"No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.” — Lily Tomlin
You really never leave
One of the volunteers I work with at the Pima Air & Space Museum is a young University of Arizona aeronautical engineering student. His family is originally Vietnamese and I have the impression his father or maybe grandfather immigrated to the USA after the communist takeover. I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind that, and I’ll have […]
In an Air Force pilot’s career there are few tasks harder and more frustrating than trying to figure out how and why a fellow pilot crashed, especially when he or she is so inconsiderate as to die in the crash and either disappear completely or leave very few clues behind that would help others figure out what happened.
Fuck stealth. There isn’t an air force in the world that won’t turn tail and run from a wall of Eagles coming its way.
The controversial and over-budget F-35 fighter is under almost constant attack. Some of the shortcomings identified by critics are no doubt real, but the story of a previously-unidentified F-35 glitch that emerged last week was, at least to this former air-to-air pilot, a bit of a shock: a report out of Edwards AFB stating that a clean (no […]
It’s been extremely hot in southern Arizona. Every day we hear about electric power outages in different sections of Tucson. Are these intentional rolling blackouts? Sure looks like it. So far no power interruptions in our hood, but since our air conditioner crapped out last week and we had to spend a night and a […]
The Navy reportedly wants to add nuclear bomb-carrying capability to its version of the F-35 fighter, the F-35C. The weapon mentioned in the linked article is the B61 gravity nuclear bomb, designed in the 1960s and long out of production. For some reason this disturbs me. In the 1950s and 60s, you’d occasionally hear about Air Force […]
A friend visited the Pima Air & Space Museum (PASM) in Tucson a few weeks ago. I told her if any particular airplane spoke to her, I’d write an air-minded post on it. Well, you never know what’s going to catch someone’s eye. In her case, it was one of our orphans, a Douglas B-23 Dragon. PASM’s Dragon has been […]
This, from an article in the Columbia Daily Spectator: “During the week spent on Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts […]