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Aviation-related posts
For the past few months, the restoration yard at Pima Air and Space Museum has been dominated by two huge Boeing airliners, a 747 and a 777. I’d point them out to visitors on my tram tour, joking that I didn’t know where we’d find room for them once they came out of resto. Well, now I know.
From Military.com: Navy to Change Pilot Call Sign Protocol After Minority Aviators Report Bias: “The head of naval aviation has directed the creation of a new process for approving and reviewing pilots’ call signs after two African-American aviators at an F/A-18 Hornet training squadron in Virginia filed complaints alleging racial bias in the unit, from which they […]
I believe the best person should get the job and if that person is a woman, so be it. You cannot tell me I don’t belong and women shouldn’t or can’t fly fighters if I just beat you on the range and/or at BFM.
When Sexy Sally started warning B-58 Hustler crews about engine fires in the 1960s, it was a major innovation, and using a woman’s voice was considered a brilliant stroke: human factors researchers thought a woman’s voice—rarely heard on the radio and never on the intercom—would cut through other chatter and get the crews’ attention.
This morning our volunteer coordinator sent an all-hands be-no* message about injecting politics and personal opinion into the information we share with museum guests.
The Collings Foundation is a private non-profit that, among other things, tours the country with a fleet of WWII-era aircraft. Last weekend its Wings of Freedom Tour stopped at Marana Regional Airport, just north of Tucson, and I rode out to see the planes.
“Carry a barf bag whether you think you’re prone to airsickness or not,” my instructor pilot said, “because you never know.”
Hush Kit, “the alternative aviation magazine,” has published another piece of mine, this one about how F-15 Eagle pilots trained to face the threat posed by the Soviet Union’s then-new Su-27 Flanker in the late 1980s and early 90s, when I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base in Japan.