September 20, 2005

• Who needs smartenin' up now, eh? Mr no-comments! *shakes fist*
• This is freaking awesome. I will have to show this link to my dad, who nearly cried the first time he saw the Wright flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis at the Air and Space museum. /comes from a long line of airplane geeks
• This is what I get for posting five minutes before I leave work. Gah.
• [this is good]
• If you build this, you will be the coolest 70-year-old kid on the block. Or the township, even.
• I just saw a replica of the glider's wing at an exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum last week. They had a sample of the original material from the 1902 glider. It made me think, "all I need is some glue, balsam wood, and pieced-together parachute pants from the 80's to construct on of these babies!" Great link Capt!
• Capt. Renault, this is an excellent link, and will keep Mr. Mickey busy for the next few years. meredithea, I cried at Kitty Hawk and I'm not even an airplane geek!
• Yeah, my Paw Paw was an airplane mechanic, and he could identify a plane just by its *sound* in the sky (oh, that's a 7-4-7, that's a DC-10...) My dad has made entire photo albums (that are mixed in with the family photos) full of airplane pictures. I'm not as big of an airplane geek as them, but I do have a favorite plane. It's the Vin Fiz. It's the first plane to cross the US. It took 84 days to cross the country and crashed about a million times. (So many times that the airplane was completely re-built over the course of the trip! I think it had like 2 original parts left on it at the end.) When I was a kid I thought that was hilarious, but as I have grown up I see that dogged determination as kind of brave.
• By sound, eh? Impressive. I could only do silhouettes.
• You should see some of the home-builts and kitplanes available out there. My dad has been obsessed with building a small flying boat for years now, so he is always picking up kit plane magazine. What boggles my mind is the fact that there are kit jet planes available. Call me crazy, or a wimp, but there is no way in hell you would catch me trying to fly a jet (or even one of those high-speed prop planes, for that matter) that was built by some guy in a garage. Sorry. I just don't have that much faith in my (or any hobby builder's) construction abilities to fly in something that goes 400-600mph and up. Come to think of it, I'll pass on the home built 'copters, too. I just hope he never actually gets around to building one, because I don't want to go up in it . . . .
• Capt. Renault: Yeah, it was pretty fun to watch him do it. The thing was, his hearing was shot after so many years on the tarmac (is that the right word? Where the airplanes hang out) and hanger without hearing protection. I don't think he was pulling our leg, though -- my other Paw Paw, who was a flight engineer, was just as impressed as we were. I guess he just knew "his" airplanes :)
• meredithea, my father-in-law is also an aircraft engineer and has albums and albums of aircraft. My personal favourite is the Sopwith Camel, because I love that smell of burning castor oil, which is what it runs on, and the way the rotary engine tilts the plane to the right every time it's revved. Said f-i-l also built a full-sized taxiing (but not flying) Stukka in his back yard a few years back for an air show. It lives there still, in pieces after a storm rolled it end-over-end.
• tracicle: wow! My dad used to build the little model planes (which he would labor on endlessly, then crash spectacularly the first time they flew, much to his horror and my delight) when I was a kid, but he never built to that scale!
• I'll put a photo on flickr sometime, if you like. He's exceptionally proud of it, not surprisingly. He gets right into the recreation stuff: the first show was themed WW2 Egypt and he helped build a giant pyramid for the VIP tent, a sphinx, and all those iconic-type structures you'd expect. The last show was WW2 Paris, and the team built a downsized Arc d' Triomphe, the VIP tent was fashioned on a Moulin Rouge-esque can-can theatre topped with a working windmill and a replica Wurzburg radar dish. We had a great time helping. And I painted the German's iron crosses on the wings, yay me. :) My dad built a model yacht way back when I was little, and I remember the maiden voyage ended about 30 seconds after release when it sank into the estuary mud.
• Great stories tracicle! (Would love to see a photo of that).
• Yes, I'd love to see pictures! He sounds like one of those people who can build anything, and I'm always jealous about that (I can *wreck* anything, but that's an entirely different skill set!) I emailed my dad the site on the FPP, and he emailed me back that he really wants an Apollo spacecraft to put in the back yard.
• Wow. That's amazing. I'd love to make the Mercury capsule -- not for the backyard, but just leave it half-buried in the woods. Let some kids find it.
• Oh -- Nova had a show on last night, all about the Wrights, and about Wright Wreplicas. Good stuff. [Link includes neat-o interactive thingy on piloting the '03 Flyer.}
• The Stuka: I got told off for putting an extra 'k' in there. Oh, and here's a site with plans for building your own boat.
• That stuka is aces!!! I love the stuka, used it in a couple of my paintings. William Gibson described it as the perfect Nazi plain - so angular, ugly and psychologically frightening. I compared it to a Spitfire, which is obviously much more graceful and designed as a fighter, not a ground attack weapon. It also takes about twice as long to draw anywhere near accurately, as it's all curves. The stuka is just straight lines... Shucks, listen to me yammering on...
• Thanks for the link to the photo! Nice job indeed. Imagine it would be fun sitting in the cockpit, letting the imagination run wild...
• That Stuka is da bomb!
• Dammit, I lost the bid.