monkeyplus1

I am posting this picture, and I will bet you have not seen this picture before. It’s one I found a few years ago, hidden somewhere, and appropriated.

More importantly, I wonder how many people might correctly guess what is going on in this picture.

Seems like it’s been weeks of snow on the ground, a first since I arrived her fifteen years ago. In the past, it’s just been a day or two, but this is ridiculous.

This picture was after the worst of it, after a snow day from hell where the neighbors and I spent the day on the roofs, some thirty feet off the ground, clearing problematic ice packs and snow accumulation.

Here, the girl is just moments from sinking in the powedery snow thigh-deep.

The wife’s car, left on the street, was blanketed.

(My WRX stayed nice, dry and warm in the garage).

Driving in the snow has been a learning experience. Four-wheel drive is fucking awesome.  Never getting past 30mph, I rarely used the breaks, leaving the car in gear the whole time, and slowing down by just taking my foot off the gas.  Excellent traction, no chains, no snow tires.

There were a few iffy spots.  My neighbor was driving me to a rental place to get the 30-foot ladder and growing impatient with the slow traffic, unwisely decided to use a side-street.

We spent nearly 30 minutes stuck atop a snow-pack, the wheels just digging the car down farther into the snow.

Some Phillipino-looking guys eventually pulled up with a snow-chained Jeep, unloaded some tow-straps, and pulled us right out. One of them said, “you guys got a Subaru stuck in the snow? SHAME!”.  I laughed and pointed to my neighbor, “HE was driving!”.   I could have just as easily made the same mistake, so I learned a lesson from it.

Yeah, the snow has gotten plenty old, we’re tired of it.

It’s xmas eve, and the kids are still up at 9pm, getting on each other’s nerves over who gets to pop some bubble-wrap that came with Grandma’s packages.

Well, it’s time to go spank some xmas cheer back into them. Happy holidays

I’ve been enjoying some time off between contracts, luxuriating in the new house.

Since I can think of no close friends or family that share my love of aviation history, I drove myself down to the Evergreen Air & Space Museum down in McMinnville, about 40 miles Southwest of Portland.

It’s probably best known for housing the Spruce Goose, the enormous, wood-and-fabric seaplane built by Howard Hughes.  That’s only mildly interesting to me, as the museum also houses what I was really interested in - beautifully restored warbirds.

There is a replica of the Wright Flyer, the first airplane.  Here is an old bi-plane, showing the wooden struts normally covered by fabric.

What really got my interest on this visit, since I’ve read so much about their mission in Vietnam, was the F-105 Thunderchief, aka, the “Thud”.   (The huge grey wing over it belongs to the Spruce Goose).

These were originally designed in the 1950’s to fly supersonic into Russia and drop nuclear weapons.

When Vietnam came about, these planes were fitted with conventional bombs, and flown out of several bases in Thailand against heavily protected targets in North Vietnam.  The defenses there were state of the art radar-guided anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), provided by the Soviets and Chinese.

Some of the F-105s were fitted with electronic counter-measures to jam the North Vietnamese defenses, known as “Wild Weasels”.   They carried an interesting weapon called a Shrike.  When the Vietnamese SAM batteries activated the radar-guidance for their missiles, a Shrike could home in on that signal and fly right down to the battery. That was really high-tech for the time, when there was no GPS, no JDAMs, and laser-guided bombs were still years away.

The bomb-dropping was very low-tech by today’s standards, and not too far improved from the techniques used in WWII.  The flights of Thuds would fly from Thailand, across Laos, and then drop down into the mountain valleys of North Vietnam, using the mountain ridges to hide them from radar.  If the weather was good, they’d continue on until they visually identified the target, pop up to get some height, roll-over and into a dive-bomb, drop their weapons, and afterburner their way out of the area.

They took such heavy losses, that instead of requiring them to serve a specific amount of time overseas, if they lived through 100 missions, they could go home.

Here are some shots of the cockpit of the Thunderchief.

Lastly, I’d just finished reading about P-38 Lightning pilots in the Pacific theater of WWII.   I believe this plane is restored to look like the one flown by the legendary Jerry Johnson, a triple-ace from Eugene, Oregon. (The book is called Jungle Ace and I highly recommend it).

Col. Johnson shot down 24 enemy aircraft in 265 combat missions.  After surviving all that, he was on his way home from Japan after the war to his wife  and child, when his aircraft was lost in severe weather, never having been found. The aircraft (I believe he was flying a B-24 home), had 5 parachutes for the 7 people aboard.  Johnson and his co-pilot stayed aboard while the other crewmen parachuted down to a beach they’d overflown.  Johnson had planned to turn around and make a crash landing on the sandy beach, but was never seen again.

live in Portland OR 9/15/2008

out of 50 or so photos, only these are marginally viewable

this is a history, in aerial photographs, of where I live.  The curious thing, my house is not in any of these.
2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

I hope it shows up in the 2008 map.