Category: Aircraft

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Aircraft

Living History on the Wing

This week the warbirds are gathering at Oshkosh. I’m not there on the grass, but I can still hear them: the uneven throb of big radials, the higher urgent song of Merlins, the deep rumble of a bomber turning final. Hundreds have flown in. They are not museum pieces behind glass. They are still flying.

The lineup this year is rich — multiple P-51 Mustangs, a rare cluster of P-38 Lightnings, the B-29 Doc, the B-24 Diamond Lil, Corsairs, a P-40, an SBD Dauntless, a Privateer.

One airplane pulls at me more than the others. I first saw a P-38 in flight at Oshkosh in the early 1980s — the twin booms, the central nacelle, a purposeful elegance I hadn’t expected from a machine built for war. It was one of Kelly Johnson’s early masterpieces, born from the same inventive culture that later became the Skunk Works. This year one of those rare P-38s has come back across the Atlantic with Austria’s Flying Bulls, its only public American appearance of the season. Watching even a video of it feels like a small closing of a circle.

The airplanes do not maintain themselves. Jim Tobul still flies the F4U-4 Corsair he and his late father spent a decade restoring. At Warbirds in Review, owners and veterans stand in front of their airplanes and tell the stories — sometimes their own, sometimes a father’s or grandfather’s. Daughters and sons speak. The sessions are informal, human, often moving.

The pilots who fly these airplanes are not reenactors. They know the systems are old, the parts scarce, the consequences of a mistake permanent. They keep showing up anyway.

I’m following it all from California — streams, photographs, mass formations, the occasional longer Warbirds in Review session. It is not the same as standing under a wing. But a Merlin still sounds like a Merlin. A P-38 still looks like the answer Lockheed once gave to a desperate wartime need. The people who keep them flying are not claiming the original heroism. They are refusing to let it become abstract.

History is still flying. Even at a distance, that amazes me.

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Aircraft Memories

Captain Gil Rud

Recently I wrote about a visit to the USS Constellation that I was very fortunate to make years ago. In that post I mentioned the captain of the ship without citing who he was.

This morning I realized I should do a bit of research and correct that – so I asked Gemini:

Who was the captain of the uss constellation who had previously led the blue angels?

Here’s how I got reacquainted with Captain Gil Rud:

That captain was Captain Gil Rud (USN, Ret.).

He served as the commanding officer and flight leader of the Blue Angels from November 1986 to November 1988, notably leading the team’s transition from the A-4 Skyhawk to the F/A-18 Hornet. Later in his career, he served as the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Constellation (CV-64) from May 1993 to December 1994.

I continued:

When was he assigned to the Constellation? I remember him talking about taking it out of the Philadelphia Navy Yard?

And learned:

Your memory is spot on. Captain Gil Rud took command of the USS Constellation in May 1993, which coincided exactly with the end of her massive Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) overhaul at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

From July 1990 until early 1993, the carrier was essentially torn down and rebuilt in Philadelphia to add an extra 15 years to her operational life. Captain Rud was assigned to the ship just as this grueling three-year yard period was wrapping up.  

He was the captain who literally “took her out” of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, leading the crew through the post-overhaul sea trials and commanding the carrier during its transit from the East Coast, around South America (as she was too large to fit through the Panama Canal), and back to her homeport in San Diego.

I continued this back and forth with Gemini learning about his career after the USS Constellation including his retirement from the Navy and work in private industry. Turns out he also authored a memoir: From the Prairie to the Pacific: A Blue Angel’s Journey.

Afterwards I felt better having done this research and getting reacquainted with Gil Rud.

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Aircraft Memories

The Wire and the Three Wires

I read this morning that the Navy retired its last C-2 Greyhound. It took me straight back to a deck fifty miles off San Diego, thirty-two years ago, and a young woman I never knew and watched anyway.

The deck comes up fast at sea. That’s the first thing nobody tells you about a carrier — that an airfield can ambush you, can rear up out of the ocean looking smaller than a parking lot, gray and pitching, while the C-2 you’re strapped into backward drops its gear and aims for four wires stretched across forty thousand tons of steel. You hit the third wire if you’re good. You hit anything if you’re lucky. Either way your body keeps moving roughly sixty miles an hour after the airplane has stopped, and the harness across your chest reminds you of that fact with some violence, and somewhere behind you a sailor a quarter your age in a yellow shirt is already waving the next plane in, because the ocean does not wait for you to catch your breath.

