Monday

What to do during the debate.


Tonight during the debate I'd advise everyone that, while the media is focused on the political and the politically correct, you should do something just the opposite. In my case, I'll not be watching a moment of the debate... instead I'll be watching a movie that could NEVER be made today... Blazing Saddles!

Of course, any Mel Brooks movie will do... but this one is the most politically incorrect ever. Thus, I love it. Saw it in the theater in 1974 among a VERY mixed race crowd- and we all laughed our asses off. Remember those days, when we could all laugh at each other, and all laugh together? Those days before everyone seemed so spring-loaded to the "offended position."

Frankly, the only thing that offends me are people who are always offended by stuff.

Sunday

What's wrong with this world? Here's a sample.

If you ask "What is wrong with this world?" ... well...

A while ago a storm blew through our neighborhood and a stray beach ball came bouncing down the street and over our fence and lodged in our yard. On the ball is written the following:

"WARNING: USE ONLY UNDER COMPETENT SUPERVISION"

 It is printed there in, as best I can count, 27 different languages!


A note to humanity, from me... IT'S JUST A F%#&ING BEACH BALL!

A message to the President... as if he'd care




During the first presidential debate on Wednesday night, October 3rd, 2012 the current President of the United States once again took a shot at “corporate jets.” When talking about Exxon and big oil the president chose to hold up general aviation executive aircraft as if they were a red flag pointing to part of what is wrong with America. This, from someone who routinely and sometimes frivolously makes use of the world’s most exclusive and America’s most expensive executive jet.

My personal revulsion for this demagoguery of executive jets and their users is rooted in the fact that I have a long history with that part of general aviation- from the VERY bottom, up.

Folks who know me, know full well that I took a full 10 years to work my way through the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. By work-my-way-through I mean that I paid for 100% of the cost from my own pocket and with whatever student aid I could scrape up. Working jobs from running a cash register at Kmart to washing rental cars to walking the floors at hotels, I wore a lot of name-tags and ate a lot of Rice-a-roni. As a part of that process I spent some of those best working days employed at a Falcon Jet service center.

In 1978, my first summer away from school, I got fed up with National Car Rental and car-hiking at MBS International Airport and walked across the field to Hangar 6 and a company called Airflight and Serve-A-Plane, which was a Falcon Jet service center. They hired me as a clerk in the parts department. For the majority of that summer I shuffled, received and stocked tiny components for the dozens of Falcon Jets that came and went through Hangar 6. Those evil “Corporate Jet” owners and their sinful machines paid for nearly a full semester of my college.

The following year, 1979, was the first time that I went so broke that the university would not allow me to register. Thus, I returned to Hangar 6 and Airflight, looking for work. This time they hired me as the “hangar rat.” For those of you who may not know it, the hangar rat’s job is to “Empty what’s full, fill what’s empty and everything else, ya’ paint yellow.” Thus I took out trash, mopped the hangar floor and cleaned the aircraft when they were finished with whatever maintenance had been needed. I earned extra cash by washing the jets and copped overtime by working on-call to do after-hours turn arounds of Dow Corning’s fleet. Likewise, when a big project came in, I was tasked with “dropping panels” or taking a speed-handle and unscrewing access panels on the aircraft. In doing that lowest of the low level jobs, I earned enough money to pay off what I owed to the university and finance yet another semester of my education.

Finally in the summer of 1985 I was hired for the third time to work at Hangar 6, where the company was now called Aero Services. This time, I was hired to work as a mechanic under the shop’s certificate. The task was one that I’m very proud to be able to say that I was a part of- the first ever “D” inspection done on a Falcon 20. This check involved removing everything that could be removed from the airframe, and inspecting, replacing, and re-installing it. And I mean everything, was removed, the windows, every stitch of the interior, the landing gear, the engines- even the fuel tanks had their bottoms dropped and were cleaned by a special team sent up from Florida. We were acting on procedures sent fresh from the engineers at Dassault. It was new stuff that in many cases no other wrenches had done before. For example, we uncovered the wing bolts, by use of dental tools, and inspected them- then we took specially shaped styro-foam plugs and inserted them back into the holes amid a bath of Mastinox compound. It was an all-day process, with no breaks or lunch, that two of us did in throw-away cloths because Mastinox compound is messy stuff- I loved it! The “D” inspection took the entire summer and we turned the aircraft over to the owner just two days before I left to go back to school. I recall sitting in turbine engines class the following week, still having Mastinox compound under my fingernails and a summer’s worth of earned income to invest in school.

