I should be working on our annual Christmas letter. Instead, I’m blogging.
Annual Christmas letter. How redundant. Christmas is an annual event, no? Let’s just agree to call it our annual letter. Or, Fox News be damned, our Xmas letter.
Speaking of, the TVs at the gym were all set to Fox News this morning. I saw some remotes in one of the cubbies where users put their gear, but didn’t know how to use them. Besides, what else is there to put on? CNN? That’s almost worse! Anyway, I was sort of half listening while I was on the leg machines, and heard nothing but dig after dig at Obama. Apparently the healthcare.gov site is mostly fixed now and the number of new enrollees is shooting up. The Fox commentators were doing their best to belittle everything about it. One of them, the blonde, actually said that people who think they’re signing up for health insurance are going to be disappointed when they visit their doctors after January, because they’ll discover then their new policies don’t actually cover anything. Now why would she say something so patently untrue? Was it meant to frighten people away from signing up for health care? I hope people are smarter than that.
Well, enough of that hideousness. Donna and I plan to spend Christmas with our son and his family in Las Vegas. Polly and her boyfriend David are going to drive up from Ajo. We’ll be back home for New Year’s Eve; as a matter of fact I’ll be pulling tours at the air museum on New Year’s Day. I expect to be very busy with museum stuff this winter — a couple of my volunteers are out of action (broken hip, knee replacement) and I’m pitching in to fill the holes in the schedule. It’s also the time of year when I have to accompany other docents on their tours in order to recertify them.
Then there are meetings. I didn’t sign up to attend meetings, but lately there are a lot of them. Whenever I’m at one, listening to some blowhard who just wants to hear himself speak, I think of how pleasant it would be to shut him up with extreme prejudice. After each meeting I walk around the museum grounds, taking photographs of the business ends of fighter jets, concentrating on where and how the guns are mounted. I thought I’d share a few of those photos with you this morning. I’ll start with my all-time favorite:
That’s not one of my air museum photos. I don’t know who took it, but it’s probably safe to credit it to the USAF. You’re looking at a Kansas ANG F-4D Phantom II armed with four SUU-23 gun pods (possibly five: there might be another mounted on the centerline, hidden behind the nose gear door). The F-4 was designed to shoot down other aircraft with missiles and its builders dispensed with guns. Combat experience in Vietnam showed that to be a mistake, and gun pods like these were one solution. Each pod contained a 6-barrel 20mm Gatling gun, the motor drive for the gun, and 1,200 rounds of ammunition. The pods weighed over 1,700 pounds apiece. The airplane may not have flown at its best with all that added weight and drag, but it certainly exhibited a businesslike appearance.
Here are a few more. These are my own photos of museum aircraft:
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The F-86H was the last of the Sabres, slightly larger and heavier than earlier models. It carried four nose-mounted 20mm cannon. The Alpha Jet, like the early F-4s, did not have internal guns: it carried either a single 27mm or 30mm cannon in a gun pod mounted on the belly, like the one in the photo.
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The Vought F-8 Crusader, a 1950s design, was the last American air-superiority fighter to be built with guns as its primary armament: four nose-mounted 20mm cannon with 125 rounds each. The Crusader-based A-7 Corsair II attack fighter was armed with a 6-barrel Gatling gun mounted on the left side of the intake. It carried 1,000 rounds of 20mm ammunition.
Obviously I’m fascinated with aerial gunnery. Obviously there’s much more to the subject. I’m just getting started.