This was July of 1994, the USS Constellation rolling gently under a sky that hadn’t decided what color it wanted to be. There were four of us. We’d flown out of North Field that morning the way you’d catch a bus, except the bus had a tailhook, and we spent the day being shown around eighty acres of moving city — the flight deck, the hangar bay, the nuclear reactor spaces, the wardroom where men twenty years younger than us ate dinner with the particular speed of people who might be back at work in an hour.

One of the men with us had commanded that ship once, in 1966, when most of his year was spent on Yankee Station, running air strikes into a war the country back home had already begun arguing about. We were guests. We were, by the time the sun went down, members of something called the Tailhook Club, which is the kind of honor that means everything to you and nothing to anyone you’ll explain it to later.

That night we went up to the flight deck for the carrier qualifications, and somebody put us right next to the meatball — the lens of amber light a pilot chases down the glide path in the dark, the only thing standing between a good landing and a very bad one.

Four instructor teams worked the deck around us, grading each approach, calling out deviations nobody but a trained eye could see. Every airplane that came aboard came in close enough to feel — gear down, hook down, throttle slammed to full the instant the wheels touched, because if you miss the wire at night on a moving ship, you don’t get to think about it, you just fly.

One of the pilots qualifying that night was a Lieutenant named Kara Hultgreen, twenty-nine years old, finishing third in a class of seven — solid, unspectacular by the numbers, which is exactly the kind of detail that becomes unbearable in hindsight. She would go on to become the first woman to serve as a carrier-based fighter pilot in the United States Navy. Fifteen months later, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1995, attempting to land an F-14 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, she would die, the first female fighter pilot in American military history to be killed flying. We didn’t know her. We knew her the way you know anyone on a flight deck at night — as a set of running lights and a sound, judged the same as everyone else by the men standing next to us with clipboards.

The next morning we were up before the sun because the ship had a refueling to do, the carrier and an oiler closing on each other from miles out, two enormous vessels pointed straight at one another like they meant it, until at the last possible moment both turned in tandem and the oiler slid in alongside, parallel, close enough that the lines shot across between them looked almost casual. We watched it from the bridge with the executive officer. Afterward the captain — a man who’d led the Blue Angels before he’d ever commanded the Constellation, and who still had the jacket with the right patches to prove it — called up the two sailors who’d run the operation and thanked them in front of everyone, the way a good leader does when he wants the rest of the crew to notice who deserves it.

Then we stayed on the bridge to watch the air wing leave. Eight F-18s — six Navy, two Marine Corps. The Navy pilots flew it the way you’re supposed to: catapult stroke, climb out, gone. The Marines went last, and the moment their wheels cleared the deck they hauled the airplanes into a vertical climb, straight up, like the sky owed them something and they intended to collect. The executive officer laughed beside us. “There go your tax dollars for this year,” he said, and none of us argued.

Then it was our turn. Strapped into the C-2 again, facing backward, braced against a catapult stroke that takes you from zero to flying speed in about two seconds. And then you stop in mid-air or so it feels. Disneyland never built anything like it.

I think about the wire sometimes — the one you catch, the one that stops you. Hultgreen caught it that week, while I stood close enough to hear the engines roar past us in the dark, indistinguishable from the five other sets of lights that came down before her. You don’t know, standing there, which ones you’re watching for the last time. I didn’t, that night. The airplane that carried us home is gone now too, and somehow it’s the airplane’s retirement, not anything grander, that brought all of it back.

Just came across this YouTube video of the final arrested carrier landing of the C-2 Greyhound. End of an era – with good personal memories!

Categories
Aircraft Aviation

Sutter’s Balloon

At Pinal Airpark, in the desert north of Tucson, the airplanes sit in rows the way old men sit in rows at a clinic, waiting for something that isn’t coming. A great many of them are 747s, parked here because the engines are worth more than the rest of the airframe and somebody, someday, may want the engines. Somewhere among the rows is one that’s shorter than its neighbors by nearly fifty feet, the line of its fuselage interrupted just behind the wing as though a piece had been folded in and stitched shut. This is a 747SP, and there were only forty-five of them ever built, because the airplane was, from the moment it was conceived, a compromise built to solve one problem and no other.

