"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Aviation-related posts
Wasps love our pool. They light on the water, float on surface tension for a few minutes, then fly off to their nests. They’re drinking, as anyone would in this heat, and I suspect storing a little extra water somewhere to deliver to the nest. It’s normally live & let live at Woodford Manor, but […]
Poor Maxie. I called her Schatzi this morning. I don’t know if she noticed, but I did, and it set me back a little. Donna’s away again, though not far. She’s at a retreat with fellow members of the local American Sewing Guild. Every year about this time they hole up in a Tucson resort hotel with their […]
The golden age of air travel dawned with the advent of pressurized commercial airliners that could fly above the weather and turbulent air closer to the surface, flourished under FAA control, and ended in October 1978 when the Carter administration deregulated the industry.
In 1979, when I was stationed at Soesterberg Air Base in the Netherlands, Prince Claus and two of his boys came to visit. I was on air defense alert that day with Jim Kellogg. We were pretty sure the Dutch would arrange a scramble for the royal family. Sure enough, the klaxon went off and five […]
Is it time for another batch of photos from Pima Air & Space Museum? Let me check. Yes, my overflowing Flickr account says it is! First up, our newest exhibit, a Supermarine Spitfire Mk XIVe recently acquired from the RAF Museum in Hendon, London. The Mk XIV is a late-WWII model of the original Spitfire, […]
Aerial refueling: also called air-to-air refueling and in-flight refueling. You can’t send a B-2 from Missouri to hit a high-priority ISIS target in Libya without it; nor can you deploy an expeditionary air wing to a combat zone in Afghanistan or the Middle East. Aerial refueling allows receiving aircraft to fly long distances or stay on station […]
A few years ago I wrote a short post about the B-36 Peacemaker bomber. Here’s an excerpt: … even though I was around during the B-36 bomber’s heyday I never saw one in flight. It’s not something you’d forget: it would have been akin to seeing the Hindenburg or a tidal wave. They say the ground shook […]
I don’t know what having a sexual kink says about a person’s character. Probably nothing, and as long as it’s all worked out between like-minded, consenting adults, and no one gets hurt, ain’t no one’s business. Unless it’s Donald Trump, of course, and the kink is a juicy one. The floodgates opened yesterday and Twitter was drowning […]