Aviation

A Visit To Wendover Field

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The Wendover Base Operations Building with restored Control Tower. Today a sleepy airport, 80 years ago a very busy place

I have always enjoyed seeing places of historical importance, with their evidence of importance hidden in plain sight. Virginia City, Nevada is such a place. To most of the visitors, it is simply an old western town whose shops now sell ice cream and T Shirts.

For those who know the history, it’s where Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain. It’s a place that produced so much silver that it built San Francisco, and was the beginning of a few major corporations today.

The Wendover Airfield is another such place. My curiosity about it was built over some years. On a past cross country trip of some years ago, I stopped there and saw dozens of old wooden buildings whose condition reminded me of the Bodie State Historic Park, which is kept in “arrested decay”.  And there was a huge hanger just to the east of the main facility. It looked a bit different from a typical hanger, as it had offices or workshops all along the sides.

Hidden in plain sight.

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Lighter than Air: Balloons and Dirigibles in Warfare

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It may seem weird, at our present level of technology, to think of a balloon as an international issue and a possible security threat.   Balloons and dirigibles, though, have a long history in warfare and national security.

The first military use of balloons was by the French revolutionary army, which used tethered balloons for observation purposes, notably at the Battle of Fleurus (1794), where a hydrogen-filled balloon was employed. Balloons were used by both sides in the American Civil War; by this time, telegraph equipment was available to facilitate the transmission of messages back to officers on the ground.

In the First World War, balloons were used for observation, and were important in accurate targeting of the longer-range artillery that had become available, but the war also saw the first military use of lighter-than-air craft that could maneuver under their own power–dirigibles.   Prior to the war, the German Zeppelin company had conducted extensive development of dirigibles and had even employed them for scheduled passenger trips within Germany. The LZ 10 Schwaben, built in 1911, was 460 feet long and could carry 20 passengers. Powered by three engines of 145hp each, it could reach a maximum speed of 47mph.

When war broke out, it was inevitable that Zeppelins would be use for military purposes. In the first raid on London, a Zeppelin dropped 3000 pounds of bombs, including incendiaries which started 40 fires.   Seven people were killed.   Airships became larger with heavier bomb loads, and fleets of up to 11 ships attacked the British capital city. The Zeppelins were vulnerable, though, to incendiary bullets and rockets.   Climbing to higher altitudes offered some protection, as did a clever tactic in which the ship would cruise in or above the clouds, with observers situated in a basket lowered as much as a mile below its Zeppelin.   But losses among the attackers were high and growing.   More of these bombing missions here.

A pioneering airborne logistics mission was also attempted, with a resupply mission to the German force in East Africa which was commanded by General von Lettow-Vorbeck.   The airship L-59, seven hundred and fifty feet long, was loaded with fifty tons of equipment and departed on a journey of over 3000 miles.   The intent was that the airship would be cannibalized when it reached its destination with the envelope used for tents and the engines employed to power generators. Just a few hundred miles from its destination, though, the airship received a message stating that General Lettow-Vorbeck had been decisively defeated, there was no longer any point in the mission, and they should return to Germany.   Which they did.   It turned out that the message had been based on a British deception operation.

In the run-up to WWII, the Graf Zeppelin was used to gather signals intelligence on British radio and radar systems. Large rigid airships were not used in the war itself, the US Navy’s ships having all come to bad ends…but blimps were used extensively for antisubmarine work:   168 of them were built for this purpose. They were primarily intended as observation platforms, being eventually equipped with radar and with magnetic anomaly detectors, as well as being great visual platforms, but were also armed with depth charge bombs and machine guns. They were apparently quite effective in helping to combat the submarine menace, and only one of them was lost to enemy action.

Since 1980, tethered aerostats have been used for border surveillance and have also been employed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stratospheric balloons, such as the Chinese balloon that was just shot down, are used for aerial imagery, telecommunications, and weather forecasting.   They have been improved in recent years, and some of them have at least some ability to navigate in desired directions by changing altitude to find winds going the right way.   More here

Movie Review: Devotion

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Jesse Brown, a black man, became a US Navy pilot in 1946.   As one might expect at that time, he faced plenty of race-based obstacles in addition to the inherent difficulties involved in becoming a Naval Aviator. Nevertheless, he prevailed, and flew a Corsair piston-engined fighter from the carrier Leyte, in missions to support US ground troops in the Korean War.   On one mission, supporting Marines at the battle of Chosin Reservoir as a member of   the VF-32 squadron, he was shot down in rugged terrain.   His (white) wingman, Thomas Hudner,   observed that Brown had not exited the airplane–which was starting to burn–and landed his Corsair near Brown’s wrecked one with the intent of getting Brown out of the plane and waiting with him until a rescue helicopter could (hopefully) be dispatched before Chinese or North Korean troops showed up.

Oh, and by the way, while Leyte was in the Mediterranean, prior to being dispatched to Korea, several of the aviators met actress Elizabeth Taylor while on shore leave.

Definitely sounds like fiction, doesn’t it?   But it really happened.   While the film indeed took some liberties with the historical truth, the events cited in the above summary are in accord with the factual history.

