"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Aviation-related posts
Back-to-back car shows this weekend. Saturday’s show was an annual event at St Gregory’s Academy; Sunday’s was at the Pima Air & Space Museum. As car shows go, the air museum event was a small one, but it gave me an excuse to combine a motorcycle ride, a photo session, and a visit to the […]
That’s our old squadron-mate Crumer, whose memorial service Donna and I recently attended in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Crumer, as you can tell from the photo (click to see it larger), flew in Vietnam … two back to back one-year tours, the first as an F-4 GIB (guy in back), the second as a front-seater. I […]
When the Eagle got up to around Mach 0.95 you’d begin to feel resistance, as if the air was getting thicker and pushing back against your airplane. As you slipped past the shockwave and through the Mach the resistance went away and the airplane felt normal. The second you retarded the throttles, though, it was as though you’d run into an invisible Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in the air. You and your jet and everything in it slowed down in a hurry, forcing you forward against the shoulder straps and seat belt. Once you were back below Mach 0.95, Mr. Stay-Puft went away and things felt normal again. Oh, and half your fuel was gone.
When I tell visitors about the Pima Air & Space Museum’s F-14 Tomcat, I always work in a few words about women in military aviation. The Tomcat seems like the right place to introduce the topic: first because the US Navy, along with the US Army, led the way in training woman aviators in 1974, a full two years before […]
I’ve been teaching myself to make panoramic montages from single photos. Lest you think this requires mastering some arcane art, I’ll admit up front that it’s actually easy. I’ll start at the beginning, when I discovered the camera in my iPhone has a panoramic mode. The iPhone makes it easy; my first thought was “How […]
I’ve been following news of the May 31 Gulfstream IV crash at Hanscomb Field in Bedford, Massachusetts. This was the executive jet carrying some VIP or other that reached a high speed on takeoff roll and then ran off the end of the runway and into a ditch, bursting into flame and killing everyone aboard. Preliminary NTSB reports are focusing on a […]
During most of the years I flew fighters and trainers for the USAF, I never paid much thought to the disposition of aircraft on the ramp. We parked them when we were through with them; if maintenance needed to move them around on the ground afterward that was their problem. I was of course aware of […]
In lieu of solving the nation’s problems and revealing brilliant new insights on life, I’ll share a few photos I took today while wandering around the outdoor exhibits at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona, where I work as a volunteer docent. I’d heard the restoration team would be moving several aircraft […]