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On This Date: Radium, Tu-144, and Earthquakes December 26, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science.
Tags: Airshows, Concorde, Earthquakes, Nobel Prize
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On most Mondays, we post either a piece by a guest blogger (first and third Mondays) or a video interview (second and fourth Mondays). We do have video interviews queued up for the new year (and just wait ’til you see who!), but today we take the opportunity for one of our “on this date” posts.

Marie Curie (National Museum of American History)

In 1898, just three years into their marriage, one of our favorite collaborative couples of yesteryear announced at the French Academy of Sciences that they’d isolated radium. Marie and Pierre Curie had isolated the element five days earlier, though it wasn’t named until the following year. They did come up with the term radioactivity, and radium was the second ray-producing element they’d discovered that year. The first was polonium. They continued to work with an enormous amount of pitchblende to isolate a wee bit of radium. And they didn’t patent their processes, thereby allowing the larger scientific community to readily use their work.

Radium was applied as luminescence on watch dials and aircraft switches, which, it turned out, was quite dangerous for those who painted those dials and switches. It was also added to cosmetics before such a glow was considered hazardous. Later, it was used to treat cancer, though, of course, because it is radioactive and because the body processes it like calcium, it likely caused the leukemia and related illnesses from which Marie Curie died in 1934.

Marie Curie was awarded her second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry, in part for her role in discovering radium. (Because Pierre died in 1906, he did not share in this award.) Her earlier Nobel Prize, which she shared with Pierre and Henri Becquerel in 1903, was in physics for their work in radiation. She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the first person to be awarded a second, and one of just two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields. (Linus Pauling is the other.) We’ve written about Marie Curie before—click HERE to read more.

Tu-144 (NASA)

Today is also the anniversary of the Tupolev Tu-144’s entry into supersonic transport service in the Soviet Union. The Soviet government began developing this aircraft in 1963. But the first production airliner crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973. Accusations of espionage and cover-ups surrounded the investigation. With delays after this debacle, the Tu-144 ended up first flying mail on this date in 1975, with commercial flights beginning almost two years later (and almost as long after Concorde started its commercial routes). The Tu-144, which shares so many design cues with Concorde (dropped nose, cranked wing, and slender fuselage) that its nickname in the Western press was Concordski, was riddled with problems and had only a short commercial run, flying passengers from November 1, 1977 through June 1, 1978. A more recent use of the Tu-144 was as a flying laboratory for NASA.

Map of This Earthquake and Aftershocks (USGS)

This past year, one of the top news stories was the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the subsequent damage to the nuclear power plant at Fukushima Daiichi. (Read some of that HERE and HERE.) Today is the seventh anniversary of another devastating earthquake, a 9.2 (numbers vary by source) quake in Indonesia, India Thailand, and the surrounding areas, that also produced tsunamis. It was so strong that some estimate that the entire world moved a full centimeter. As with most recent earthquakes, this one in the Indian Ocean was the result of subduction, or one tectonic plate scraping under an adjacent tectonic plate. In this case, hundreds of miles of a tectonic plate moved about 50 feet.

When this subduction occurred, the seabed rose, pushing water up. In the vast, deep ocean, that sort of wave isn’t much of a problem and is difficult to detect. But as the tsunami reaches shores, the wave can be devastating, and no warning system was in place for the Indian Ocean. The tsunami, of course, reached different shorelines at different times—several minutes or several hours—depending on the distance of the land from the earthquake’s epicenter. In some places, the waves washed a mile inland.

This natural disaster killed almost 230,000 people and is considered one of the ten deadliest natural disasters of all time. In addition to the cost of human life, it devasted coral reefs and wetlands and contaminated freshwater sources. Haiti’s earthquake, the second anniversary of which occurs next month, was even deadlier. Earthquakes change the face of the earth and the faces of the world.

Blue Sky Metropolis December 14, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science, Space Exploration.
Tags: Airshows, Museums & Archives, Physics, Space Shuttle, WWII
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Yakir Aharonov

Today’s post is going up a little later than usual because we spent part of today listening to Yakir Aharonov, our colleague at Chapman University, explain quantum mechanics and Alice in Wonderland. We’ll get back to Aharonov and the Aharonov-Bohm effect at some point at Lofty Ambitions.

Time is running out, though, on the Blue Sky Metropolis exhibition at the Huntington Library, so we wanted to share our recent viewing of that while there’s time for area residents and visitors to catch it before it closes on January 9, 2012. Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in California was one of our happy accidents. Our colleague Jana Remy invited us to present in the Past Tense series at the Huntington Library on November 18, and we hung out afterward to see some of what there was to see there, including this exhibit, which is tied to a forthcoming edited essay collection by the same title.

The first international air meet was held in Dominguez Hills, California, in 1910, thus beginning California’s aerospace history. Like air shows today, it was incredibly popular, attracting 226,000 watchers during its ten-day run. During the 1920s, commercial aviation took off, and Southern California became a hub for that industry with 28 aircraft manufacturing companies in 1928.

