Royal Air Force & World War II

The precursor of the Sri Lankan Air Force were the elements of the Royal Air Force based in Sri Lanka. The history of these elements of the RAF is a run-up to the history of the SLAF.
On 07 December 1941, Japan entered the war with the bombing of the Pearl Harbour. By Christmas day of that year they had occupied Malaya, Guam, Wake Island and Hong Kong. BY 23 March 1942, the Japanese were at Sri Lanka's doorstep in the East with the capture of the Andaman and the Nicobar Islands and they had Philippines, Burma and Singapore under their control.
     
With the fall of Singapore, Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, Commander-in-Chief of the British Far Eastern Fleet, set up headquarters in Sri Lanka with power over the civilian administration as well. The invasion of Sri Lanka by Japan was imminent and Admiral Layton realised that Sri Lanka with hardly an Air Force or an Air Defence system to speak of would be easy prey to the Japanese. He lost no time in taking remedial action. In March that year an air-strip was built at the Colombo racecourse and the Ratmalana airport was taken over by the RAF and extended. Two squadrons of Hurricanes flew in from North Africa and was based in China Bay and the racecourse. A squadron of Blenheim medium bombers detached from Greece, Crete and the Middle East was based in Ratmalana. Also based in Ratmalana were two squadrons of Fleet Air Arm ' Fulmars.' In Koggala Layton deployed an element of Catalina aircraft.

Spotting of Japanese Fleet
    
By 02 April 1942, Admiral Nagumo's fleet was heading towards Sri Lanka in search of what remained of British'sea power in the East. On 04 April 1942, Sqn. Ldr. L J. Birchall, a Canadian, was in his Catalina on a reconnaissance mission, patrolling an area 250 miles South East of Sri Lanka, when, about two hours before dusk, he spotted a speck on the Southern horizon. This was the vanguard of Nagumo's fleet. Spotting Birchall's aircraft six Japanese zeros, flying twice as fast as the Catalina, were soon in hot pursuit. Under attack by the Japanese fighters, the reconnaissance aircraft disintegrated but not before Birchall had got the message of the presence of the Japanese fleet in Sri Lankan waters. 

With darkness setting in, the courageous crew of the Catalina kept afloat in the Indian Ocean, about three hundred and fifty miles from land. Three of the crew were badly injured and before long a Japanese destroyer picked them up. Anxious to obtain intelligence about the country's defences and to find out whether the Catalina had been able to alert the Sri Lankan forces of the presence of the Japanese fleet the helpless crew were subjected to physical violence. Ignorance and denials were all that the Japanese could obtain. 

Japanese Attack

On Easter Sunday, 05 April 1942, all hell broke loose in Colombo. A Japanese force of about 125 aircraft, screaming and whining and led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida of Pearl Harbour fame, attacked strategic targets in Colombo. While Ratmalana came under heavy attack the racecourse went unscathed, with Japanese intelligence unaware of its existence. This lapse on the part of Japanese intelligence cost them dearly. Unable to achieve the air superiority that they had hoped to achieve, the Japanese met stiff resistance and lost twenty seven aircraft in the air battle and the British too lost the same number. On Wednesday 08 April 1942, the Japanese fleet, as expected, attacked Trincomalee. 

The airfield in China Bay came under heavy bombardment but again due to the timely , warning by Birchall and the effective measures taken by Layton, the attack was repulsed. In March 1946, many months after victory over Germany and Japan had been won, and Sir Winston Churchill had been voted out of office, the architect of the British victory was asked, according to author Michael Tomlinson, what he considered was the most dangerous moment of the war. Churchill had replied that it was when news was received that the Japanese fleet was heading for Sri Lanka's port of Trincomalee. He went on to say that "Britain was saved from disaster by an airman on reconnaissance flight who though shot down was able to warn Ceylon of the impending attack and eliminate the element of surprise." Sir Winston Churchill Prime Minister of Britain during the World War II According to Canada's Foreign Minister of 1950, Lester Pearson, it was Churchill's opinion that Birchall-later Air Commodore in the Canadian Air Force -had made one of the most singular contributions to victory in World War II.

Air Operations by the British

Between the late 1930's and the early 1950's a great deal of military flying activities took place in, and from, Ceylon. These activities were conducted by the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm(FAA). The following airfields were established during these years and used by the RAF and FAA. RAF Airfields Colombo Racecourse, Ratmalana, Katukurunda, Negombo, China Bay, Minneriya, Vavyniya, Kankesanthurai, Sigiriya, Dambulla, Mawanella, Koggala, Kalametiya and Puttalam. 