My point here is that those “corporate jets” that Obama so easily condemns are not just a luxury for billionaires and millionaires, (one of which he happens to be), but rather they are instruments in the economy. They provide gainful employment by which hundreds of thousands of honest hard-working folks earn their living. In all of my years around Falcon Jets, I rarely met those millionaires and billionaires until I became a Falcon Jet pilot. And even then, the VAST majority of people whose work, I repeat, WORK, involved those evil “corporate jets” were just regular middle-class folks. They’re the ones who shuffle the parts, pump the fuel, answer the phones, mop the floors, turn the wrenches and do a thousand other jobs that Mr. Obama has never stooped to do. I can say that because, unlike the president, I HAVE done those jobs in the world of executive jet general aviation. I have punched the time clock at two in the morning and gone out to meet the arriving flight with a trash bag in one hand and bottle of spray cleaner in the other. And on those occasions, I was not alone- there were fuel trucks with amber flashing lights, there were limo drivers waiting for passengers and there were countless other airport employees. Then there were the off-airport people, the hotel alone- which would accommodate passengers arriving on those late night flights employed dozens on that shift. Then there were the food service people who brought out the tray of goodies that that cost enough to feed a slob like me for a week. Up the line were the people who manufactured the parts that supported those flying machines, the people working in the warehouse that stocked the parts, the companies that shipped those parts and its people. Those thousands of hands that reached out to do the work rather than reaching out to take a government hand-out.

So, when President Obama waves “corporate jets” like a red flag to represent the evil rich, (again- of which he is one,) what he is really doing is blindly slapping the faces of all of the hard working folks who support the use of those machines. As having been one of them, I find that to be beyond repulsive.

Today, I’ll be wearing my Falcon Jet hat and shirt all day. This just to illustrate the point that I’ve been where the president has not, and I’ve met the people that he, in a single swipe of his words has slapped in the face. In fact I’ll be wearing the hat until the voters of the United States re-distribute Barack Obama to Chicago- where he’ll spend the rest of his life traveling, exclusively, by way of private Jets.

Monday

How the Civil Air Patrol rescued me.




Recently I was contacted by a Civil Air Patrol squadron. They wanted to buy a bunch of my Dr. Zooch Rockets Space Shuttle kits so that they could launch them in a multi-squadron event. Cadets of the Lone Eagle and Curtiss-Wright Squadrons in New Jersey got together on Sept. 29th, 2012 and made 105 Shuttle flights. That’s exactly 105 more than NASA can presently do. Everyone had a good time and in exchanging messages with the group it brought to mind something that I had almost forgotten- it was 40 years ago, this month, that I joined the CAP… damn, am I old.

I have to state that the CAP saved me from some of the worst months of my life. At age 15 I was in my third miserable year at a stinking rat-hole called Webber Junior High School. This was a crummy public “school” on the wrong side of Saginaw, Michigan where the workin’ class kids were herded together with the non-workin’ class kids in a rude mixture. I learned fast that you never wanted to make the honor roll- you’d get beat up. You always carried your lunch money in your shoe. The term “Borrow me a nickel” actually meant give me the coin or I’ll punch you in the gut. You never wanted to be late for school- not by a single second, because when that bell stopped ringing, the doors were locked and buzzards hanging out around the building would rob you, beat you or worse. Every single day there was a fight, or some sort of trouble. Very often there were disturbances in the class room- so often, in fact that anyone not wanting to witness it, again, could simply ask for a library pass- which was always easily granted. Mr. Parr, the principal, was proud of the fact that in a fire drill he could empty the building inside of three minutes, that when there was one of the frequent bomb threats “at two o’clock the building is gonna blow up” that he would hit the fire drill at five minutes before the bomb, and wait for the school to blow up, which, unfortunately, it never did. The school never had a dance, you could never attend a full football game or a basketball game- because sometime during that event you would be robbed. Thus, there were no extracurricular activities for kids who didn’t want to rob, beat, do drugs or be arrested.

I had survived two full wasted years at that place, often by taking my all-consuming passion for the space program and aviation and pulling it over my head like a security blanket and spending lots of time in the 629 section of the Dewey Decimal System. I also always had a nickel in my pocket and never touched a basketball. Then, one day a pal of mine came into class and was telling me about going to a CAP meeting. Knowing that I was into aviation he encouraged me to go with him to the next meeting. I attended that single meeting and I was hooked. At long last there was a constructive after-school activity that I could do and it involved aviation. Soon we had four of us from Webber Junior hole in the CAP- Saginaw Valley Composit Squadron 7 dash 2. It was terrific- SAR (Search And Rescue) CAPs, CD (Civil Defense) training, orientation flights, camp-outs, canoe trips, First Aid classes and Red CAPs (actual search and rescue missions). I made friendships that last to this day. One of the other cadets and I even ended up flying together for the DNR when I was fresh out of college with my new commercial certificate.

Joining the CAP was one of the best things that I did in my youth. It saved me from a sizeable portion of the suffering that my third wasted year at that stinking school would have inflicted. Thus, when I was contacted by the CAP about the Shuttle kits I was more than happy and willing to help. The CAP is about search and rescue- and it sure as hell rescued me.