Aviation
“Dinosaur Bones”
A Belmont Club thread linked to this great scene from the movie, Flight of the Phoenix. I saw that movie on TV when I was a kid, and ever since I wanted to know what a Coffman Starter was. And now there is the Internet. Drunk with power, I googled… and found this web site. Holy cow. I emailed the URL to Lex and he replied, “Fragments, like dinosaur bones.” He got that right. In a couple of hundred years, who is going to know what any of this stuff was?
(BTW, it appears that a Coffman Starter works by directing gas from an exploding cartridge against a piston, which is connected to a shaft, and that this shaft turns the engine. If that’s the case, how could James Stewart “clean out the cylinders” by firing a cartridge with the ignition off? Wouldn’t he have merely turned over the engine without cleaning out anything? Perhaps the movie makers used some artistic license here.)
DoubleQuotes and Questions
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]
You know, I really enjoy building my DoubleQuotes. They can be entirely frivolous, as is this one, for instance:
with its touch of gothic — a taste I share with my friend Bryan Alexander.
Or they can work like a Necker cube, offering opposite framings with which to view a single topic — in this case, video games.
Copter Box
Here is a neat concept for air dropping supplies cheaply. The system uses cheap prefabbed boxes that have a tiny stabilizing parachute and then cardboard rotors that pop out and autorotate to slow the package’s descent. Check out the videos at the bottom of the linked page to see it in operation.
The advantage of this system is that you don’t need a big expensive parachute and you don’t have to have someone who can properly pack a chute. Just grab the boxes, load them up to weight and toss them out of the aircraft.
It will be a big boon for relief and aid workers and yet another innovation created by small-scale capitalists.
It’s funny what you find while researching pre-WWII autogyros.
WWII Airplanes on Tour
The Collings Foundation Wings of Freedom Tour this year includes B-17 and B-24 bombers and also a P-51 Mustang fighter. You can visit the airplanes for a small donation and, for a substantially larger donation, you can actually take a ride! If the tour is coming to an airport near you, these planes are well worth seeing. Schedule here.
The P-51 has an interesting history. Its design was led by James “Dutch” Kindelberger, a high-school dropout who had worked as a draftsman and taken correspondence courses before gaining admission to college. Kindleberger became president of North American Aviation in 1935. When his company was approached by the British govenment to manufacture a batch of P-40 Tomahawk fighters, Kindelberger proposed instead that a new design be built. Fortunately for the world, his proposal was accepted, and the first P-51 was flown only 6 months after the order was placed.
The P-51 had considerably greater range than previous escort fighters. Hermann Goering told his interrogators that it was when he saw P-51s over Berlin that he knew the war was lost for Germany.
Aerial warfare is of course not only about machines; it is also about men. Randall Jarrell, a major American poet, served in the U.S. Army Air Force during the war, and wrote many poems centering around WWII air combat.