The problem belonged to Pan American World Airways. In the early seventies Pan Am wanted to fly nonstop from New York to Tehran, a route that did not then exist because no airliner Pan Am owned could cover the distance with a full load of passengers and still land with fuel in the tanks. Iran Air had the identical problem in reverse. Boeing had, at the time, the 747-100, an airplane that could carry nearly everybody in the world somewhere, but not necessarily that far. McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed had the DC-10 and the L-1011, three-engine widebodies built expressly for the medium-haul market the 747 was too big to serve efficiently, and Boeing, watching two competitors carve into territory it had assumed it owned outright, needed an answer that did not require designing a new airplane from the keel up. There was no time and, after the financial near-catastrophe of developing the original 747, no appetite for one.

The man who supplied the answer was Joe Sutter, the engineer who had led the 747 program from the start and who brought to it an instinct for solving problems by subtraction. Sutter’s idea was not to add a third engine, which several engineers in the room had assumed was the path, since removing one engine entirely was reckoned to save a third of the fuel burn and nearly seven tons of weight in one move. Sutter’s idea was to leave the engines alone and shorten the airplane instead. Take fuselage out fore and aft of the wing, forty-eight feet four inches of it, lighten the structure to match, simplify the flaps from the standard triple-slotted design to a single-slotted one, lengthen the tail surfaces to keep the shorter airplane stable, and let the weight savings buy range instead of payload. Boeing’s engineers called the result, informally and a little affectionately, Sutter’s Balloon. The company filed it as the 747SB, for Short Body, before settling on a name that did the marketing for itself: 747SP, for Special Performance.

The first one, manufacturer’s serial number 21022, rolled out of the Everett plant on May 19, 1975, and flew on July 4th, ten days ahead of a schedule that was already tight. Jack Waddell, who had flown the maiden flight of the original 747 six years earlier, was in the left seat again, and on that first flight he put the shortened airplane through a stall and a run up to Mach 0.92, a speed that had no business being associated with anything called a jumbo jet. In November, Boeing flew the fourth airframe nonstop from New York to Tokyo, 6,927 miles, with two hundred passengers aboard, and landed in Seattle’s backyard with more than thirty thousand pounds of fuel still in the wings, a fact Boeing’s marketing department repeated for years the way a man repeats the one good thing a difficult relative once said about him. The FAA signed off in February of 1976. Pan Am took delivery of the first production airplane, named Clipper Freedom, on March 5th, and put it into revenue service in April.

What the SP was for, it did well. A South African Airways SP flew nonstop from the Boeing plant in Seattle to Cape Town on its delivery flight in 1976, a record for an unrefueled commercial airplane that stood for more than a decade. Pan Am flew SPs around the world in well-publicized record attempts, and for thirteen years, until the 747-400 arrived in 1989, the SP held the title of longest-range airliner in the world. It is a title that means something only to the small number of people who keep track of such titles. Boeing had once projected sales in the neighborhood of two hundred. Fuel prices rose through the back half of the seventies and into the eighties, and the SP, despite its range, cost more to fly per seat than the standard 747 it had been built to outdo on a narrower set of routes. Twin-engine widebodies were coming that would solve the same range problem with half the engines to maintain. Production ran from 1976 to 1982, paused, and then opened once more in 1987 for a single VIP-configured order from the Abu Dhabi Amiri Flight, after which Boeing closed the line for good. Forty-five airplanes, full stop.

A handful of them found second careers that outlasted anything the airline business had planned for them. One, a former Pan Am airframe, was hollowed out by NASA and the German Aerospace Center and fitted with a hatch that opened in flight to expose a reflecting telescope two and a half meters across, an arrangement that let astronomers fly above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere and look at the sky the way the ground never quite allows. It flew as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy until 2022. As of this year, the airplanes still capable of flight number three: two belong to Pratt & Whitney Canada, which uses them as flying engine test beds, bolting experimental turbines onto a wing built half a century ago to prove an idea about subtraction; the third belongs to a casino company in Las Vegas, configured for fifty passengers, which is roughly the inverse of what Joe Sutter had in mind. The rest are scattered in places like Pinal Airpark, sitting in rows, shorter than their neighbors, waiting on engines somebody might still want.

