Holden's Lightning Flight(en.wikipedia.org) |
Holden's Lightning Flight(en.wikipedia.org) |
>Some years after the incident, my hidden fears of high speed flight came to the surface and I had to spend two periods in hospital. I had not come to terms with the emotional side of the event. To return to my wife and family, after five close encounters with death, was indeed a miraculous experience, but I had not been honest with myself, to accept it as such, so I needed psychiatric help. I could recall the technicalities of the flight without any hang-ups, but was unwilling to talk about that emotional side of the ordeal until I was placed under medical drugs and to bring these emotions to the surface. That was a rewarding experience and it gave me a much better understanding of people who might need that kind of help, after similar unfortunate occurrences
http://www.nzrafaaa.dx.am/Halton%20Wheel%20Issue%2021%20Sept...
The most he said of it was: “it was a real hot ship”
This fellow had stories for days.
Can we not now envision threats moving faster than a Concorde?
During WWII, a flight of P-38 Lightnings and B-17s made an emergency landing on the Greenland ice. After being buried under almost 300 feet of ice for 50 years, one of the P-38s was pulled up and restored to full flying condition [1]
There's countless stories of old warbirds being pulled out of swamps and lakes and being flown again.
Interestingly, warbird restoration became a bit of an industry in New Zealand during the 90's, in part due to a bloke called Tim Wallis [2], who made his fortune in 60s and 70s from live deer recovery (basically grabbing wild deer from a helicopter) and later on deer farming.
He ended up crashing a Spitfire in 1996 (he also crashed a helicopter and broke his back 20 years earlier), which left him unable to walk for some time and permanently unable to fly, unlike the Spitfire which was restored over almost 20 years and is now in flying condition again.
Tragically, a few years back, he lost two sons in separate helicopter crashes a few months apart. Helicopter pilots in New Zealand don't have a long life expectancy. If you've ever seen them flying, it's no surprise [3]. There's old pilots, and there's bold pilots, but there aren't any old, bold pilots...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier_Girl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329703 (2 comments, 8 years ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7963421 (no comments, 7 years ago)
I guess that makes certain Star Wars scenes a bit more believable.
The next morning the American ship that had been involved in the collision was nowhere to be found. The British admiral asked the Americans where it was, and was told that the captain had reported the collision and been ordered to return to port for an investigation.
He was shocked- earlier in his career, a ship he commanded had been involved in a similar incident. The letter he received from a senior admiral in response to it began with "Today, you became a better sailor..."
- Computer programming
- Landing an airplane (was student pilot for about 250 landings, until..
- Parenthood
- Expressing myself effectively in writing, and
- Counting the number of things that I need to improve.
)
- Counting the number of parentheses needed to close the s-exp.
I've reached the stage in my programmer's career where I look back on stuff in horror: architecture astronautical sins, foolish arrogance, too much complexity...
Although for good programmers, hubris might be a virtue:
The first reason was ICBMs becoming the dominant form of nuclear deterrent. The A-12 was never going to be built into an interceptor that could shoot down an ICBM.
The second was the Nike Hercules program. They took the Nike surface to air missiles, enlarged them, and put a nuke on top of them. This did a reasonable job of solving the ICBM problem, and also solved any problem that would have been solved with interceptors. There were 200-300 Nike Hercules sites in the continental US, plus a non-nuclear export version that had a 1,000lb conventional payload which was deployed in many other NATO/US allied countries.
The end result is that even though there's still a need and a market for air superiority and multirole fighters, the high speed interceptor is not a role that exists in a modern military anymore. Much like the battleship for instance.
(edit: note that the fastest strategic bomber built by the Soviet Union was the mach 2.05 Tu-160, which is slow enough to be intercepted by the mach 2.5 F-15 or the mach 2.4 F-14.)
But it was just meant as a little internet humor snark rather than a direct attack for a rather innocuous comment on a historical wikipedia link on HN.