Word War II made aviation the largest industry in the world, and Southern California remained a go-go and a region for building aircraft. As the placard script noted, “Southern California aircraft factories employed 2 million people; some individual plants had 100,000 workers each, with shifts working around the clock.”

JPL Computers (people who computed), 1940s-1950s (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Of course, by 1957, with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I, the industry expanded its notions and helped put an American satellite into orbit in 1958. Though it was launched from Florida, Explorer I was built at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as part of the International Geophysical Year (see our photo of a geodetic in a previous post HERE). Of course, the recently retired space shuttle orbiters were born and took their first, albeit tentative, steps in Southern California (see the shuttle’s first flight video below).

The boom-and-bust cycle of space exploration and Cold War defense programs kept the California aerospace industry a dynamic, ever-changing part of the regional economy. Now, California’s aerospace industry is expanding into commercial space exploration.

Blue Sky Metropolis covers this aerospace history with a roomful of selected artifacts, including many photos, letters, and memos. In fact, though it’s no surprise at a library, this exhibit is one of the more text-heavy displays we’ve seen in our travels to archives and museums. That makes sense, of course, because these letters and memos articulated the decision-making throughout the growth of the industry.

Kelly Johnson

Kelly Johnson, who grew up in Ishpeming, Michigan, where Anna’s grandfather was raised, is featured prominently. A course notebook from his Aeronautics course at the University of Michigan in 1931 documents an assignment to analyze a “performance problem” by calculating characteristics from an aircraft blueprint. He writes, “In general, the performance of this plane is good. The Clark Y wing is a speed wing, and the speed for this plane at sea level is probably from 120-125 m/p/h. All computations in this report are given at 5000 foot altitude and with empty tanks.” While still at the University of Michigan, Johnson performed wind tunnel tests on Lockheed’s Model 10 Electra. (See our Lofty post about the Electra Junior HERE.) Those early assignments led Kelly Johnson to a four-decade career in the aerospace industry, in which he contributed to the design of aircraft like the P-38 Lightning, the family of Constellations, the F-104 Starfighter, the C-130 Hercules, and the U-2 spy plane.

Also featured in the exhibit is Willis Hawkins, another engineer educated at the University of Michigan whose career at Lockheed spanned decades. Some of his more philosophical writings are included. He writes, “One group of men can be blamed however, if there is cause for blame, and that group goes by the name of engineers. An engineer is fundamentally a mechanic whose dexterity with the tools of physics has made it possible for him to create inanimate machines which propelled by some form of thinking pilot can produce material miracles of transportation or creation.”

A memo from D.A. Shields about “a satellite and space exploration program” asserts, “The feasibility of the proposed program is probably the most exciting part of the entire idea.” That’s dated 29 September 1959. Less than three years later, President John F. Kennedy thought going to the Moon was indeed feasible.

H-4 in (Only) Flight

The tidbits mount up and are worth seeing: a wall-sized blueprint of the Spruce Goose HK-1 from 1944 (read Spruce Goose curator’s guest post HERE and our original HK-1 post HERE), a photo of Kelly Johnson and Amelia Earhart working together in ta Lockheed hangar during the 1930s, a letter from Willis Hawkins in 1992 replying to a middle-school student who asks how something can fly, and a one-way ticket for Transcontinental Air Transport dated October 19, 1929 (a year later, TAT would be bankrupt).

Blue Sky Metropolis is worth a flyby! And of course, there’s lots more at the Huntington Library, including the Beautiful Science exhibit in the same building.

On This Date: Lunar Eclipse & More! December 10, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science.
Tags: Airshows, Biology, Chemistry, Nobel Prize, Physics, Railroads, Wright Brothers
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Last night, we set our alarm for 5:30a.m. so that we could take a look at the total lunar eclipse. A total eclipse had occurred earlier this year, in June, but it wasn’t visible from North America.

The moon hung in our western sky, its face three-quarters in shadow. We watched the slow process, which takes several hours, for about ten minutes. Then set the alarm for 6:15a.m. to see how much it had changed. By then, the sun was rising over our backs, and the moon had sunk behind trees that line the street a couple of blocks away. Still, we could make out the reddish glow of the lunar orb.

If you remember your grade-school science lessons, you’ll recall that a lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets in between the Sun and the Moon and blocks the Sun’s rays from striking the Moon. Lunar eclipses are beautiful in part because the alignment necessary happens to occur when the Moon is full. In fact, even before the eclipse, last night’s Moon was striking.

We didn’t brush up on our how-to-photograph-the-Moon instructions, but Universe Today has some amazing photos and a video HERE. MSNBC also has a great collection of photos HERE. A Seattle blogger also has amazing shots from around the globe HERE.

If you missed this weekend’s eclipse, mark your calendar for April 15, 2014.

The First X-ray: Anna Berthe Röntgen's Hand

If you’re looking for other events to commemorate today, it’s the anniversary of the awarding of the first Nobel Prizes in 1901. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen received the Nobel Prize in Physics that year.

