> Low-altitude flyovers were legal pretty much everywhere in Germany until 1990;
I was at Hahn [0] from 83-85. We had a German partner airbase (Pferdsfeld [1]) and they would occasionally act as aggressors (fake Soviets) in our exercises. So we got used to the sound of F4's passing at low altitude over the base, in addition to our own higher-pitched sounding F-16s with their near-constant takeoffs and touch-and-goes.
I recall one time a German Tornado pilot did a loop around our 100m tall microwave tower. The observer we had on top of it (for the exercise) was able to look down at the pilot. Any US pilot would have been called on the carpet for this stunt, but the all the Germans drove fast and flew fast.
The photo at site [0] of the airman guarding the fenceline brought back bad memories of doing the same. Hahn had the worst weather in USAFE because we were on top of a mountain range (icicles would grow sideways off the chain-link fences due to the wind), and being out there for 12+ hours in the winter was really unpleasant. The trick was to get one of the WW-II era metal helmets larger than you needed so you'd have room for a couple of knit caps underneath.
Yeah, there's a bit of misdirection in that name - if you land there expecting to be in Frankfurt am Main - there's a 90 minute bus ride ahead of you. But the airfare is cheap.
This is a surprisingly interesting article about a time and place we don't hear much of.
> In 1988, an A-10 went down over the little town of Remscheid, setting fire to several buildings and killing five people on the ground. I remember an evening news comment that the “images remind you of a bombing raid.” There were rumors that the A-10 had carried uranium-coated ammunition. On the internet, you can still find some Remscheid truthers convinced that it was so.
Well, the depleted uranium round was one of the options for the A-10. But "uranium-coated" sounds like a misunderstanding, as if they coated the bullets to spread something radioactive around. But depleted uranium is used because of its density. The fragments are highly toxic though.
From an A-10 site: Using the cannon, the A-10 is capable of disabling a main battle tank from a range of over 6,500m. The cannon can fire a range of ammunition, including armour-piercing incendiary rounds (API) weighing up to 0.75kg, or uranium-depleted 0.43kg API rounds.
The du rounds are not highly toxic per se the radiation level is low you might have some problems if you inhaled dust with uranium particles - if for say you where in a tank hit by a du round - then again if you successfully bail out of a brewed up tank any life after that is a bonus.
A mate of mine was in GW1 and told a story that he and some mates where investigating a brewed up Iraqi tank - they jumped out when they realised that not all the crew got out and one poor sods boots with feet inside where still in the tank.
How ever the German Tungsten squeeze bore rounds used in ww2 also had the same problem and a crashed burning plane probably kicks out a lot of potential nasty chemicals
Well, it does, but very slowly. Depleted means it contains only a very small percentage of fissible U235. The bulk being made up of U238, which also decays - emitting alpha radiation - but with a half life of ~2.5 billion years.
Is tungsten particularly toxic? I thought it was one of the metals that was comparatively easily eliminated from the body.
Also, that squeeze-bore technique sounds like playing with fire by increasing the chance of an overpressure rupture of the barrel. Surprised that it apparently worked so well.
Yes it was designed to get a beater ap performance out of a 50mm round of course there as not that much tungsten available to Germany in ww2 and what was better suited to other uses
The attitudes of Germans towards Americans, and vice versa, were completely transformed from fear and distrust to friendship by the Berlin Airlift.
The hedge-hopping was risky but accepted because that's how you evade enemy radar and anti-aircraft batteries. They had to ensure the Soviets knew they couldn't win an air attack on the west.
The Germans really put up with a lot. When armored convoys went through towns, there was usually a jeep with a junior officer following them, and he would write checks to property owners that suffered damage (perhaps an Abrams would cut a corner too closely and knock over a fence or the corner of a building).
The damage wasn't all one way - one REFORGER exercise a crew in an M-113 personnel carrier were killed because they failed to lower their antenna before crossing a rail line with it's electric wire overhead.
I'm sure they did. But they also had recent experience with what it was like to be invaded by the Soviets, and knew what was going on under Soviet domination in the DDR. You'd put up with a clipped corner now and then, too.
It's not really possible to have a well trained, ready military and not do lots of hard training, and the hard training inevitably results in damage and some deaths.
I remember the low-altitude flyovers in West Germany too well. It was as if you’d live in a war zone (or I guess more like as of you’d live close to a war zone).
I remember we were told that all critical facilities in the border areas were spaced wider than a 20 kilotonne blast radius. That really brought home the nature of the threat.
Definitely interesting article. Notes about an author he'd read seemed prescient:
>Pausewang wrote one more dystopian novel in which the Nazis had come back to power, and that in some way made explicit what these books had been about all along. Never again were young Germans to close their eyes before some change in the macroclimate. Pausewang was turning the children of the 1980s into little Geiger counters ready to register the faintest contaminants.
Turns out the inoculation is well-needed as the Nazis return in the guise of the Alt-Right, across the EU and US (and promoted by Russian bot armies).
Interesting, this is getting to be a distinct pattern. Even in even in otherwise innocuous comments, every mention of known activity by a certain country to undermine western democracies & alliances, is downvoted.
That's likely because it's flamebait that leads to partisan flamewars, which are off topic and destructive of the site.
Also: the HN guidelines ask you not to post insinuations about astroturfing, shillage, and so on, unless you have actual evidence of abuse, in which case you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.
Thanks for the tip -- definitely not my intent to start partisan flamewars (my actual intent is to raise awareness of these influences and tactics). Seems like that's out of context, so I'll refrain.
As to the consistent downvoting for mentions of a certain country's online influence campaigns, I've got insufficient data to make a hard accusation, just a handful of starkly consistent data points and no way that I've noticed to track downvoters (is there one I don't know about?).
I was at Hahn [0] from 83-85. We had a German partner airbase (Pferdsfeld [1]) and they would occasionally act as aggressors (fake Soviets) in our exercises. So we got used to the sound of F4's passing at low altitude over the base, in addition to our own higher-pitched sounding F-16s with their near-constant takeoffs and touch-and-goes.
I recall one time a German Tornado pilot did a loop around our 100m tall microwave tower. The observer we had on top of it (for the exercise) was able to look down at the pilot. Any US pilot would have been called on the carpet for this stunt, but the all the Germans drove fast and flew fast.
The photo at site [0] of the airman guarding the fenceline brought back bad memories of doing the same. Hahn had the worst weather in USAFE because we were on top of a mountain range (icicles would grow sideways off the chain-link fences due to the wind), and being out there for 12+ hours in the winter was really unpleasant. The trick was to get one of the WW-II era metal helmets larger than you needed so you'd have room for a couple of knit caps underneath.
[0] http://www.mil-airfields.de/germany/hahn-air-base.html
[1] http://www.forgottenairfields.com/germany/rhineland-palatina...