I've attended the Cleveland National Air Show regularly since 2008. Because I'm such an aviation geek , I love giving tours to the people who come with me. And sometimes I attract attention.

As I've been defining my "brand" of what I do well, one of my early attempts at a brand was "force-multiplier" or a creator of force-multipliers. I've found that most people don't have the (normally military) background to understand the term right away, so I wanted to write about how I came to the term. For me, it was webcomic Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler .

Update schedule change: I'm dropping my Friday updates going forward: with my childcare duties and having burned through much of the backlog of items I wanted to blog about, I'll be updating only two days per week: Monday and Wednesday. Now on to the (last?) Friday musing: Inauspicious Beginning This post was inspired by poor phrasing: on March 6, 2025, Aviation Week quoted General Randall Reed , the chief of the US Air Force Transportation Command, as stating that for the brand-new B-21 Raider bomber, “it’s going to be a little bit higher requirement specifically in the fuel transfer”. At the time, Aviation Week reported that meant that the B-21 would require a faster fuel-transfer rate, i.e. that a single aerial refueling tanker could deliver X gallons per minute more than it could today. Later, Transportation Command clarified they meant that the US Air Force needed more tanker aircraft, not a faster pump. I had a whole rant planned on how something had to be horribly...