Jacobus van ‘t Hoff was awarded the chemistry prize for his work on dilute solutions and how they behaved, mathematically speaking, like gasses. In his address, he espoused the role of imagination in science.

The prize in physiology or medicine that year went to Emil von Behring, who came up with the diphtheria vaccine and also a serum to prevent tetanus. If you haven’t had a tetanus booster in more than ten years, you could commemorate this anniversary with the CDC-recommended tetanus shot to prevent the potentially deadly bacterial infection of the nervous system. Of course, consult your doctor because contraindications exist too.

Paul Ehrlich

There’s some controversy as to whether von Behring should have shared the financial rewards for the diphtheria serum and the Nobel Prize with Paul Ehrlich, who shared the prize in 1908 for work in immunity. A year later, Ehrlich developed a cure for syphilis, though even now, no vaccine is available.

Today is also the anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental flight across the United States and the first cross-country airmail, which began on September 17, 1911. Clearly, not a nonstop! In fact, Calbraith Perry Rodgers, great-grandson of Matthew Perry, stopped 70 times (not all planned), finally landing in Long Beach, California, on December 10. The last twenty miles from Pasadena had included two stops and a broken ankle. To celebrate and fully complete his transit, the pilot taxied his plane (the Vin Fizz, named to advertise a grape soda) into the Pacific Ocean. Only a few months later, on April 3, 1912, in a sad bit of irony, Rodgers, who had received about 90 minutes of flight instruction before his first solo in June 1911, perished when his exhibition flight over Long Beach ended in the ocean near where he had completed his transcontinental trek.

We end today’s post with an excerpt from a poem by Emily Dickinson, who was born on this date in 1830. Though the poem isn’t about a lunar eclipse (the full poem is available at The Academy of American Poets), it does resonate with our viewing early this morning:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
[…]
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
[…]

There’s No Business Like Air Show Business (Part 4) November 30, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.
Tags: Airshows, Museums & Archives, WWII
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We’ve sung the praises of serendipity—that chance occurrence that connects a single, unanticipated event to our larger projects—on a number of occasions (HERE and HERE and HERE). But we’re also big believers in preparation, doing the research, and being ready to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Our recent trip to the Eighth Annual Jacqueline Cochran Air Show provided just such an opportunity. We’ve already described some of the events that took place at this air show, but the signature moment for us took place shortly after we arrived.

After making our way through the gate, we headed towards the C-17 transport sitting at the southern end of the flight line. Its gigantic wings offered shade from the desert sun, giving us the chance to pull our thoughts together. We then walked the length of the flight line in order to reconnoiter the aircraft, the crowd, and the vendors, a standard tactic to get the lay of the land.

Long before we reached the end of the flight line, we began see occasional flashes of bright, reflected sunlight. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence at air shows. Many WWII-era aircraft are displayed unpainted, finished in their original aluminum skin. But this was different. The reflected light was vibrant, more intense. When we arrived at its source, we saw why: a 1939 Lockheed 12A Electra Junior.

This aircraft’s owner is Les Whittlesey. He spoke with us about the aircraft’s lifespan, gave us a tour of this magnificent piece of aviation history, and showed us various Lockheed ephemera he’s been collecting, often finding something on eBay. (Click here for another article about Les and his plane.)

A product of aviation’s Golden Age in the 1930s, the Electra Junior, so named for its relationship to the larger Lockheed 10 Electra, is a living exemplar of architect Louis Sullivan’s form follows function maxim. Many of the aircraft of the late 1920s and early 1930s were still boxlike structures, covered with fabric, dope, and paint. Recently developed aluminum-based manufacturing techniques gave aeronautical engineers like Kelly Johnson, a native of Ishpeming, Michigan, also Anna’s grandfather’s hometown, the ability to experiment with a new design language which emphasized spare, streamlined shapes. The Electra Junior, a twin-engine, six-passenger plane, was just such a new aircraft shape.

It’s often assumed that the era’s defining architectural and design style, Art Deco, was deeply influenced by the aviation industry and developed its love of curves and shining metal surfaces from the era’s aircraft. In reality, the relationship among aviation, industrial design, and art deco is a more complex, symbiotic one. Art deco had always been a reflection of modernism with its roots in machines and mechanisms. As the ne plus ultra machine of its day, it was only natural that the speed and dynamism of the airplane would influence art deco and that designers steeped in the vernacular of art deco would turn that knowledge back on the flying machine.

Les Whittlesey’s Electra Junior was originally built in 1939 for aviation and automotive magnate Errett Lobban “E. L.” Cord. Cord, as owner of Auburn Automobile Company (in addition to the Stinson Aircraft Company, Lycoming Engines, and several others), was no stranger to futuristic designs. The Auburn Boattail Speedster, designed in the early 1930s by Al Leamy, was an aggressively streamlined shape. Cord took delivery of the Electra Junior in 1940, but he was only able to enjoy it briefly.

