Why Air Power Australia is an important addition to the Plane Talking blog roll

Crikey and its blogs report on things that the established media often ignores or misunderstands or wraps up in the obscure language of managerial or administrative english.

This is a criticism that has also been made of Plane Talking, for its non-coverage of defence aerospace issues. It is a valid criticism.

The independent Air Power Australia think tank, launched in 2004 by Dr Carlo Kopp and Peter Goon, has been a sharp thorn in the side of Canberra’s defence bureaucracy, critically analysing the organisation’s inability to do it job properly. The Air Power Australia website provides an online public analysis resource for defence issues, with many layers, covering the technical, operational, strategic, governance and management aspects of the business.

This makes including Air Power in Plane Talking’s blog roll a long overdue necessity.

Kopp and Goon have the inadequacies of defence planning and strategy, and in particular, the dangers of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, in their sights.

When Plane Talking began to criticise the failings of 787 program, its disconnection from reality, and the obscure, vague, unreliable and jargon laden manner in which it was being pushed, Goon raised the strong parallels between that project and the JSF.

The result is a detailed examination of the similarities between programs that involve two otherwise totally different military and civil aircraft, yet both of which are in crisis, by Peter Goon, which will appear here later today.