Categories
Aircraft Bicycles Dayton Ohio History

The Ordinary

Part 1 of 3…

The man sitting atop a penny-farthing in the summer of 1879 is five feet off the ground. He weighs maybe one hundred and fifty pounds. The wheel beneath him is fifty-four inches across — taller than most of the children who stop to watch him pass. He got up there by running alongside the machine, hooking a foot on a small peg above the rear wheel, and vaulting himself upward in a single practiced motion. He will dismount the same way: a controlled fall forward, a hop, gravity made manageable by repetition. He has done this so many times that he no longer thinks about it. He thinks about the road ahead.

He is not a daredevil. He is a commuter.

The people on the sidewalk call his machine a penny-farthing, which is a joke dressed up as a name. A penny was the largest British coin; a farthing the smallest, worth one quarter of a penny. Seen from the street, the big front wheel and its tiny rear companion looked exactly like the two coins set side by side. Some wit had noticed, and the name stuck. The riders themselves refused it. They called their machine the ordinary — because to them, it was exactly that, the standard form, the rational machine, the obvious answer. They said ordinary with complete seriousness while everyone else was calling it loose change.

This tells you something about the people who rode it. And about the machine they thought they were riding.

The penny-farthing was not a circus prop. It was the highest expression of an engineering logic that had no other options. The pedals connected directly to the front axle. One rotation of the legs meant one rotation of the wheel. If you wanted to go faster, you needed a bigger wheel. It was that simple. It was that brutal. The geometry of human ambition ran directly through the circumference of that front wheel, and the front wheel kept getting bigger, and the riders kept climbing higher, until the whole enterprise teetered at the edge of what a human being could reasonably mount and survive.

The high-wheeler was not a mistake. It was the answer to a question no one yet knew how to ask differently.

The machines were built in Coventry, England, by craftsmen who bent and brazed steel frames by hand, fitted wire spokes under tension — a Starley innovation that made the wheel lighter than anyone expected — and pressed solid rubber tires onto rims by feel and experience. James Starley had essentially invented the industry in 1871, and Coventry became its Detroit: a concentration of metalworking skill that fed on itself, that knew things in its hands it couldn’t fully explain on paper.

Then, in the mid-1880s, someone put a chain on it.

The chain-and-sprocket drive seems obvious now, the way all elegant solutions seem obvious after the fact. Decouple the pedals from the wheel. Run a chain from a sprocket near the rider’s feet to a smaller sprocket at the rear axle. Suddenly the wheel didn’t have to be enormous — the gearing could do what only size had done before. The front wheel came down. The rear wheel came up to match it. The rider dropped five feet closer to the earth. The machine that emerged from this rearrangement was called, without any particular irony, the safety bicycle. It was safe. It was fast. It was something a woman in a skirt could ride, something a child could learn on, something that didn’t require a running vault to mount.

The ordinary had been a machine for athletes. The safety bicycle was a machine for everyone.

By the 1890s it had become something close to a religious phenomenon. Factories couldn’t keep up with demand. Doctors wrote approvingly of its effects on the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, the general disposition of the modern soul. Roads were improved because cyclists demanded it. The bicycle arrived before the automobile and prepared the world for it — softened the ground, culturally speaking, for the idea that ordinary people might move through space under their own mechanical power, faster than their feet could carry them, farther than their legs could take them. It was the first technology to feel like freedom to people who had never felt that way before.

In Dayton, Ohio, two brothers watched all of this happen and decided to get into the business.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were not, in the beginning, aviation pioneers. They were bicycle mechanics. They opened their shop in 1892, right at the peak of the craze, and what they learned there — the feel of a machine in motion, the gyroscopic principles of balance and control, the importance of getting the weight right, the importance of understanding what a human body can and cannot do at speed — was an education no university offered and no book could fully provide. They learned it with their hands. They learned it in the gap between the machine that existed and the machine that should exist.

The Wrights were not the only ones in Dayton thinking about bicycles. The Huffman Manufacturing Company had opened its doors the same year as the Wright Cycle Company — 1892, the peak of the craze, the same fever in the same city. Huffman would eventually become Huffy, and Huffy would eventually become the bicycle every American child found under the Christmas tree. Dayton was doing something in those years. It was a city that couldn’t stop thinking about how people move. The precision those Coventry craftsmen had developed — interchangeable parts, tight tolerances, the discipline of making things that had to work — migrated into every bicycle shop that followed, including a small one on West Third Street.