In 1941, the U.S. Treasury Department commandeered the aircraft (Cord was paid for it) in preparation for the coming war. The Electra Junior was given the military designation of C-40 and shipped off to England as a part of the Lend-Lease program. As a transport during the war, the aircraft survived a friendly-fire incident over Belgium (the damage was uncovered during its most recent restoration), and there’s a “rumor” (Whittlesey’s word) that Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew in the aircraft. The January 2012 edition of Aviation History contains an article about Churchill learning to fly. Who knows, perhaps Churchill even graced the co-pilot’s seat of this aircraft.

The Electra Junior evokes a different era, one of, as the sales brochure announces, “real comfort when you fly.” In fact, an Electra Junior (and a cutout of one) was used as the Air France aircraft in the penultimate scene in Casablanca (see the video clip below). Although Air France never operated the Lockheed 12A, Hollywood’s artistic license led to the correct choice of style over accuracy in this case.

The Electra Junior’s indisputable style plays a leading role in the Cal Aero Aviation Country Club at Chino Airport, an events venue owned and operated by Les and his wife Susan. During our interview, Les related the fact that aviation-themed country clubs—think standard country club but with runways instead of golf greens—were popular in Southern California in the 1930s. Yes, as we sat in the passenger seats aboard the Electra Junior, we could almost hear the strains of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”

One of this particular aircraft’s greatest achievements was winning the 2006 Grand Champion award at the AirVenture in Oshkosh. It turns out we were there that year, which serves to remind us of a great value of air shows. These events are traveling archives, and each artifact has its own knowledgeable docent. This time, initially attracted by its aesthetic appeal, we grew to understand the story of an Electra Junior.

ALSO SEE OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES for more info on the people and the aircraft & lots of photos: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

There’s No Business Like Air Show Business (Part 3) November 23, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.
Tags: Airshows, WWII
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On this date in 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that “the Women Airforce Service Pilots as having served on active duty in the Armed Forces of the United States for purposes of laws administered by the Veterans Administration.” After the Navy decided in the mid-1970s that women could fly government planes, this legislation picked up a bill that had fallen by the wayside in 1944. WASPs who’d served during World War II did so as civilians and, until Carter signed this law more than thirty years later, had no formal military benefits.

Melissa Pembleton in her Edge 540

We started this series (for the first two parts, click HERE and HERE) after attending this year’s Jacqueline Cochran Air Show in the desert. For the last few weeks, we’ve planned to add a segment today and to get more specific about that show’s performers. What great serendipity that, when Anna turned the page in her calendar (yes, she keeps an old-fashioned paper calendar) this weekend, there was a note in the margin for Wednesday: Carter & WASPs. After all, it was Jackie Cochran who, in 1939 immediately after Germany’s invasion of Warsaw, wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt suggesting that women could be used as military pilots.

Jacqueline Cochran

The WASP program quickly grew out of the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, which had been organized by Cochran, and the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, which had been organized by Nancy Harkness Love. We won’t go into the rivalry and politicking between these two women here, but Jackie Cochran became the WASP’s director and Nancy Love continued to oversee its ferrying operations to move aircraft about the country. When the WASP program ended in December 1944, largely because male pilots were being rotated home after flying overseas, 38 WASPs had died in service and 916 were still serving.

Among the women who lost their lives as WASPs were some of the most talented aviators in America. Cornelia Clark Fort was the first woman pilot to die in the service. After surviving Pearl Harbor—she was attacked by a Zero while giving a flying lesson—Fort ran out of luck and perished in a mid-air collision over Texas in March 1943. In the movie Tora-Tora-Tora, Fort was portrayed by a man.

Hazel Ying Lee, another WASP, was born in Portland, Oregon in 1912 and, in 1932, became the first Chinese-American woman to earn a pilot’s certificate. Once, after a forced landing, she was chased around her aircraft by a pitchfork-wielding Kansan who assumed she was at the vanguard of a Japanese invasion force. While delivering a Bell P-63 Kingcobra to Great Falls, Montana, as a Lend-Lease aircraft destined for Russia, Lee collided with another P-63 after a control tower error. She died two days later.

Jackie Cochran, the only woman in the Bendix air race in 1937, went on to become the first women to break the sound barrier. For that record, she flew an F-86 Sabre, one of the two planes in the heritage flight at this year’s Jacqueline Cochran Air Show. Over the years, she held more records than any other pilot. Later in her career, Cochran initially championed the possibility of thirteen women as astronaut candidates, only to testify against allowing women to become astronauts later.

Her namesake air show’s website points out, “She was a long-time resident of the Coachella Valley, and is buried in Coachella Valley Cemetery. She regularly utilized Thermal Airport over the course of her long aviation career.” So on the morning of November 5, we headed into the mountains to see what there was to see there. The Thermal Airport is nestled in a valley formed by the San Bernadino Mountains to the north and northeast and the San Jacinto Mountains to the south and southwest. Nearby is the Salton Sea.

