{"id":4254,"date":"2010-08-10T12:49:06","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T19:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=4254"},"modified":"2010-08-10T16:54:30","modified_gmt":"2010-08-10T23:54:30","slug":"my-old-boss-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=4254","title":{"rendered":"My Old Boss, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" style=\"margin: 10px; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 120px; height: 170px;\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2010\/08\/11\/us\/11stevens2-cnd\/11stevens2-cnd-articleInline.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/>Former Senator Ted Stevens has been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/08\/11\/us\/11crash.html?src=me\" target=\"_blank\">killed in a plane crash<\/a> near Dillingham, Alaska.<\/p>\n<p>No, I never worked directly for Ted Stevens, but I do think of him as a former boss.  I was an F-15 pilot at Elemendorf AFB in Anchorage from 1982 to 1985, flying for what we all fondly called &#8220;Ted Stevens&#8217; Air Force.&#8221;  Then-Senator Stevens was the man responsible for changing Alaskan Air Command from a forgotten NORAD backwater into a centerpiece of America&#8217;s late Cold War strategy.  If it hadn&#8217;t been for Ted, Alaska would never have gotten F-15s and A-10s, an instrumented air combat range, or, later on, F-16s and F-22s.<\/p>\n<p>Corrupt he may have been, and probably an utter asshole to his underlings &#8212; as almost all of these movers &amp; shakers are &#8212; but he had the Senate figured out, and he consistently brought home the bacon for Alaska.<\/p>\n<p>I note that one of his fellow-passengers was Sean O&#8217;Keefe, a former head of NASA.  The NYT article says the two were old fishing buddies, but, knowing Ted Stevens, I assume he was lobbying O&#8217;Keefe for an Alaskan spaceport.  And he probably would have made it happen, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former Senator Ted Stevens has been killed in a plane crash near Dillingham, Alaska. No, I never worked directly for Ted Stevens, but I do think of him as a former boss. I was an F-15 pilot at Elemendorf AFB in Anchorage from 1982 to 1985, flying for what we all fondly called &#8220;Ted Stevens&#8217; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-flying","category-military"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4254"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4258,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4254\/revisions\/4258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}