I grew up not far from the Boeing Plant in Renton, WA. My parents worked and met there. My uncle worked there. He once took me on a tour of a 707 being built for the King of Saudi Arabia….(a “dual seat” side by side gold plated set of “thrones” were present in the head)…He also showed me the very simple “DB Cooper” lock installed on B-727s to keep jumpers from leaving before arriving at the jet way at the planned destination.

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B-52Ds in Action over Vietnam But…the big news is the B-52A made it’s first flight 53 years ago today. 3 were made, and Boeing used them for flight testing.The story of the genesis of this aircraft, from the initial design with propellers, to a radical new idea, hatched out of the requirements placed by the USAF, overnight, in a hotel room by the Boeing design team, to install 8 jet engines instead, brought this country a flexible, solid aircraft that will serve almost a full century in the military.Over the years, my path in life crossed that of the B-52. Living on Guam from ’67 to ’71, I watched the D models, bellies painted shiny black, take off and land at Anderson AFB, wing tips flapping up and down. One time, while on that base for a swim meet, a B-52 lost a wing just after lifting off the very long runway. It barrel rolled to it’s death on the reef at the north end of the island, taking it’s crew to a watery grave.

My uncle was a navigator in the C-5A Galaxy. One of his friend was a B-52 Bombardier. Jim bombed out of Thailand, and later Guam. One night, we had dinner with him at the Anderson O Club and he told me the last B-52 rolled off the line in 1962 and all of them had been reskinned twice and had flown over the originally planned lifespan for the large strategic bomber. The white paint on the bottoms of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers cost $75/gallon (we’re talking late 60’s dollars here) and was designed to reflect the heat of a nuclear explosion the aircraft would be speeding to escape, with no hope of outrunning all of the blast effects. Later, Jim took us on a flight line tour of his planes, which included a trip to the bomb farm. The ordnance guys handed us yellow grease pencils and let us write on the built up dumb bombs on the trailers getting ready to head out to the revetments to be loaded. I used to see the vertical contrails on the western horizon in the early afternoon, then hear them in the landing pattern an hour or so later. It was a puzzle piece in the daily life of that small Pacific island.

The parent of one of the swimmers from the Anderson team was an Air Force photographer. He got me a 1/2″ high stack of 8″x11″ pictures of B-52s, covering a full mission from bombing up, through the attack, refueling on the return leg and landing. Not sure where they went, but he took most all of them. Official stuff we’re talking here.

The evolution of this fine airframe is remarkable and in the last few years I read we will keep the B-52 in service until about 2050. As a Surface Warrior Officer, the B-52s found a maritime mission by being outfitted to carry the AGM-84 Harpoon Anti-Ship Missiles. Yes, we had the P-3s, the S-3Bs and the A-6Es to do that, but nothing says Doom like many more than 4 sea skimmers (I think they could bring 12 to the party) headed to you on a multi-axis, coordinated time-on-top attack, all from one platform with some serious “on station” time.

As a student at the Naval War College, I read and read and read, then read some more. One of the books I came across, which is excellent reading from the “other side” was “A Vietcong Memoir” by Truong Nhu Tang, the VC Minister of Justice. He described being on the receiving end of the carpet bombing of B-52 raid. It made strong men go insane.

My uncle spent a tour on Vietnam on logistics missions. He said when a B-52 raid was going on, the vibration, even from many, many miles away, would cause your chair to basically in the stay about an inch off the floor because of the severe vibrations….

There is so much to the history of this plane that served in Vietnam, Desert Storm, the GWOT and will be flying long after us old reader may be gone. It is a testament to the genius of those men and women of Boeing, who gave the American taxpayer a lot of return on our investment and the enemy, lots of bang for our bucks:

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A Prius? 100 mph? YEEHAW! Maybe Tom Cruise should get one to have a ground based version of his P-51 Mustang…

But…I wonder how this flies in the Global Warming discussions at the family dinner table?

July 4th. I don’t have a specific sea story relating to a 4th of July I was somewhere where something profoundly patriotic was done for me. I was pretty lucky, with all my deployments, I was home most summers. Cruises generally happened in Oct-Apr time frame it seemed, so even when on sea duty, I was stateside. Dennis Prager, in his column yesterday, suggests that America needs a 4th of July Seder. Having once attended a Passover seder, I agree.The purpose of the seder is to recount the history of the people, including playing out certain skits and conducting some set rituals in remembrance of the moment.Dennis begins his editorial thusly:

Perhaps the major reason Jews have been able to keep their national identity alive for 3,000 years, the last 2,000 of which were nearly all spent dispersed among other nations, is ritual. No national or cultural identity can survive without ritual, even if the group remains in its own country.

Americans knew this until the era of anti-wisdom was ushered in by the baby boomer generation in the 1960s and ’70s. We always had national holidays that celebrated something meaningful.

When I was in elementary school, every year we would put on a play about Abraham Lincoln to commemorate Lincoln’s Birthday and a play about George Washington to commemorate Washington’s Birthday. Unfortunately, Congress made a particularly foolish decision to abolish the two greatest presidents’ birthdays as national holidays and substituted the meaningless Presidents Day. Beyond having a three-day weekend and department store sales, the day means nothing.

