Daily archives: May 27, 2005

Burnt out on asbestos

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Earlier this year a blogger called Michael Buffington started a pecialist blog on asbestos. The idea was to see how lucrative niche blogging could be, because lawyers were paying big bucks to put their Google ads on asbestos related sites as the lawsuits are money spinners. The experiment seems to be over. The lesson seems to have been that if you’re going to aim for a niche, make it one your interested in. Which just gives me a chance to say that all the Spinneyhead special subject blogs are about things that interest me or get me excited, even if they seem at odds with the main blogs slightly twisted character.

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UAV School

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Teaching soldiers to fly remote control planes at Fort Huachuca.

Most of the teaching here at Fort Huachuca, from federal flight regulations to the operation of the drones’ infrared cameras, is done by outside contractors. Bill Hempel’s specialty is training “external pilots” — the guys who use twin joysticks to take off and land the 23-foot-long, split-tailed Hunter UAVs. It’s kind of an unmanned master class; only soldiers who already know how to keep a drone in the air — which is just a matter of pointing and clicking, really — can sign up for external pilot duties.

“We take these Army guys who don’t know the front end of an airplane from the back, and we teach them from scratch all the aviation they need to make them pilots,” he explains.

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