Hembree Heating & Air helping Stock the Pantry with non-perishable food
Pensacola Beach Sailfish sign now reads 'Gulf of America'
Over 100,000 children along the Central Gulf Coast are food insecure.
Josh Hembree, owner of Hembree Heating & Air, joined WKRG's Stock the Pantry campaign — a partnership with Feeding the Gulf Coast to make sure children who rely on school meals are fed during the summer.
Hembree Heating & Air is collecting donations of easily accessible food such as chips and cereal bars snacks until April 30.
Baldwin County Sheriff's new unit to focus on farmland, rural areas
Find a Stock the Pantry drop-off location near you.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Yahoo
08-08-2025
- Yahoo
B-2 Bombed A Smiley Face Into The Ground Because It Ran Out Of Targets
A B-2 bomber left a smiley face made out of bomb craters on the 'runway' of a mock airfield during a test some two decades ago. This happened after personnel at the sprawling Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) had run out of shipping containers to turn into targets that a B-2 would hit during a single attack run. It's a reminder of just how much precision destruction America's upgraded stealth bombers can dole out in one pass. Air Force Maj. Gen. Jason Armagost, who was part of the crew that flew the test mission, mentioned the smiley face during an online talk that the Air & Space Forces Association's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies hosted yesterday. Armagost, who is now commander of the Eighth Air Force, to which the Air Force's current B-2s, B-1s, and B-52s are all assigned, used the anecdote to highlight the unique capabilities offered by heavy bombers. 'I happened to fly an operational test mission where we tested the carriage of 80 500-pound JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munition precision guided bombs] and released them all in a span of a little over 20 seconds on an airfield in the UTTR,' Armagost said. 'I mean, that's an amazing sight to behold, such that we even ran out of CONEX boxes to strike, and so [we] drew a smiley face across the runway with JDAMs.' Armagost said that this flight occurred in 2004, but this appears to be in error. The rest of his description aligns completely with a widely publicized test that occurred on September 10, 2003. The specifics of the event are detailed in the video below, which makes no mention of drawing the smiley face. The faux airfield constructed on the UTTR for the September 2003 test was just under a mile long. In addition to two mock runways, one graded and one just a desert strip, it included nine distinct simulated target areas. These were designed to represent an aircraft revetment, a helicopter landing pad, a control tower, a vehicle park, a generic structure, a hangar, an SA-6 surface-to-air missile system site, a fuel storage site, and a Scud ballistic missile launch site. The mock revetment, control tower, generic structure, and hangar were all made using arrays of shipping containers. The B-2 bomber, flying at an altitude of some 40,000 feet, released all 80 JDAMs in a single pass. The GPS-assisted guidance packages in the tail fin sections in each of the bombs were programmed to hit a separate aim point, and all of the impacts occurred within a span of approximately 22 seconds. The JDAM was still a relatively new weapon at the time, and the B-2 used in the test had to be specially modified with new 'smart' bomb racks to be able to drop the bombs. There were also safety concerns about dropping that many bombs from a B-2 in such rapid succession, and 11 other test flights were conducted to gather key data before the final 80-bomb pass on the mock airfield. Today, JDAMs, which consist of one of a number of low-drag bomb bodies combined with a new tail section that contains the guidance system, as well as clamp-on aerodynamic strakes, are among the most widely used air-to-ground munitions in the U.S. military. In addition to 500-pound-class types, there are also 1,000 and 2,000-pound-class versions. The Air Force had certainly demonstrated the B-2's ability to drop large numbers of bombs, in general, before the September 2003 test. The service has continued to show off the B-2's capabilities in this regard in training and testing, as well as real-world operations, since 2003, as well. As mentioned, during yesterday's talk, Maj. Gen. Armagost used the 80 JDAM test to highlight the immense and unique capabilities that heavy bombers offer. The B-2, with its maximum payload capacity of around 60,000 pounds, has especially cavernous bomb bays. It is notably the only aircraft currently certified to operationally employ the 30,000-pound GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker buster bomb, the heaviest conventional munition in U.S. service today. It can carry two MOPs in its internal weapons bays. The MOP has now become a household name after the bombs were dropped on real targets for the first time during the Operation Midnight Hammer strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. Armagost's remarks yesterday about the 80 JDAM test came in response to a question about what he would want fellow airmen to better understand about the differences between what fighters and bombers bring to the fight. 'Bombers are an order of magnitude difference [from fighters] in what you can do with them,' he also said. 'Now, they nest incredibly well together, right? We see that with our partners and allies, who … fly fighters as their power projection capability. But when we nest them together with bombers, it is a completely different animal.' The United States is currently alone in the West as an operator of bombers. It is a small club overall, with Russia and China being the only other countries that do so anywhere else globally. 