The chain drive had taught the world that the right mechanical insight could make an impossible thing ordinary. You didn’t have to accept the constraints you were handed. You could re-ask the question.

Orville and Wilbur had been paying attention.

When they went to Kitty Hawk in 1903, they brought with them a bicycle chain. It connected the engine to the propellers. The same principle — a sprocket, a chain, a transferred force — that had brought the penny-farthing rider down from his absurd perch now lifted two men off the ground for the first time in human history.

The man on the high-wheeler in 1879 did not know he was riding toward the Wright Brothers. He was just going to work. But the machine beneath him, the one everybody called loose change and he called ordinary, was already asking the question that would take twenty years to answer.

What happens when you finally get the wheel the right size?

The roller chain — the specific form that connected pedal to wheel and made the safety bicycle possible — was invented in Manchester in 1879 by a Swiss engineer named Hans Renold. He was refining a design that Leonardo da Vinci had sketched in a notebook around 1500. Leonardo could imagine it. He couldn’t make it. The world needed four hundred years of improving machine tools before anyone could hold the tolerances tight enough to build what Leonardo had already seen. The idea arrived centuries before the craft caught up. It is always this way.

Categories
Aircraft History

The Merlin

There is a sound that men who heard it never forgot. Not the roar exactly, though it roared. Something beneath the roar — a note, almost musical, that settled into the chest and stayed there. Four Rolls-Royce Merlins at full throttle on a Lancaster climbing out of Lincolnshire in the dark, and sixty years later old men would close their eyes trying to describe it and find they couldn’t, not quite, which was itself a kind of description.

The engine was a miracle of the wrong era. Liquid-cooled, sixty degrees of vee, twenty-seven liters of displacement producing over a thousand horsepower from something you could fit in a large kitchen. Rolls-Royce had been making engines since 1906, had learned things about metallurgy and tolerance and the behavior of superheated gases under compression that couldn’t be written down, only accumulated, passed hand to hand through decades of making things that had to work when nothing could be allowed to fail. The Merlin was the distillation of all of it.

And then — this is the part that stops you — they couldn’t build enough of them.

Britain in 1940 was a country running on nerve. The factories were working. The workers were willing. But the math was brutal and the math didn’t care about willingness. So someone made a phone call to Detroit. To Packard. A company that had spent thirty years building luxury automobiles for American industrialists, cars with interiors like drawing rooms on wheels, cars that announced their owners had arrived at exactly the place they had always intended to be. Packard looked at the Merlin blueprints, converted the tolerances from imperial to metric and back again, retooled their entire production line, and started building the engine that would power the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, and the P-51 Mustang.

Think about what that required. Not just the engineering, though the engineering was extraordinary. The belief required. That these tolerances mattered. That this particular arrangement of pistons and supercharger vanes and coolant passages was worth the disruption of an entire industrial operation. Packard’s engineers didn’t question the design. The design had already proven itself.

You built the Merlin because the Merlin worked.

The question — the one that takes longer to arrive — is what you do when the thing the Merlin is for doesn’t.

Arthur Harris believed.

That is the first thing to understand about him, and maybe the last. He believed in the bomber the way certain people believe in a technology so new and so powerful that the believing itself feels like vision. Strategic bombing would break Germany. Not assist in breaking Germany. Not contribute to a larger effort that would break Germany. Would, by itself, through the systematic destruction of German cities and the German will to continue, end the war. Harris had held this view before the war began and he held it after the evidence came in and he held it, unmodified, until he died in 1984.

This is not stupidity. The most costly certainties never are. Harris was shrewd, forceful, organizationally gifted, genuinely courageous in the sense that he was willing to send men to die for what he believed and knew he was sending them. He understood logistics, understood morale, understood the brutal arithmetic of attrition. What he could not do — what the structure of his certainty would not permit — was update.

The evidence arrived slowly enough that you could always explain it away. German war production increased through 1943, then through 1944, even as the bombers came night after night. The factories dispersed. The workers adapted. The morale that was supposed to crack showed instead a remarkable tendency to consolidate under pressure, the way populations sometimes do when the threat comes from the sky and cannot be reasoned with. The theorists had a model of human psychology that turned out to be wrong, and the model’s wrongness kept arriving in the data, and Harris kept flying.

