Aviation

It’s In the Small Details

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A few years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I’d spend 1-3 hours a night watching YouTube videos. But this has evolved quite a bit from the early days of shaky cams, airplane noise in the background, and questionable advice. The questionable advice is still out there but is swamped by so much good advice and programming.

Although I haven’t flown as a pilot in command of my mighty 100 hp Beechcraft since the late 80s, flying and aviation safety videos have held my interest. Specifically, aviation accidents and their causes.

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Masters of the Air – 100th Bomb Group

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Observations of the series and from other sources

I am 7 episodes into the series, based on the 100th Bomb Group at Thorpe Abbotts in Britain during WW II, and am thoroughly enjoying it.

I became so interested in the series that I started to read a book on the last surviving member of the 100th Bomb Group, John “Lucky” Luckadoo. I was surprised to learn that the series was so accurate they brought many of the historical figures to life, with no fictional embellishment.

As an aside, the one thing even this author did that bugged me a bit was refer to what was the US Army Air Force as the “Army Air Corps”. It seems a common mistake.  A minor nit perhaps, but by June 1941, the US Army decided that the mission of their Air Force had expanded such that their aviation arm was its own Air Force:

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Gliding to the Matterhorn

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Reprise Post: Sunday Morning at the End of the World

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(A repeat post from 2007, from my original milblog, on the anniversary of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor)

“Life in the wide world goes on much as it has these past age, full of its own comings and goings, scarcely aware of the existence of hobbits… for which I am very thankful.” Gandalf, from “The Fellowship of the Ring”

There are some things that are so obvious that 20-20 hind-sight is not required, and Sunday, December 7th 1941 is one of them. The events of a couple of hours in the skies over a tiny Pacific Island previously known more as a tourist destination and a source for sugar and pineapples created a rift across the American consciousness, an abrupt demarcation between “then” and “now”. Very much like the effect of 9-11, a snap of a cosmically huge cracker into two pieces; you could look across to the other half of the cracker, and see that on either side of the chasm everything appeared to look just the same… but in your heart, you knew that things were not the same, and would never be quite the same again.

It was a smaller world, that America of seven decades ago, a very local, insular and insulated world, and one which moved comparatively slowly. Only the wealthiest or most adventurous traveled widely. Those who did travel did so by train, or passenger steamship in varying degrees of luxury. Passenger air travel was in its infancy, an exotic and expensive curiosity, as was television a fancy futuristic gadget displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair. People got their news from newspapers and movie news reels, from weekly magazines like “Life” and “The Saturday Evening Post”, and from the radio. Telephones were large clumsy black objects, nine out of ten on a party line, if you had one at all in your home. Urgent news came by telegram, a little slip of paper delivered by a bicycle messenger.

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Plane Spotting Meets the 21st Century

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As a kid I would love going to the airport and seeing all of the different types of planes, and the branding, and would always wonder where they were all going. Planespotting.

Now, you can go onto Youtube and enter “planespotting” and any of a number of different streams will populate, many of them live, that will take you all over the world to see all types of different planes from passenger to cargo to pleasure. Many have a revenue stream and are dependent on eyeballs and donations/subscriptions and many are just a guy and a camera set up on a hill.

Probably one of the biggest and best is Airline Videos Live, and they are usually planted around LAX. This week they are in ANC and the video from yesterday is absolutely stunning. They even had a DreamLifter show up.

If you like this sort of thing, the world is your oyster now.

Disclaimer – *I have no financial or any other gain by referring AVL*.