Steve Hinton in an F-86

As soon as we parked the car, it was clear that the how was underway. The sky was the cloudless, deep-blue that we’ve come to associate with the desert. As we walked toward the runways of the Thermal Airport, a Korean War era F-86 Sabre flashed overhead, its aluminum skin shimmering in the mid-morning sun. Piloted by Steven Hinton, president of Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino and veteran film and television pilot, the F-86’s routine was focused, enclosed by the nearby mountains that ring the airport. Up was the only direction that wasn’t constraining the sixty-year-old warbird, so again and again it finished high-speed passes down the runways centerline with soaring climbs.

Most current air shows feature acrobatic demonstrations, and the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show is no exception, with no fewer than four of the day’s sessions devoted to acrobatic flying: Doug Jardine, Rob Harrison, Jon Melby, and Melissa Pemberton. In honor of the barnstorming and acrobatic women flyers of decades past, we give a special nod to Melissa Pemberton today.

Melissa & Rex Pembleton

A hundred years ago, Harriet Quimby became the first American woman to earn a pilot’s license. (What better names for little girl characters than Harriet the Spy and Ramona Quimby?) Nowadays, Melissa Pemberton, who is in her mid-twenties, flies torque rolls and gyroscopic tumbles above crowds at air shows not just here in the United States but also in Japan, Spain, and El Salvador. Melissa learned to fly with her grandfather, and she’s been flying aerobatics since she was 17 years old.

Melissa and her husband Rex, who was the youngest Australian to climb Mt. Everest, are both skydivers. Melissa performs with three other women—the only all-women four-way free-fly team. This year at the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show, Melissa flew her Edge 540 while her husband wafted to the ground in his wingsuit, which has webbing between limbs so that he can fly three feet forward for every foot he drops.

They came up with this act that combines skydiving and aircraft aerobatics to combine their skills and create something new for the air show circuit. It was quite a sight as traced Rex’s descent by the smoke trailing behind him. Likewise, Melissa’s plane trailed smoke, drawing relatively tight circles around Rex’s path. They also both have radios to banter with each other and the crowd as the shapes in the sky form.

The Jacqueline Cochran Air Show wrapped up this year’s season for Melissa Pemberton. Lofty Ambitions hasn’t quite wrapped up this air show series, though.

There’s No Business Like Air Show Business (Part 2) November 19, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.
Tags: Airshows
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As we wrote on Wednesday (click HERE for that), air shows are unusual events, in that they represent a confluence of American history: they’re political, they’re technological, and they’re commercial. Today, we’re focusing on the technological history.

One amazing outcome of the air show is the possibility of seeing in person artifacts representing the arc of aviation history, from the Stearman biplane heavily used in the 1930s and 1940s to jets currently flying commercially and for the military. Sometimes, even a replica of the Wright flyer, the plane to first achieve controlled manned flight in 1903, will show up. While no air show offers the entirety of the technology’s history, few other histories are thrown together for a weekend as comprehensively as on the air show circuit.

The underlying reasons we can see the arc of aviation history are that this narrative is only about a hundred years old and because often a model of aircraft will fly in military, commercial, and/or private service for decades. The Boeing-737 made its first flight in 1967 and was flying passengers the next year. Forty-some years later, when you get on a Southwest Airlines flight, you’re flying in a 737. In fact, Southwest started flying passengers in 1971 but didn’t start routinely retiring planes in its fleet until 2007. Compare that with another well-known, perhaps taken-for-granted technology: the computer. Chances are, you’re in need of a new laptop if yours is even five years old.

Stearman

An airplane doesn’t hold up safely forever, and every pressurization cycle (based on takeoff and landing) stresses the fuselage and wings. Eventually, in commercial aviation, a plane nears the number of pressurization cycles it can accumulate without significant risk of damage and becomes cheaper to scrap than to maintain because large portions would need to be replaced. Some aircraft we see at air shows have had so many parts replaced that they are new planes in a sense. Human beings replace cells all the time; the skin we had as children is long-ago shed, and we are, in that sense, completely rebuilt on our surface.

So the brevity of aviation history combined with the longevity of individual models and airplanes means that air shows often encapsulate 80 or more years worth of this particular technology story. When we head to an air show, we’re not sure exactly what we’ll see, but we expect to see a historical arc.

T-6 Texan

The first North American Aviation T-6 took flight in 1935, and this model is still making rounds on the air show circuit. In fact, you can pretty much expect to see a T-6 as you walk around the grounds. The P-51 Mustang, a slender aluminum cruciform object against the blue sky, is a regular at air shows. We usually see a Corsair, with its distinctive gull wings, often a dark blue that somehow catches the sun and our eyes especially well.

P-51 Mustang

Ford Trimotors occasionally turn up, and they first flew in 1926. The WWII-era Japanese Zero is a rare sight; as of last year, there existed only three airworthy Zeroes and only several more intact. FIFI is the only remaining airworthy B-29, so that’s an exceptionally rare air show participant; this aircraft tours the air show circuit (this year included Oshkosh and St. Louis) and spends the winter at the Cavanaugh Flight Museum.