Race does play a significant role in this movie, of course…since his childhood, Brown had maintained a notebook in which he recorded the various race-based insults he had received over time, especially those telling him all the things he would never have the ability to do.   Sometimes he would recite these as a way of giving himself extra inspiration for high performance.   But I don’t think the racial angle was overemphasized, given the era and Brown’s apparent actual experiences.

The flying scenes were well-done…real airplanes, not CGI…an actual MiG-15 even made an appearance.   (The scene in which a MiG is shot down by a Corsair did not actually happen on this mission, but there was historically an engagement in which a Corsair did manage to shoot down a MiG.)   The movie also includes scenes of the ground combat at Chosin Reservoir.

Despite Hudner’s effort, Brown could not be pulled from the wrecked airplane, and died there.   He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart medal, and the Air Medal.   Tom Hudner received the Medal of Honor from President Truman.   The frigate Jesse L Brown, FF-1089, was named after Brown in 1973, and an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer was named after Hudner in 2012.

The movie draws on the book Devotion by Adam Makos,   which I haven’t read but apparently goes into considerable detail on the Chosin Revenue ground battle as well as the stories of Brown and Hudner and the experiences of other VF-32 members.

Recommended.   I thought it was better than   Top Gun:   Maverick.   A little slower, but more sense of realism and character development.

Another Texas Road Trip

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We took Wee Jamie on another road trip, this last weekend. My daughter and I have decided that we should dedicate one day a week to “Not Doing Work Stuff” and have an outing of at least half a day, doing something … something diverting. This long weekend demanded a whole day of ‘Not Doing Work Stuff.’ My daughter suggested a road trip to Fredericksburg, and I thought that we should check out the Museum of the Pacific War, as it has been at least five years since I visited it. It was indisputably the last war which we won, after all. The first time I went to the War Museum was maybe in 1995 when it was all still contained in the old Nimitz Hotel on Main Street, and an annex down the road IIRC, a side-less pole barn. (And Fredericksburg was still a sleepy little town with an attractive Main Street, with local-oriented business situated in profitable commercial real estate, where they tended to close shop and roll up the sidewalks at about 5 PM. Well, that has come to a screeching halt, I assure you.)

We took the back way, to Fredericksburg, after stopping at a local restaurant for a breakfast which turned out to be more substantial than expected a local outlet for the Maple Biscuit Company. The fresh-squeeze orange juice was fantastic, and yes, I would know about all that, having grown up with orange trees in the back yard. The biscuits and sausage gravy were so generous and so good that we were resolved to split an order next time. (This was the last place I saw anyone wearing a mask, BTW. The staff were all masked-up.) The back way to Fredericksburg meant driving up 281 to Johnson City, passing memories all the way; Blanco, where we had done market events at the Old Courthouse, and where once we scored some amazing deals at an estate sale at an old house just off the highway. Johnson City, where we had a wonderfully fun three-day long market one year, for the lighting of the Courthouse, the weekend after Thanksgiving. (We had to stay two nights for that in a cabin at the Miller Creek RV resort, which meant that we barely broke even.)

Johnson City, when I first went through in the late 1990s, was sad and depressing in comparison to Fredericksburg. It seemed to be hanging on based on the relation to LBJ, the Johnson ranch and various residences where LBJ’s family had lived. Now it is the beginning of the Texas Wine Road and has a new lease on tourist life. Some years ago, I had suggested that the Hill Country had all the components save castles, villas, and quaint hilltop towns to become the New Provence, since they produce such Frenchified specialty items as lavender, wine, olive oil, goat milk cheeses … and wine. Oh my gosh, have they gone into producing wine. Someone has even built a castle! The usual maps of the Texas Wine Road usually include only the top twelve or fifteen of the biggest and most well-established of the wineries along 290 or at least, those with the flashiest central building. As we discovered, just about every commercial or retail business along that road was posted as a winery, and even a couple of places, like Wildseed Farms, which initially specialized in some other commodity like peaches or wildflower seeds had added on a wine tasting room. If you started at the two wineries just outside Johnson City to the south and stopped at every single winery or tasting room and had a single glass … your liver would be screaming for mercy when you got to Stonewall, and you’d be on the list for a liver transplant once you got beyond Fredericksburg itself.

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Exaggerated Automation Claim Story of the Week

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In 2016, a prominent computer scientist–a pioneer in artificial intelligence, he would be a winner of the 2018 Turing Award–said:

We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.

Hasn’t worked out that way.   AI can be a useful supplement to a human radiologist, but I don’t think it’s being used anywhere on an exclusive, human-radiologist-replacing basis.

Just as well that the training of radiologists wasn’t shut down.

It is often unwise to make radical changes based on the opinions of experts who are proponents of particular technologies.   (Of course there are cases where such radical changes are called for–the aviation experts who in the 1920s and 1930s foresaw a major role for aviation in naval warfare, for example.)   But in the case of robotics/AI at the present time, I think over-claiming is generally more likely than under-claiming.