Europe. Now as an advanced Chinese surface air missile system right in its own backyard. This is the

lowdown. We cover everything that goes on in the past week or so with respect to defense and

aviation. I'm John Waters, former Air Force fighter pilot and this week we're diving in, take a look

to see what happened. And that's just one of the topics for this week. As with every lowdown,

we like to kick it off with a bit of history with the history of the day and threat of the day to give you little nugget bombs of things that we think are interesting and stuff that

yeah, maybe it's a conversation for the water cooler or just good information to have. So this week,

we're kicking off with history from January 6, 1945. And that's when the Japanese launched

their largest and deadliest kamikaze attack to date of World War II.

And in this attack, they struck the USS New Mexico, killing 30 crew members.

And this included the commanding officer of the USS New Mexico, as well as the British

representative to General Douglas MacArthur, Lieutenant General Herbert Lumson, who happened

to be the highest-ranking British army official that was killed during the war.

Next, we need to talk about the threat of the day, which is the HQ22. And spoiler, this might or

might not be in Europe's backyard right now. But the HQ 22, aka the Red Bannard, hit initial operating

capability IOC in 2017. Now they exported the FK3 variant to Serbia in 2022 and it just became

fully operational and integrated into Serbia's air defense system. It's a mobile system that has a

range of 16 nautical miles and a ceiling of up to almost 90,000 feet. Its missiles capable of Mach 6,

so good luck dodging that because also it's able to track target multiple targets all at once with advanced radar system.

Capable of targeting not only aircraft but drones and cruise missiles as well kind of displays just some of the capability of this missile system.

And I would be looking for it to be proliferated to further countries as the

Chinese look for additional buyers. All right, over to the flight line. First and foremost, the

Japanese have been approved to buy 1,200 aim 120 missiles. That's an AMRAM, advanced,

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