Heritage flights are a relative newcomer to air shows. We don’t remember such a thing from our early adventures together twenty years ago. Begun in 1997 to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Air Force, the Heritage Flight Program established a non-profit in 2010 to help keep this popular but expensive air show feature afloat. This year, we’ve seen two heritage flights: one at the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show featuring the F-86 and F-16, and the other at Miramar (posts HERE for photos and HERE for more) featuring the P-51 and F-16. The idea is to present a vintage aircraft alongside a current one so that viewers like us can understand the technological and performance differences and also begin to grasp through examples the larger story of aviation history.

Heritage Flight, Jacqueline Cochran Air Show

Both the F-86 and the F-16 are single-engine fighters. The F-86 set a world speed record only months after aircraft starting rolling out of production in 1948: 670.9 miles per hour. The F-16, which the Air Force started flying in 1978, can top speeds of Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, and can pull 9-g—g-forces on the plane and pilot—maneuvers, for which it has a reclined seat to help prevent the pilot from passing out by keeping blood better distributed under high g-forces. Lest you think the F-86 is a speed slouch, in its day, which was the Korean War, it bested the MiG-15 with a 10:1 victory ratio.

Likewise, lest you think that military aircraft are all about U.S. superiority, keep in mind that the F-16 was built by a consortium of four—now five—NATO countries and, therefore, represents international technological collaboration. In fact, seeing the Korean War-era fighter zip by on the flight line followed by a fighter currently being used in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq points out that the history of technology is intertwined with our larger history, politics, and culture.

P-51 Mustang & F-8 Bearcat

One fascinating aspect of the history represented by seeing the F-86 and F-16 together, particularly considering the longevity of an aircraft model, is that each individual plane at any air show is almost always exceptionally well documented. When a plane crashes, we all know that investigators can trace its entire maintenance history. Safety requires a regular maintenance established by the manufacturer for all aircraft. If a tire blows or a valve sticks, the repair or replacement is written down and filed away officially. More than once, we’ve sat in a plane at the gate waiting for the pilot to get permission to take off while maintenance files the paperwork. The military, of course, keeps careful records too, and even private pilots have to file maintenance and flight plan paperwork.

When a visitor walked into the Palm Spring Air Museum and said, I think that’s the plane I flew at Naval Station Great Lakes, the museum’s staff was able to look at the records and confirm that. We included photos of and information about that plane in our post on November 11 (click HERE for that).

Electra Junior

A man like Les Whittlesey can buy a Lockheed Electra Junior, an L-12, and know exactly who owned the plane for how long over the course of its entire lifespan. When we see the gleaming plane at the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show, Les can recount an abbreviated version of that plane’s story to us. In fact, this Electra deserves its own post, so that’s in the works at Lofty Ambitions.

More than three years ago, we moved to California in part to have easier access to the nation’s aviation history. Lockheed was and now Lockheed Martin is based in Southern California. North American, manufacturer of the T-6 and the P-51 and now subsumed by Boeing, was based here too. Just down the road in Tustin are two WWII-era blimp hangars of the type we grew to appreciate during our visits to Tillamook, Oregon, and its aviation museum. Just up the road is Chino’s Planes of Fame Air Museum, and Chino is a hub for aircraft restoration. And of course, the space shuttle was born here in California.

T-28, the last departure before we headed home

We went to the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show earlier this month. In the Midwest, that just wouldn’t be possible. Illinois doesn’t host air shows in November. California, on the other, offered us a sunny November afternoon to spend wending our way among rows of aircraft, eyeing the technology’s history up close one plane after the other. For hours, we also peered into the sky to watch the history retold.

There’s No Business Like Air Show Business (Part 1) November 16, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.
Tags: Airshows
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Two Saturdays ago, we made our first trip to Palm Springs and Palm Desert to attend the 8th Annual Jacqueline Cochran Air Show (actually held near Palm Desert in Thermal, California). We’ve already posted two photo essays of our visit to the Palm Springs Air Museum that weekend (click HERE and HERE for those).

Here at Lofty Ambitions, we’ve made no secret of our affection for air shows. We’ve attended almost every variant of air show. We’re not alone at these events. In recent years, some 25-26 million people have attended air shows in the United States and Canada. Air shows are the second most popular sporting events by attendance (well behind only Major League Baseball at 70+ million).

Stearman at jacqueline Cochran Air Show 2011

Some of our favorite air shows have been small, family-oriented gatherings like the College Park Air Show in Maryland; the Stearman Fly-In in Galesburg, Illinois; and Wings of Victory in Lancaster, Ohio. The smaller air shows allow us the opportunity to interact with aircraft and owners in ways that we can’t predict. Once, at College Park, an aircraft owner and restorer took us into his workshop—on the airport’s grounds—to see his most recent work on a long-term restoration project. He was painstakingly removing fasteners from seventy-year-old corrugated aluminum wings. Anna wrote a poem about that air show that made its way into her chapbook Turns about a Point. We never found out how far the man got with his restoration project, but his goal was to see the airplane fly again.