'I'll reflect back to that, that B-2 example of 80 500-pound JDAMs in a matter of a little over 20 seconds, and that was one aircraft,' Armagost said later on in yesterday's talk. 'It's like the example we used to give of World War II attacks requiring massive formations with high numbers of people at risk to get a single target. And then, as we transition through the precision capability, kind of revolution, and then evolution, you get down to single aircraft with single targets. And then the B-2 with multiple targets per aircraft. And, so, most simply, the cost, the strike efficiency, and the cost per kill comes down to: it matters how big your weapons bay is.' Now it also 'matters what access you have bought with the platform or with the weapons, in the case of hypersonics from range, or a penetrating force bringing large numbers inside of denied airspace,' the Eighth Air Force commander added. The ability of a single B-2 to destroy, or at least inflict severe damage, on a large facility like an airfield with pinpoint accuracy on a single pass, even when flying miles from the target, remains a significant capability, although one that is waning with the advent of ever more advanced integrated air defense systems. Regardless, this unprecedented ability is something TWZ has highlighted in the past when talking about the B-2. In line with all of this, Armagost spent much of his time yesterday talking about the critical value he sees coming not just from the size of the planned fleet for forthcoming B-21 Raider bombers, as you can read more about here. The Air Force plans to buy at least 100 B-21s, if not many more. The service currently has just 19 B-2 bombers out of a total of 21 that were ever produced, which imposes significant limits on their operational capacity despite the highly valuable 'silver bullet' capabilities they offer, as was demonstrated during the Midnight hammer strikes. The B-21 is smaller than the B-2, and won't be able to carry as much gross tonnage of ordnance per sortie. Still, the Raider could have an even more impressive 'single pass' strike capability, all while offering enhanced survivability. While 80 JDAMs may not be on the weapons menu, with new smaller standoff munition options like the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) or its successor, the GBU-53/B StormBreaker, the B-21 could exceed the quantity of the B-2's bomb load. And it could release those weapons at standoff ranges, eclipsing the B-2's impressive direct attack capabilities. The B-2 is not currently capable of employing the SDB or Stormbreaker. The ability to launch even small but just as accurate drones that can network together to swarm targets with deadly precision could take this capability even another step forward. Regardless of what the future holds, the smiley face anecdote that Maj. Gen. Armagost shared underscores why the Air Force's B-2s will continue to be prized for their unique ability to bring heavy ordnance loads deep into defended and deal massive, highly-efficient destruction in minimal time. Contact the author: joe@
Yahoo
06-08-2025
- Yahoo
Mobile to bid ‘iconic' ship farewell
OKALOOSA COUNTY, Fla. (WKRG) — The SS United States Conservancy is in the early design phase of a land-based museum to display artifacts and showcase the history of the SS United States. Mobile business employee injured while trying to stop alleged shoplifter The museum's exact location has not yet been decided, though renderings have begun based on dimensions of potential property in partnership with Okaloosa County. Early rendering of the potential museum in Okaloosa County with ship parts of the SS United States. (Courtesy of SS United States Conservancy) Warren Jones with the Conservancy Board of Directors said a meeting will take place this week with top donors to push forward the presented designs. 'The county has, again, partnered with us so we'll help out with the search for property and bounce around some ideas on that as well, and then they're involved in the transport of funnels to a temporary location,' Jones said. 'We've looked at the exhibits, and we've kind of mapped out what we would exhibit in the museum. There are thousands and thousands of artifacts for this museum, and they are all over the East Coast.' Having launched 74 years ago, the SS United States holds the transatlantic speed records during her maiden voyage and has carried over 1 million passengers during her time on the water before being docked in 1996. 'The record's never been broken, both eastbound and westbound, never been broken,' Jones added. 'It will never be matched, and so it's really that, you know, we, the SS United States Conservancy, have tried since 2011 to have this ship repurposed as a multi-purpose stationary ship, hotel rooms, event spaces, eateries, as such.' Gulf Breeze man wins Florida lottery Although the museum groundbreaking has no set date, reefing expects to be completed around the start of the new year. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Washington Post
06-08-2025
- Washington Post
4 people die in crash of medical transport plane on Navajo Nation in northern Arizona
A small medical transport plane crashed and caught fire Tuesday on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, killing four people, the tribe said in a statement. A Beechcraft King Air 300 from the CSI Aviation company left Albuquerque, New Mexico, with two pilots and two health care providers, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and CSI Aviation. It crashed in the early afternoon near the airport in Chinle, about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northeast of Phoenix.