Fifty-five thousand men.

Picture Harris alone. The commander in the early morning after the casualty reports come in, before the day’s work begins again. The loneliness of a certainty that has become structural — no longer a belief you hold but a belief that holds you, because the alternative is not just being wrong but having been wrong, which means all those boys went down over the Ruhr for a theory, which is a weight no living person can carry and continue to function. So you don’t revise. You recommit. You ask for more aircraft, more crews, more nights.

You build more Merlins.

This is the mechanism. Not malice. Not indifference. The certainty becomes self-protective, which means it becomes invisible, which means it becomes the water you swim in rather than a position you hold. Harris stopped being a man with a theory about bombing and became a man for whom bombing was the answer to every question, including the question of whether bombing was working.

The Lancaster crews knew something was wrong before Harris did. You could see it in the casualty rates, which they could calculate as well as anyone — better, actually, because they were doing the calculating with their own lives as the variable. Forty-four percent didn’t survive their tours. They knew this. They flew anyway, because courage doesn’t require certainty about the strategic framework, only about the man beside you and the mission tonight.

The Merlin started and you went.

The Merlin outlasted the theory. It kept flying for decades after the war, in civilian aircraft, in racing planes, in the occasional restored Lancaster that still tours airshows in Britain, where crowds gather on summer afternoons to watch it pass and hear, carried on the wind, that sound. The note beneath the roar. The thing that settles in the chest.

Beautiful, people say, watching it go.

And it is. It genuinely is.

What they couldn’t know — what none of them could know — was that the engine was the most reliable thing in the entire enterprise.

Categories
Aircraft Aviation Dayton Ohio

The Gravity of Wright Hall

There’s a building in Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, that I walked into as a child and never entirely walked out of.

It’s called Wright Hall, and it was designed by Orville Wright himself — his last major project before he died in January 1948, two years before the park even opened. He didn’t live to see anyone walk through the doors he helped design. But he had a very specific idea about what the experience should feel like when they did.

He wanted you to look down at the plane.

Not up at it, the way the Smithsonian would later hang the 1903 Flyer from the ceiling. Down. The 1905 Wright Flyer III sits low in that room, close to the ground, positioned so a visitor can lean over and see exactly how the pilot lay across it — stomach-down, nestled into a hip cradle, with a joystick-like lever in one hand and a paddle in the other. No seat. No cockpit. Just a man flat on a machine made of spruce and muslin and wire, trusting himself to the sky.

I didn’t understand any of that when I was a kid. What I understood was that you didn’t talk loudly in that room.

The feeling was immediate and hard to name then, though I can name it now: it felt like a church. The building had been made for one thing and one thing only — to hold this object — and that specificity of purpose had given it a kind of sanctity. Other museums have artifacts behind glass with plaques. Wright Hall had a presence at its center, the same way a cathedral has an altar. Everything in the room was organized around the plane. The light. The silence. The way adults moved more carefully than they did outside.

The Flyer III is the one the Wright brothers themselves considered their most important aircraft. Not the famous 1903 machine at Kitty Hawk — the one that made the front pages, that answered the question of could it be done. This one. The one that asked what came next. By October 1905, Wilbur flew it for nearly forty minutes before running out of gas. It could bank, turn, circle, come back and land where it started. It became the first practical airplane — the proof that flight wasn’t just a stunt, but a technology, the first tentative sketch of the world we’d build on top of it.

Eighty percent of the materials in that plane are original. The rest were made to replace parts lost or borrowed. The 1905 engine is in there. Orville oversaw every detail of the restoration and then, before it was finished, died. The plane was completed without him. It opened to the public on June 3, 1950, and the crowds swarmed in.

What I keep thinking about, decades later, is the deliberateness of Orville’s final act — the decision to spend his last years not flying, not inventing, but making sure one specific machine would be seen correctly by people who hadn’t been born yet. He chose the building. He chose the angle. He chose to put the plane on the ground so you’d have to lean over it, so the mechanics of it — the hip cradle, the geometry of control — would be legible rather than merely impressive.

He was trying to explain something.

Growing up in Dayton meant growing up in the long shadow of a thing that had happened there before you were born. The Wright Brothers were not myth in Dayton the way they might be elsewhere. They were local — specific, biographical, connected to real streets. The bike shop where they worked the figures out. The cow pasture at Huffman Prairie where they practiced. The house where Orville lived until he died. All of it still there, or mostly there, embedded in the ordinary geography of a mid-sized Ohio city.