T-28 Trojans

We’ve also attended themed air shows, like our recent visits to the MCAS Miramar Air Show (click HERE and HERE for posts on that), with its emphasis on Marine Corps aviation and the centennial of Navy aviation. Last fall, we traipsed over to nearby Zamperini Field (named for the man who serves as subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s new book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption) in Torrance, California, for their “Salute to North American Aviation” (click HERE for that post). Academics that we are, themed air shows have the feel of an upper-level seminar, a chance to dive deeply into some particular aspect of aviation.

Inside the Commemorative Air Force's C-53

Our experiences at the large, multi-day aviation events have also been rewarding and sometimes overwhelming. We aren’t Oshkosh mainstays like our friends Jim Amundson and his father, Glen. Glen Amundson has attended EAA AirVenture each year since 1987, and Jim has joined his father at nearly half those shows. Still, we’ve twice sweated out Oshkosh (see our Oshkosh post HERE) with best of them on those brutally hot and humid late July days. (The best of them would be Lisa, Jim’s wife, who once attended while six months pregnant.) We’ve also managed to take in the corporate-aviation-heavy shows like the Dayton Air Show and Chicago’s Air and Water Show. The size and scale of these shows (and even the parking) can be intimidating, but the pay-off comes in the range of aircraft and the quality of the performers we’ve seen.

Skydiver Rex Pembleton

Air shows are unusual events, in that they represent a confluence of American history: they’re political, they’re technological, and they’re commercial. For the next post, we’ll focus on the technological history, for air shows offer, in just an afternoon, a recap of the entire history of this technological achievement. Along the way in this series, of course, we’ll include photos, particularly of the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show earlier this month.

Happy Birthday, Evelyn Bryan Johnson! November 4, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.
Tags: Airshows, WWII
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Evelyn Bryan Johnson, the woman pilot with the most flying hours in the world, celebrates her 102^nd birthday today in Morristown, Tennessee. The locals call her Mama Bird. Her total flying time is the equivalent of roughly 6-½ years.

(National Aviation Hall of Fame)

Evelyn Johnson learned to fly when World War II was raging overseas and women like Evelyn filled a variety of new roles outside the home. She decided to learn to fly when she saw an advertisement for lessons in the newspaper. Her first lesson was on October 1, 1944, her first solo was November 8, and she earned her private pilot’s license the following June. Within three years, she became a flight instructor, then an examiner in 1952. She later learned to fly helicopters, only the twentieth woman to do such a thing.

As of February of this year (see video below), Evelyn Johnson was working at the local airport four days a week. She didn’t let a car accident and leg amputation in 2006 slow her down much. That said, she stopped flying at the age of 96, in large part because of glaucoma, and gave up her title as the oldest flight instructor in the world. She trained more pilots and gave more than 9,000 FAA check rides, more than anyone else ever. She worries that today’s new pilots aren’t taught to use a map and that instructors are afraid to have student pilots practice stalls. All her efforts earned her a spot in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

Evelyn’s advice for longevity: “”Don’t sit down and watch the grass grow. Stay busy. Have something that you have to get up and do every day.” (Click HERE for that full news story from November 2010.)

To celebrate women in flight, we may just have to head to the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show this weekend. Jackie Cochran beat Evelyn Johnson into the air by several years and, in 1953, became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

MCAS Miramar Air Show (Part 2) October 5, 2011

Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Collaboration.
Tags: Airshows
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Last week, we wrote about “Writing Together, Writing Apart.” We’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately, and we’re in the midst of drafting a couple more posts about how we write as a couple and as individuals and how we work together on a writing project and separately on different projects.

This past weekend, our visit to the MCAS Miramar Air Show reminded us that our writing together comes out of some shared activities that helped shape and solidify our relationship way back when. This week, we take some time to recount our Sunday of gaping at the sky (click HERE to see more of our PHOTOS in Part 1), but we’re also in the process of weaving this description back into our grappling with writing as a couple.

The annual MCAS (Marine Corp Air Station) Miramar Air Show, as you would expect from the name, has a decidedly military vibe. Most air shows have a present and past military presence, but Miramar is more of that than any other air show we’ve attended. This year’s show had the added mission of honoring the 100^th Anniversary of Naval Aviation. The program is labeled “A Salute to San Diego,” with the following text just beneath: “1911 ~ Birthplace of Naval Aviation ~ 2011.” A quick glance might give the impression that the first landing on and take-off from an aircraft carrier took place in San Diego. In fact, those events took place 500 miles away in San Francisco. (Click HERE for a blog post, published on the actual 100^th birthday, 18 January 2011, that contains some fantastic photographs of the events.)

