Air-Minded: First Flights
Everyone has to start somewhere. Do you remember your first airplane ride?
Air-Minded: Little Friends & Aerial Refueling
In an earlier Air-Minded post, I wrote about the early days of aerial refueling and the initial development of USAF tanker aircraft and refueling methods. This post is about the USAF jet fighters, interceptors, and attack jets that depend on those tankers to get to where they’re going and back home again.
Air-Minded: Tankers … in Spaaace!
The V-2 rocket, with its sleek cigar-shaped body, pointed nose, and swept-back fins, entered the imaginations of people the world over. It lent its iconic shape to the science fiction spaceships of the 1950s and 60s, and still has a firm grip on our dreams.
Transonic Cat Wars
I remember a huge flap at Soesterberg Air Base in the Netherlands when a new guy, one of the first of a wave of evangelical Christian officers from the Air Force Academy (a wave that continues to plague the USAF today), recorded Spielberg’s awful “1941” movie over all the alert shack’s Betamax porn tapes. Funny now, but an existential crisis at the time!
Air-Minded: PASM Photoblog XV
I was tapped yesterday, New Year’s Eve, to escort a tour group visiting Pima Air and Space Museum. They had their own Grey Line-style bus and driver, and the only way to get them from the parking lot onto the museum grounds was to drive around the back of the museum and through the restoration […]
Air-Minded: Training for the Last One
We should have it so easy, going up against an enemy air force equipped with 1950s technology … even North Korea has more advanced equipment. But you know what they say: we always train to fight the last war we had (and in this case I feel like we’re still training for Vietnam).
Alternative Facts
I rode 12 miles with our bicycle Hash House Harrier group on Sunday. It was my first bicycle hash since a knee replacement in July. Despite hours on the stationary bike at the gym and fairly frequent but short bike rides with our friends Mary Anne and Darrell, my knee is still stiff, sore, and […]
Tuesday Bag o’ Callsigns (Updated 2/5/18)
That leaves Marine One, the callsign used by USMC helicopter crews flying the current president to and from the White House. This is the point of highest danger on my tour, because I refuse to say that president’s name. “Current president” is as close as I come; I have to carefully engage my tongue to my brain lest I blurt out “President Individual One” or something worse.