's quiz.
Picture of the
month
RAF Jaguar in winter
camouflage
Future
Plans
I hope to be able to add more aircraft to the
directory, update some, add articles and revise the downloads section (previews
of the wallpapers in the form of a description and thumbnail, and probably
some new ones)
For questions or comments please e-mail
me.
Happy new year,
Niels Hillebrand
MILAVIA Webmaster
The MILAVIA newsletter is a service of the
MILAVIA website to keep the subscriber up to date about items related
to the MILAVIA military aviation website, located at http://milavia.net Submitted e-mail
addresses will not be used for any other purpose than sending the MILAVIA
newsletter/newsflash once a month and will under no circumstances be sold or
provided to any third party. For this newsletter the same disclaimer applies as
to the MILAVIA website, this disclaimer can be found at http://milavia.net
To unsubscribe please send an e-mail with
UNSUBSCRIBE as header to newsletter@milavia.cjb.net or
visit our website at http://milavia.cjb.net
and use the form located on the newsletter page. Sorry for any inconvenience if
you have received this newsletter in error.
