I keep noticing a new face in the game; Vertir Airlines, of Armenia, founded last year has been flying routes from the UAE into Afghanistan. Not much information has been available, but we know a few things; the only known aircraft, Antonov An-12 EK-12221, serial 7345201, is the old ER-AXE, which flew for the now-banned…
Read More Dig the new breedEveryone was all over this NYT story about those vanishing cargoes of guns in Iraq. It’s nothing new if you’ve been reading this blog; we’ve been concerned about this ever since 2005. And, unlike Spencer Ackerman, we’ve got the whole supply chain; those guns didn’t come on no C-17, Spence, but on JLI and Aerocom…
Read More Belated Bad Logistics BloggingIf you watched Britz this week you’ll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs’s seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds…
Read More The Failings of Social Network AnalysisWhat was a small British company doing importing vast quantities of arms from Bosnia? More importantly, what was it doing telling lies about their destination in order to clear Bosnian customs? What was it doing contracting with Tomislav Damjanovic, possibly Viktor Bout, and disgraced Iraqi minister Ziad Cattan to ship them to Iraq when the…
Read More 58,000 AKs in a Nottingham basement?The International Herald-Tribune has an interesting article about a Serbian gun-runner and colleague of Viktor Bout’s, one Tomislav Damjanovic. For some reason it’s in the Style section; most photos of Viktor would seem to rule that out, but the one of Damjanovic they supply does have a certain Balkan sharpness. Anyway, the report is based…
Read More Fascinating Report out on Viktor Bout & CoI’ve recently been experimenting with various ways of automatically gathering information about Viktor Bout’s airlines; you’ve probably noticed the resumption of Pathetic Python Blogging. Anyway, though the project is far from ready, enough of itnow works to produce some useful results. For example, who the hell are “Asia Airways”, who regularly fly between Sharjah and…
Read More Political Pathetic Python; and some mystery jetsDavid Phinney notepads something interesting about the scandal-lapped Kuwaiti contractor on the US Embassy in Baghdad: From spring 2006: The general manager for the US Embassy contractor, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting has two airplanes the company can’t register and is piloted by a German pilot named Wolfgang …. The general manager also has…
Read More Need a hand with that?So, there’s this new Kyrgyz airline called Galaxy Air; started by people from TAPOAvia in 2006. It’s been on the EU blacklist since March, 2007, and it ain’t coming off any time soon. On the 29th of August, its Ilyushin-18 EX-786 was seized by the Pakistani authorities in Islamabad. Why? Well, the 142 passengers, of…
Read More Pass Down The Plane, PleaseSonia Falcone is deported from the US, heads for Beijing; where she intends to catch up with ol’ Pierre.
Read More China: The New Exile?Disturbing Search Request of the decade: 213.42.21.150, searching Google for “who would handle a commercial shipment of arms and ammunitions from Sharjah to Baghdad”. That’ll be someone downstream of AS5384, or Etisalat (Emirates Telecom), the UAE’s fun-loving national telco monopoly, best known for blocking more websites than China. Ha. But there is some actual substance…
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