KUALA LUMPUR: Fourteen special needs children showcased their musical talents at the “One-Two-Star” Talent Show here recently.

“MANOEUVRE ON!” ‘Pointer’ banks his jet to the left. Through the thin, ribbony cirrus clouds, at his one o’clock position, he sees a delta-shaped speck off in the distance. It darts out of the clouds and is in a half-roll, the sun glinting off its clear Perspex canopy. It skitters from left to right. This guy is hauling ass.

‘COME in. We’re about to start.’ To say that ‘Arrow’ is a towering presence would be an understatement. At 1.83m, Major (now Colonel) Sebastian Arokiaraj William could barely squeeze inside the cockpit of his Mikoyan MiG-29N ‘Fulcrum’, his second favourite place after his home, next to his lovely wife Donna Marie Koh, and daughters Sonia Anne, 21, and Sophia Adelle, 19.

KUALA LUMPUR: AS part of the broad, sweeping changes in the Defence Ministry, big-ticket defence procurement programmes will no longer be vendor-driven.

KUALA LUMPUR: The Defence White Paper (DWP), which will map out the future direction of the Malaysian armed forces, is expected to be tabled in Parliament in November.

JUST 24 hours earlier, ‘Pacman’ had nursed his stricken fighter, a Royal Malaysian Air Force Boeing F/A-18D Hornet, back to a textbook, single-engine recovery at Langkawi’s Padang Matsirat.

LANGKAWI: Lieutenant Colonel Faizal Abu Bakar, callsign “Fab”, bangs on the throttles and firewalls his two Lyulka Saturn AL-31FP afterburning turbofan engines with his left hand. He then wraps both hands around the centrally-mounted control stick and hauls back on it. Hard.

“I WAS 50 feet off the deck at 220 knots and then, all of a sudden, ‘BANG!’”

Yesterday, Royal Malaysian Air Force chief General Tan Sri Affendi Buang flew in from RMAF Subang to view firsthand the progress.

In cities and campuses all across America, student protesters, stoked by the Utopian promise of a New World Order, clashed with truncheon-wielding police. The war in Vietnam threatened to engulf the whole of Southeast Asia. In August, public disenchantment with the ‘police action’ in Vietnam finally erupted in a week-long conflagration during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Some 10,000 protesters were met by an overwhelming force of 23,000 police officers. The carnage left more than 500 protesters, and over 150 of Chicago’s finest, battered, bruised and bloodied.

“SPIKE! Smoke in the air! SAM launch, four o’clock low!”

THE lack of operational funding has resulted in the low serviceability rate plaguing the Royal Malaysian Air Force’s fleet of Su-30MKM Super Flankers.

THE lack of operational funding has resulted in the low serviceability rate plaguing the Royal Malaysian Air Force’s fleet of Su-30MKM Super Flankers.

‘PMAD’ swivels his helmeted head to the right and checks out his wingman. With a “head nod”, the executive officer, or EXO of 11 Squadron, Royal Malaysian Air Force, bangs the twin throttles on his left console forward, past the detent.

‘FAB’ hauls his gargantuan Sukhoi Su-30MKM Flanker into a gentle left turn, plugs the ‘burners for some airspeed and levels off before pulling back on the stick and grabbing sky like a moon-bound Saturn V.

THE scenario playing out in the Korean peninsula seems to be predicated on the assumption that Pyongyang’s ultimate goal is to point its nuclear dagger at the heart of America, just for the heck of it.

“STICK me in this jet, and I’ll take her anywhere,” said a Royal Malaysian Air Force F/A-18D Hornet ‘driver’.”

KUALA LUMPUR: As details into Monday’s assassination of Kim Jong-nam begin to emerge, one thing is becoming increasingly clear — that this was a sloppy, hastily planned hit, with too many loose ends.

THE sophistication with which state-sanctioned assassinations are carried out these days has come a long way from the time Ramon Mercader plunged a rusty ice pick into the head of Leon Trotsky on Aug 20, 1940, on the orders of Joseph Stalin.

I used to love flying. But things started getting a bit macabre after Sept 11. From then on, every time I boarded a flight, the first one hour after the initial climb-out, I would be preoccupied with a number of “What-if” scenarios. At least until I settled into another round of Forrest Gump or Turner and Hooch.