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There I was at 30,000 feet
On last night’s loss of Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean, it’s simply too early to speculate on what might have happened. If the aircraft is never found, speculation might be all we’ll ever get. It took more than a year to find Steve Fossett’s crash site, even though searchers had the area […]
One of the men I flew with in the early 1980s, Dave Baker, died last Thursday. We called him Bull; I blogged about him a few months ago. Bull had been a prisoner of war; captured and held after being shot down in Cambodia near the end of the war in Vietnam. They teach you […]
A friend in Melbourne sent me this absolutely chilling video of a Russian IL-76 taking off from an RAAF base in Australia. Granted, I flew the F-15, a fighter with so much power we never had to compute takeoff data, but in training I flew T-37s and T-38s, where running the numbers (gross weight, pressure […]
Wow. Just wow. Who doesn’t need a bit of good news once in a while, especially lately? The incredible and ongoing story of US Airways Flight 1549 delivers the feel-good in spades. Of course I’m heavily prejudiced in favor of fighter pilots, and the actions of the former fighter pilot in question, the captain of […]
Dropping ballast in anticipation of retirement: satellite radio. Talk about not living up to promises. When I listen to Sirius today, not only do I hear the exact same playlists of songs I heard five years ago (particularly on the Blues Channel, my one-time favorite), I hear commercials. Yeah, terrestrial radio is ten times worse, […]
I was fascinated by this exchange during Katie Couric’s interview of Sarah Palin the other night: Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians? Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears […]
In an earlier post, I promised to tell you about our resident spy at Soesterberg Air Base in The Netherlands. His name was Jack van Beek, but we called him Jack the Clock. I honestly don’t know that he was our resident spy, but everyone knew there was a resident spy, and most of us […]
When I told my son I wasn’t going to vote for John McCain, he said, “But he was a fighter pilot. And a POW!” Meaning, I suppose, that McCain just has to be my kind of candidate. I understand the fighter pilot part. Indeed, my ideal candidate would have served in the military. If he or […]