"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
What was (and might have been)
I first saw this document, unsourced, crudely edited, and incomplete, in an email sent around to volunteer docents at Pima Air and Space Museum. It grabbed my attention immediately, so I took the trouble to track down the source and obtain a complete, unedited copy.
Latest update (10/3/25): added a link to an excellent hands-on tour of a B-58, including extensive information on the crew escape pods. If my fighter pilot friends are wondering about me after my earlier post on the F-101B Voodoo air defense interceptor, they’ll surely think I’ve lost my grip now, fetishizing over, of all things, […]
I grew up as an Air Force brat in the 1950s and 60s, and one trend or theme you may have noticed with my Air-Minded posts is that I keep coming back to the jets of my childhood, plastic models of which hung from the ceiling of my bedroom.
I have an older but sharper memory of Grandfather Estes dragging me and my sister Sue outside one night to see something that had never seen before. It was October 1957, and the Russians had just launched Sputnik.
“All this virtue, and no witnesses.”
Don Martin was drawing for Mad in 1958, with his floppy-footed characters and wet-your-pants hilarious farty sound effects like “FLEEN!” and “FOOSH!”
This Air-Minded post is from March 2014. I was thinking about the Douglas Skyknight yesterday, and after reviewing what I had written about it earlier, decided to move the post to the top of the queue. —Paul Woodford There’s a Skyknight on display at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona, where I […]
Until now, I’ve been able to avoid saying Trump’s name in front of museum visitors. The closest I ever come is when I say the “current president” flies on Marine Corps helicopters. But it seems impossible to talk about a new paint scheme for Air Force One aircraft without mentioning the name of the only person who’s pushing the idea.