They were found in a storage warehouse in Perth Australia, after being recorded at the NASA facility in Parks Australia (you should see the movie about this called “The Dish” - it’s funny and tells a bit of real history about the event). The people in the cab of the telemetry dish portrayed in the movie were the only people to have ever seen the original, uncompressed, video images. I would surmise that the tapes sent to the US and subsequently lost were copies of this original.

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Exclusive story in the Sunday Express.

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The images we’ve all seen were recorded on 16mm film off of CRT screens in Houston, and that was after compression in Sydney and transmission over Intelsat III. However a few handheld cameras also shot images from the CRT screen, including the one below. Note the details of the reflections in the helmet visors.
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IF, and that’s a big IF, the original data tapes can be read successfully, the images may be very good indeed.
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This looks like a small illustration, but in reality it is a full size silhouette of a DC-10 on the desert floor, a memorial to UTA Flight 772 that was brought down by Libyan terrorists in 1989 killing 170 people. More info at googlesightseeing.com.
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Well, I saw a helium balloon up above 100k feet anyway. I saw it driving home from work during full daylight, and it stayed brilliant white, illuminated by the sun, long after the “low” clouds at 30k feet were black in the sunset. I was beginning to think it was Venus, because it stayed bright so late, but it finally went red and blinked out in the darkness of the terminator. Pretty cool. A friend shot these pictures.
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Slashdot details the budget cuts at NASA, even while federal deficit spending ramps up out of sight.

Rutan has a policy of not talking about something before he can do it - and do it reliably. But the Space Ship 2/White Knight 2 project to get people into space attracts a lot of attention, so silence can easily appear as failure.
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Because of some “misinformation” published about a recent White Knight 2 flight, Rutan opens the curtains a bit and published a statement about their April 20 test flight, and released video exclusively to Wired.com.
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ABC and Instpundit report and comment on the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport for Nobody.
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You’ve heard of the Bridge to Nowhere. You might call this the Airport for Nobody. The John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport has an impressive $18 million runway made of reinforced concrete that’s big enough to land any airplane in North America. The airport also has a $7 million air traffic control tower, a $14 million hanger and $8 million radar. Most of the time, the only thing the airport doesn’t have is airplanes. . . .
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I know that AOPA pushes for these kinds of projects, because it locks the local town into keeping the airport. It’s great to be able to fly into such places, but I don’t relish the idea of forcing taxpayers into funding something that is a little used pork project.
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A much better way to provide good air transportation is to get government out of the way of General Aviation. The airlines can only use large high-density airports, but a thriving GA would make an airport like this support itself.
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A good start was the Light Sport category, but LS isn’t viable transportation. It’s just a toy. The feds need to back way off the overregulation that prevents genuinely modern aircraft from being built at reasonable prices. Such airplanes would give low-skilled pilots safe all-weather capability into places like Murtha airport, making federal pork money unnecessary, and helping the economy for all of us.
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Even the proposed “NEXTGEN” system is prehistoric technology that doesn’t go nearly far enough. It was technically possible to do almost 20 years ago, and yet the FAA is dragging their feet at even doing that.
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The bottom line is that the government and FAA is in the back pocket of the airlines and ATC unions. They’ve got their jobs, but they’ve halted progress in their greed for personal security, and ultimately they’ve only hurt all of us, and themselves as well.

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PACIFIC OCEAN (April 8, 2009) Lightning strikes behind an F/A-18C Hornet from the “Blue Diamonds” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 146 on the flight deck aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74). Stennis and Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 9 are on a scheduled six-month deployment to the western Pacific Ocean. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Elliott Fabrizio)

Last weekend I flew in the first air race of 2009, the “Taylor 100″ in Taylor Texas. The interesting thing is that this is the 100th year of air racing, with the first known air race taking place in August 1909. The winner was Glenn Curtiss at 46.5 mph.
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I came in last in a class of two. But it was lots of fun. After a spending the evening in OKC with relatives, the flight home to AZ82 was spectacular. Here’s a shot somewhere around Amarillo, down fairly low for a cross country, with totally smooth air.
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Here’s a better picture:
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But.. But.. I thought Obama told us there would be no tax increases if you made less than $250k????
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The specter of User Fees raises it’s ugly head again, with the obvious aim of destroying the GA industry. And why not? Only “Rich” people fly their own airplanes. Right?
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More at AOPA.

At this FAA web site.

What looks like an “Earthquake” in the video from MSNBC, with a rather violent shaking at about 0.5hz, was apparently caused by autopilot software errors during an orbit boost last month. The twin 440lb thrust rocket engines on the Russian Zvezda module began a regular oscillation that matched the natural frequency of the entire station. Full Story and video at MSNBC.
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Details at NationalGeographic.com:
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Flight Sim X may be the last in the long line of the MS franchise.
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Story at DailyTech.

With all the attention on the inauguration, the Tuskegee Airmen are getting some new attention. DeepGlamour.net put together a great slide show of the airmen when they were young and glamorous, taken by famous fashion photographer Toni Frissell. Check out the tight formation of Mustangs and lots more at the link.
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This extended video shows the ditching, initial evacuation of the aircraft, and pickup by ferry boats, all in real time.
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[edit - I just noticed that the time from the top image, right after the jet hit the water, to the next image is only 61 seconds, and already there are quite a few passengers exited on the wings. That’s quick.]
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In an ironic twist, note the supersonic Concorde on the pier in the background, part of the Intrepid museum.

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[update] - The Airbus has now been lifted from the water (images at the BBC). There are obvious openings in the belly, but it’s unclear in the images whether these are mere fairings, or major structure. The cargo doors are open, but I can imagine that this may have been done deliberately by divers to drain the jet, or the doors failed from the weight of water as the jet was raised.

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[update 2] - Sky News has a gallery of 50 images. These are the best I’ve seen so far, but still no good evidence there was major structural damage in the fuselage. The fairing is torn from the engine in this image, and other shots appear to show flaps hanging, which isn’t surprising.
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