The Royal Navy's establishments on land were given names of ships, and a similar practice applied to bases of the Fleet Air Arm. The FAA bases were mostly given names of birds, with the exception such as "Bambara" (which means "hornet" in Sinhala). The "Bherunda" is a mythical two-headed bird. The following are Royal Navy shore bases, all of which except HMS Monara had airfields and operated aircraft; HMS Bambara ( China Bay , Trincomalee) HMS Bherunda ( Colombo Racecourse) HMS Seruwa(Ratmalana) HMS Ukussa ( Katukurunda) HMS Lanka/HMS Rajaliya ( Puttalam) HMS Monara (teaching establishment in Maharagama, no airfield) 

-Sri lankan Air Force-

Wales' Institute - Rawathawaththa

Pacitic Rim 2013

When an alien attack threatens the Earth's existence, giant robots piloted by humans are deployed to fight off the menace

Director: 

Guillermo del Toro

Writers: 

Travis Beacham , Guillermo del Toro,

Stars:

 Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi 

MAMA 2013

Annabel and Lucas are faced with the challenge of raising his young nieces that were left alone in the forest for 5 years.... but how alone were they?

Director: 

Andres Muschietti

Writers: 

Neil Cross, Andres Muschietti

Stars:

Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier 

The Dark Knight Rises

Warner Bros. Pictures' and Legendary Pictures' "The Dark Knight Rises" is the epic conclusion to filmmaker Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. It has been eight years since Batman vanished into the night, turning, in that instant, from hero to fugitive. Assuming the blame for the death of D.A. Harvey Dent, the Dark Knight sacrificed everything for what he and Commissioner Gordon both hoped was the greater good. For a time the lie worked, as criminal activity in Gotham City was crushed under the weight of the anti-crime Dent Act. But everything will change with the arrival of a cunning cat burglar with a mysterious agenda. Far more dangerous, however, is the emergence of Bane, a masked terrorist whose ruthless plans for Gotham drive Bruce out of his self-imposed exile. But even if he dons the cape and cowl again, Batman may be no match for Bane.

Genre: Action | Crime

Size: 2.48 GB

Quality: 1080p

Resolution: 1920*1080

Frame Rate: 23.976 fps

Language: English

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 2hr 45 min

IMDB Rating: 8.8/10

MPR: PG-13

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CERN's Large Hadron Collider Reveals New Type of Matter

Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced unexpected behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions, creating a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate. When beams of particles crash into each other at high speeds, the collisions yield hundreds of new particles, most of which fly away from the collision point at close to the speed of light. However, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) team at the LHC found that in a sample of two million lead-proton collisions, some pairs of particles flew away from each other with their respective directions correlated.

"Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us," says MIT physics professor Gunther Roland, whose group led the analysis of the collision data along with Wei Li, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Rice University. A paper describing the unexpected findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review B and is now available on arXiv.

The MIT heavy-ion group, which includes Roland and MIT physics professors Bolek Wyslouch and Wit Busza, saw the same distinctive pattern in proton-proton collisions about two years ago. The same flight pattern is also seen when ions of lead or other heavy metals, such as gold and copper, collide with each other.

Those heavy-ion collisions produce a wave of quark gluon plasma, the hot soup of particles that existed for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. In the collider, this wave sweeps some of the resulting particles in the same direction, accounting for the correlation in their flight paths.

It has been theorized that proton-proton collisions may produce a liquid-like wave of gluons, known as color-glass condensate. This dense swarm of gluons may also produce the unusual collision pattern seen in proton-lead collisions, says Raju Venugopalan, a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who was not involved in the current research. Venugopalan and his former student Kevin Dusling theorized the existence of color-glass condensate shortly before the particle direction correlation was seen in proton-proton collisions.

While protons at normal energy levels consist of three quarks, they tend to gain an accompanying cluster of gluons at higher energy levels. These gluons exist as both particles and waves, and theirwave functions can be correlated with each other. This "quantum entanglement" explains how the particles that fly away from the collision can share information such as direction of flight path, Venugopalan says. The correlation is "a very tiny effect, but it's pointing to something very fundamental about how quarks and gluons are arranged spatially within a proton," he says.

The CMS researchers originally set out to use the lead-proton collisions as a "reference system" for comparison with lead-lead collisions. "You don't expect quark gluon plasma effects" with lead-proton collisions, Roland says. "It was supposed to be sort of a reference run—a run in which you can study background effects and then subtract them from the effects that you see in lead-lead collisions."

That run lasted only four hours, but in January, the CMS collaboration plans to do several weeks of lead-proton collisions, which should allow them to establish whether the collisions really are producing a liquid, Roland says. This should help narrow down the possible explanations and determine if the effects seen in proton-proton, lead-proton and lead-lead collisions are related.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/11/cerns-large-hadron-collider-reveals-new-type-of-matter.html