"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Aviation-related posts
People who don’t know any better are starting to think the F-15 Eagle … like me … is ancient history. Witness this BBC News story, gleefully shared by a Facebook friend: The linked story describes how Japan grounded its Eagle fleet after a fuel tank and training missile fell off a wing of an F-15J […]
Two words: holy shit! In the aftermath of an airplane crash all manner of misinformation hits the news. It’s even worse if there are a lot of witnesses. You’d think it would be otherwise, but people are in general terrible witnesses, especially when they see something shocking and violent, something that happens in the blink […]
When I lead visitors on walking tours at the Pima Air & Space Museum, we start underneath a replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer. I think about Orville and Wilbur often. They showed us the way, and the F-15 Eagle I flew in the US Air Force used the same three-axis controls the Wrights developed […]
Pima Air & Space Museum is determined to keep me on my toes. PASM is closing the normal entrance area for a month, and guests will now be entering the main hangar from the gift shop. Before, my walking tour started underneath the replica of the Wright Flyer. Now it’ll start smack in the middle […]
Last week I noticed they’d moved several outdoor aircraft at the Pima Air & Space Museum, opening up a big empty area behind Hangar One. When I showed up for my tour yesterday there was our F-15A, once hidden in the back reaches of the museum’s 300 acres, newly on display alongside the path between […]
Air-minded. Wow. There’s a phrase I haven’t heard since I was an air-minded kid. I ran into it again this morning in an online article at The Awl. “Are You Airminded?” The Slang Of War “Airmindedness” is a term that used to be everywhere and now it’s nowhere. The word, as defined by the OED, […]
Tomorrow morning I’ll guide another walking tour group through the Pima Air & Space Museum. It’ll be a red-letter day: the docent team leader and volunteer supervisor will evaluate my skills; if I do well I’ll become the museum’s newest certified walking tour docent. As you might imagine, boning up is the order of the […]
Today they call it SERE, for Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. When I went through the training in the mid-1970s, it was called Survival School. What prompted the memory was last night’s Netflix rental, the epic survival movie The Way Back, a story about escapees from a Siberian prison camp who trekked 4,000 miles across Russia, […]