"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
There I was at 30,000 feet
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 […]
Looking for photos to add to my Promise of Air Travel folder on Pinterest, I came across this: It’s a Speedpak, a conformal cargo pod or pannier designed by Lockheed for its Constellation aircraft. It wasn’t used for passenger luggage but for extra cargo. It appears to be the grandfather of the conformal cargo pods […]
I corrected a couple of minor errors in the original post. I have since learned more about early presidential aircraft, and will share that knowledge in a separate post, coming soon. —Paul When I read the president-elect’s now-famous tweet a few days ago, my thoughts turned to two presidential fleet aircraft I show visitors at the Pima Air […]
On a motorcycle trip in April 2015 I visited and photoblogged the Planes of Fame Museum in Valle, Arizona. The Arizona facility is an annex of the main Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California. This time around I pointed my Honda west toward Los Angeles and dropped in on the main facility. As with the […]
I love what I do at Pima Air & Space Museum, and always try to give visitors as good an experience as I can. So it was especially nice to get this note from a member of the museum staff who took two out-of-town visitors on my tram tour yesterday afternoon: Hi Paul – I […]
The first thing I do after getting out of bed in the morning is turn on the small radio sitting on top of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Donna and I like to listen to NPR news while we get ourselves ready for the day. Fifteen years ago this morning, we turned the radio on in the middle of a live report from […]
Pima Air & Space Museum is getting ready to open a new display hangar for WWII-era aircraft and artifacts. Not all the new exhibits are here … some are coming from as far away as Australia and England … so the official grand opening date is still up in the air, but the “soft opening” […]
We got a safety recall notice on our GMC pickup. Actually, two of them: one about a potentially bad trailer hitch, the other about a defective part in the seatbelt mechanism. I took it in this morning. The service rep said they’d fix the seatbelts and inspect the hitch, and if the hitch was bad […]