Ospreys

This year at Miramar, the day’s signature event was the thirty-minute MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Force) Demonstration Team. As befitting the ground part of MAGTF, there were tanks, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees careening about on the tarmac. But the real appeal for us were the numerous aircraft: C-130s, F/A-18s, AV-8Bs, and CH-46s just to name a few. Our eyes were pointed skyward watching the F/A-18 Hornets flashed by in high-speed passes at 600 knots. (We think that’s what the announcer said, but, of course, it was a bit loud at the moment he said it.) That’s just over 90% of the speed of sound (661 knots or 761 mph at sea level, which was about where we were, since Miramar means sea view).

We’ve never before seen as many helicopters in the air at once. In fact, this was the first time that either of us had seen an MV-22A Osprey up close and personal. The Osprey is a VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft that the Marine Corps uses to move troops. The Osprey blends (some would say breaks) the characteristics of a fixed-wing aircraft with a helicopter. Or rather, with two helicopters, since the Osprey’s enormous blades and engines are mounted on both wingtips. The blades are so large that the Osprey can have them in the fully forward position only once it is airborne. It’s an odd, yet somehow very impressive-looking, machine.

Harrier, hovering

If we had only two words to describe the AV-8B Harrier, another VTOL aircraft in the Marine Corps inventory, they would be LOUD and improbable. The first time we encountered a Harrier at an air show was at the Quad City Air Show in the early 1990s, one of our first forays to such events together. Back then, a volunteer walked through the crowd to pass out orange earplugs and warn that the air show wouldn’t be responsible for our hearing loss if we chose to forego the offered hearing protection. We had our own earplugs on hand this time, and we admit we used them.

The Harrier is descended from a 1960’s British aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley Harrier, and Harrier pilots have been flying amazing maneuvers for nearly fifty years. This past Sunday, part of the MAGTF demonstration featured two Harriers flying, or hovering, really, perched atop shimmering towers of hot jet engine exhaust as they made their way down the runway at improbably slow speeds. That particular demonstration is among the least improbable bit of flying that the Harrier can do. Later in the day, a solo Harrier demonstration featured a vertical takeoff, another improbability that we’d seen twenty years ago on the shores of the Mississippi River. Ready for more? How about slowly flying sideways? Definitely another tick up the improbability scale. At just about the point that your brain begins to wonder whether this some sort of videogame, the pilot throws the Harrier in reverse and confirms the surreal. These Harrier demonstrations never get old.

The Blue Angels

A full day of sun, sound, and standing on concrete took its toll. The Blue Angels were scheduled to begin their display at 2:45 pm, but they were delayed. It’s difficult to leave an air show before the last act, but by 3:00 pm, we were ready to call it a day. Besides, we’ve seen the Blue Angels several times, and our aching knees and backs were as pressing as our need for lunch. We headed for the exit slowly, lingered at the car with the doors open to cool it, and hoped to catch a glimpse of the Blue Angels before we drove away.

As we’ve written several times at Lofty Ambitions, serendipity sometimes catches us, and that’s what happed on Sunday. Just as we were finishing lunch at a restaurant on the road between the air show and the freeway, the sound of jet engines roared overhead. We rushed out into the parking lot and caught the Blue Angels show from a completely new vantage. We had positioned ourselves at a randomly chosen sandwich shop. In fact, we had stopped at a different place first, but it was closed. This randomly chosen sandwich shop just happened to be on the Blue Angels’ flight path. Roughly five minutes after the show started, Doug heard a gentle rumble behind us and turned to see four jets approaching in a diamond pattern. In just a few seconds, it became clear that they would fly directly over our heads: 200-250 feet above us at nearly 500 mph. The F/A-18 Hornets came over our position as a single jet, a pair of jets, and in the diamond formation at least a half-dozen times. By pure chance, we’d managed the best seats in the house.

All during the Blue Angels’ routine, cars spontaneously pulled into the same parking lot where we stood and emptied of families who plopped themselves down onto any grass they could find. An Indian family emerged from the Indian restaurant. Adults were as awestruck as the children. We all spent the next twenty minutes staring into the sky, looking at fast-moving flashes of blue and yellow. On that first pass overhead, a young boy standing not twenty feet away from us started spontaneously shouting and cheering. Anna was doing the same thing. The sounds that air show crowds make are different from the trilling ooh’s and ah’s of a fireworks display. Air show crowds gasp with punctuated yelps of wow’s and oh-my’s, as if surprised by every pass, every loop, every zipping into the distant clouds.

We are aviation nerds. Despite what we know about the physics of lift and gravity, of thrust and drag, the fact that a big metal contraption can manage controlled flight boggles our minds. One of the reasons that we like air shows so much is that, despite the complicated politics and ethics on display, the aircraft themselves have the power to turn anyone within the line-of-sight and earshot into an aviation nerd, if only for a couple of hours, if only for a few minutes in a strip mall parking lot.

We end this post on a different topic, with a video of Steve Jobs, giving the Commencement Address at Stanford University in 2005. Steve Jobs died today, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. We drafted and revised this post on Mac laptops and are long-time Mac users. We like especially the way Steve Jobs talks here about learning widely and about the role of serendipity.