Columbus Day is rarely celebrated since the European founding of European civilization on American soil is not politically correct.
[…]

He goes on to discuss how holidays such as Christmas have been plowed under, not to be named or discussed in public, by the plowshares of the brain washingpolitically correct thought process. It is detrimental to lose this memory, of how our Nation grew from small settlements along the shore, experimented for one year in what later became to be called “Communism,” and was rejected because it almost killed them, of how the right to be equal, laid out on this day in 1776, has become far closer to universal for all our citizens, that it every has been in any country in history. How only the rich, landed men used to determine our fate and course in history, and now we all have that right to voice out opinion at the ballot box. How the error of slavery was understood, and rectified, without foreign powers coming across our shores to tell us how to become more civilized. How millions of young men have left their families and gone overseas, never to see their homeland alive again, because there was something bigger at stake than their lives.

We all know it, but how long, now with only about 1% of our men and women and their families comprise the military that hands our food, candy, soccer balls and encouragement to the oppressed around the world?

Yes, a seder in the name of Freedom is something worth looking into. Dennis ends with a challenge:

[..]
But someone — or many someones — must come up with a July Fourth Seder. A generation of Americans with little American identity — emanating from little American memory — has already grown into adulthood. The nation whose founders regarded itself as the Second Israel must now learn how to survive from the First.

Could you be one of those “someones?”

My suggestion: It all begins with family and friends gathered in the presence of ,a href=”http://www.townhall.com/columnists/BenShapiro/2007/07/04/the_stars_and_stripes_forever”>Old Glory, standing if they are able, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by the reading of two documents; The Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address.

I urge you to consider this effort by Dennis Prager, and forward your suggestions.

Research indicates the severity of lightning in Africa may directly foretell the severity of hurricanes….

Of course, the research is being done in Israel and doesn’t blame the Atlantic storms on Global Warming®….

Aside from the snarking value, this has real possibilities of alerting the Atlantic region further in advance of really nasty blows headed our way.

H/T: Post-Postmodernist Blog

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The ‘CLEVER’ Car I first saw this on “Future Cars.” It gets my attention at several levels, like 2D fast maneuvering, great gas mileage, looks like a 2 seat fighter (that’s the “pure” F/A-18 pilots).More info here, here, and here, with the project main page being here.Using compressed natural gas, you’d be getting some serious distance for your energy dollar. The main site has some great cutaways of the frame structure, the steering and tilting systems, and other info….

H/T: A Soldier’s Perspective Blog

Again, stumbling over links:

GI Film Festival scheduled for 16-18 April, 2008.

Check out the people that will be there on the home page. Michael Yon is one of them!

Army Civil Affairs at work.

Army Sgt. Valetin DeLeon, a civil affairs specialist with 351st CACOM, opens up a soccer pump to inflate a soccer ball for a child at the Kapisa Orphanage in the Mahmud Raqi district of Afghanistan during a humanitarian aid drop on June 27. Photo by Melissa Escobar.Servicemembers supply aid to orphanage

3 July 07
By Pfc. Melissa M. Escobar
22nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan— Backpacks jammed full with school supplies, soccer balls, teddy bears, toys, hygiene kits, sandals and shoes were delivered to an Afghan orphanage in Mahmud Raqi district by members of the Bagram Provincial Reconstruction Team June 27.

National Guard Soldiers with the 351st Civil Affairs Command from Mountain View, Calif., along with the 1175th Military Police Company, 205th MP Battalion from Mississippi geared up and armed themselves with humanitarian supplies.

Army Sgt. Valetin DeLeon, a civil affairs specialist with 351st CACOM, opens up a soccer pump to inflate a soccer ball for a child at the Kapisa Orphanage in the Mahmud Raqi district of Afghanistan during a humanitarian aid drop on June 27. Photo by Melissa Escobar. In the three months that the team has been in country, this was the first time they visited the orphanage.

“The governor of the province asked us to visit the orphanage,” explained Army Capt. Jordan J. Berry, team leader with 351st CACOM. “The mission was a good-will gesture to strengthen ties with the community.”
[…]

Read it all.

It seems the best bet to keep spares out of the wrong hands is to clip “them” into little bitty pieces.

After all, the only country besides the US to ever fly the F-14 TOMCAT happens to be the guys who like to spread mayhem via the back-channels, hoping they won’t get caught. So, make them into Bud cans and our valiant aviators and missileers won’t lose sleep over splashing an American icon, even if it wears a desert colored paint scheme.

Link: sevenload.com

Lex, I’m sure will be sneaking to his computer late at night, Guinness in hand, to watch this over, and over, and over in the dark…

Update: See, what did I tell you? But to be fair, he went one better…Maybe the F-14 challenges his fighter-pilotness or sumthin’ (not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

Bad? Lebanese Hez’b’allah special ops in Iraq, at the direction if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, specifically to kill/capture American soldiers.

Good? A very direct link of Iranian involvement in combat operations against us (bad medicine to swallow for hose who just want to “talk” to Iran).

Better? Michael Ware of CNN is doing this report!

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