The Wandering Minstrel

Clickable image: T-38 Talons on Flatbeds

Last week, I posted about seeing aircraft being hauled on flatbed trucks. In the comments to the article, DrJim and I speculated about the destination for the Talons. We thought either a rich collector or perhaps a museum like Pima Air Museum in Tucson.

Today, the Better Half snapped another photo of a third Talon on a flatbed (bottom) in the same location we saw the first two. The two at the top, each with a different tail number, were headed out last week.

I now speculate that the Talons are headed for the Davis-Monthan “Boneyard,” in Tucson, AZ. There are a couple of places near Tucson that aircraft are ‘mothballed’ after their service life. Davis-Monthan and Pinal Airpark in Marana. The former is used for military aircraft while the latter for retired commercial airliners and such. Since this is the third military T-38 Talon that we have seen near I-10 in Arizona, I now strongly suspect that Davis-Monthan is the destination.

I believe that this is a record for me. Well, not quite Guinness record-worthy, but how many out there have seen three aircraft on flatbeds along Interstate 10 in one day? Two Northrop T-38 Talon supersonic trainers going somewhere and a bent up Cessna on the flatbed headed to somewhere else.

Clickable image. We’re on the road again and won’t be very verbose for a few days. We’ll try and get something on the blog daily, though.

Today marks the 106th anniversary of powered heavier than air flight. Orville and Wilbur Wright, after many years of experimentation, finally slipped the surly bonds of Earth on that day, when they successfully flew their invention four times from the sands of Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Clickable image: The Wright Flyer lifting off the launch rail 106 years ago.

I managed to travel to Kitty Hawk in 1993 to visit the place where it all started on the 90th year following the historic events. As a pilot and flight instructor, I took special interest in the Wright Brothers. On another trip to the Washington, D.C. area, I visited the Flyer and the Vin Fiz in their permanent exhibits in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum. I have some old VHS-C footage of Kitty Hawk and the Smithsonian around here somewhere, but no way to play VHS any more. It’s too bad that You Tube hadn’t been invented back then.

From WikiPedia:

The Wright Flyer (often retrospectively referred to as Flyer I, 1903 Flyer and occasionally Kitty Hawk) was the first powered aircraft designed and built by the Wright brothers. The flight of the Wright Flyer is recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics, as “the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight”. [more]

The Better half and I took a ride down to Point Vicente today. It was a nice clear and warm Thanksgiving Day and a lot of other people had the same idea. The air was clear, the ocean was calm and you could easily see Catalina Island across the channel to the south. To the west south west, if you really tried, you could make out Santa Barbara Island, about 45 miles offshore.

It was also a nice day to jump in your Boeing Stearman open cockpit biplane and take a flight along the shoreline. I took this photo of the plane as it rounded the point near the Lighthouse. It’s painted in the original pre-WW2 Army Air Corps primary trainer color and markings.

This is Wikipedia’s summary of the Boeing Stearman Model 75:

The Stearman (Boeing) Model 75 is a biplane, of which at least 9,783 were built in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s as a military trainer aircraft. Stearman became a subsidiary of Boeing in 1934. Widely known as the Stearman, Boeing Stearman or Kaydet, it served as a Primary trainer for the USAAF, as a basic trainer for the USN (as the NS & N2S), and with the RCAF as the Kaydet throughout World War II. After the conflict was over, thousands of surplus aircraft were sold on the civil market. In the immediate post-war years they became popular as crop dusters and as sports planes.

If you have a pair of red-blue or red-cyan 3D glasses, you might be interested in a 3D picture of this very same airplane that I posted last month on the family blog. It’s a beauty. If you don’t have the glasses, the 2D version is here.

Just off of Interstate 10 in Quartzsite, AZ, there is a park dedicated to the concept of freedom through strength. That’s something that the Obamination seems to forget - we’re free because we are willing to FIGHT for freedom.

This is an F-4 “Phantom” (clickable image) - sometimes referred to as the “Wild Weasel.” This remarkable aircraft was deployed as Navy Squadron VX-4 at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, CA, while I was stationed there as an aviation electronics technician. Seeing these here today took me back to the days when we were proud to serve under a Democratic administration headed up by JFK.

Today? Not so much.

We stopped by the Pima Air Museum in Tucson, AZ today. We would have gone in except for one minor “No Firearms Allowed” placard. Screw it. I can see the good stuff through the fence, be armed and save the 25 dollar admission ripoff for the two of us.

There is this one good shot that the Better Half got of an A7 with a C-130 in a low-pass in the distance.

Sweet. Clickable image.

On our way to do some grocery shopping, the Better Half and I stopped at the Western Museum of Flight at Louis Zamperini Field in Torrance, California. The museum sports a modest, but eclectic, collection of interesting aviation artifacts, aircraft and memorabilia.

Clickable image: one of two M39 Cannons installed.

Naturally, I was drawn to this exhibit of the Colt-Browning “Pontiac” M39 Cannon installed in a Northrop F-5A “Freedom Fighter” in the overcrowded hangar of the museum:

The Pontiac M39 was a 20 mm single-barreled revolver cannon developed for the United States Air Force in the late 1940s. It was used on a number of fighter aircraft from the early 1950s through the 1980s.

The M39 was developed by the Springfield Armory, based on the World War II–era design of the German Mauser MG 213, a 20 mm (and 30 mm) cannon developed for the Luftwaffe, but not used in combat. The same design inspired the British ADEN cannon and the French DEFA, but American designers chose a smaller 20 mm round to increase the weapon’s rate of fire and muzzle velocity at the expense of hitting power.

Initially designated the T-160, the new gun was installed for combat testing on a number of F-86 Sabre aircraft under the “GunVal” program in late 1952, and used in action over Korea in early 1953. It was subsequently adopted as standard armament of the F-86H fighter-bomber, F-100 Super Sabre, F-101A and F-101C Voodoo, and the F-5 Freedom Fighter. Current models of the F-5 Tiger II still use the M39A2 version of this weapon.

For the past 15 hours, this British Airways B-747 has been cruising over the higher latitudes of the globe and finally, finally is on approach to Los Angeles International Airport. Inside this craft are up to 450 cranky, tired passengers and a spent aircrew, all of whom are glad that the ordeal is almost over.

Transcontinental flights are like that, trust me.

The better half and I visited her Mom a day early for Mothers Day today. Her house is about two miles east of the Airport and you can see a continuous flow of inbound aircraft. I also took pictures of two other 747s - one Lufthansa and one Air Pacific Fiji. That’s about one thousand three hundred and fifty tired and cranky passengers arriving at LAX today.

I don’t miss international air travel a bit, especially in a post-9/11 airport environment.

Click on the image for a 1024×768 close-up.