But Wright Hall was different. Wright Hall was where the thing itself lived. And the thing itself, seen up close, was smaller than I expected and more fragile and more terrifying. Two pusher propellers driven by chains. A twelve-horsepower engine. Gaps in the ribs of the wing you could see daylight through.

The altar, when you finally stood over it, turned out to be the most improbable thing in the world: a contraption that barely looked like it could stay together, let alone in the air. And that, I think, is exactly what Orville wanted you to feel. Not awe at the achievement from a safe distance. Proximity to the audacity.

He made a room for it. I walked in as a child and it got into me somehow, that room, that plane, that deliberate act of making something matter. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Categories
Aircraft Aviation Memories

My Ride in a Goodyear Blimp

Today’s Sunday New York Times has an article written by Ken Belson about the 100 year anniversary of the Goodyear blimp. Curiously it’s titled “No Drone Can Compare With The Goodyear Blimp”.

Many years ago – in high school I think – I took a ride in a Goodyear blimp. We departed from the Oakland Airport. My friend’s father had entered a contest at a Goodyear tire store and he won a ride for two on one of their blimps. He was gracious to suggest I join his son for the ride instead of taking it for himself.

My memories are faded but I do remember a few things. Like how weird it was having a team of guys catching ropes to land and moor the thing. How it had one wheel at the rear of the cabin and it would weathervane in the wind around its mooring mast. How the interior of the cabin had these sloping sidewalls and we could look down easily out of the windows.

But what I most remember was how the cabin of the blimp swung gently side to side. It was such an unnerving movement to be floating and rolling at the same time (and not silently as the two piston engines on the side of the cabin made quite a racket!).

I’m sure I have some pictures of our ride somewhere but so many of those old pre-digital era photos are pretty much lost to history in the depths of storage boxes somewhere at home! Maybe one day I’ll find them before I’m gone and delight in a new flood of memories that they bring back!

Meanwhile it turns out there’s an Instagram feed for the blimps that’s mentioned in the New York Times story today.

Categories
Aircraft Dayton Ohio

Constellations

Lockheed 749 Constellation Airliner (aircraft; aeroplanes)

As a kid, I grew up in Dayton, Ohio – home of the Wright Brothers, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the original Air Force Museum, etc. There was a lot of aviation energy in Dayton!

One of things I remember doing with my Dad was driving out (usually on a Sunday – he liked to go for a Sunday drive) to the Dayton Airport which was in Vandalia, Ohio.

We could get close enough to be able to see the airliners coming and going – and the most striking of those back in my era were the TWA Lockheed Constellations. These four-engine beauties were quite a sight to behold – with beautiful streamlined lines, four big rotary engines, that triple tail, and striking red and white TWA colors. Wikipedia notes:

The April 1957 OAG shows 73-weekday departures: 56 TWA, 13 American, and 4 Lake Central. TWA had two nonstops to New York but no other nonstops reached beyond Chicago-Detroit-Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Cincinnati. The first jets were TWA Convair 880s from Chicago in January 1961.

A beautifully restored Lockheed Constellation arrived this week at the annual EAA AirVenture 2023 event at Oshkosh, WI. It brought back good memories of those days with my Dad at the airport in Vandalia. Beautiful to watch this lovely restored “Connie” arrive and land at Oshkosh. This particular Connie is restored as an Air Force VC-121A, a VIP transport model nicknamed Columbine II first used as Air Force One back in the Eisenhower administration.

Here’s a great article about learning to fly the Constellation.

The Wikipedia note above reminded also that I first saw the Convair 880 jetliner at the airport in Dayton. I always thought the Convair 880 (and the later 990) were the most beautiful jetliners in terms of design!

Here’s a good article about piloting the Convair 880!

The 880 was the fastest of the first-generation jet airliners. We could cruise it at Mach .85 and the Mmo was .88. Some thought that is where Convair came up with the number 880. Others thought it was because the passenger cabin had 88 seats and 88 windows. Your guess is as good as mine…

The author goes on to tell a good story about meeting his future wife – “Sharon is the only thing I ever stole from TWA.”

Ah, so many good memories were triggered by that Oshkosh arrival this week!