Sad Day

[Flyfalcons]

And what does all of this have to do with experimental aircraft and or Oshkosh? Nothing!

Good thing it was posted in the Warbird forum and not the Homebuilt or AirVenture forums then, right?

[Bill Greenwood]

Ron, I never said those other days like Dresden or Hamburg or the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and the Arizona sunk with loss of many young men, were not sad days. If you want to have a topic to recognize them or others it is fine with me.

I saw the news piece about the Atomic Bombing and that is why I posted it.

As for the next point, if it took 300 or more bombers with conventional weapons to destroy most (not nearly all) of a city and kill 100,000 people; and it the Enola Gay did it in one flight, one day, with one Bomb, then it makes my point that this is a huge escalation of warfare to a whole new and awful level of killing and it is not just another bombing raid as before.

[WLIU]

What this has to do with the annual warbird gathering at Oshkosh is that we honor the men and women who made the sacrifices in the 1940's to knock down the some of the greatest evils that have arisen in the last couple of hundred years. The combination of two cultures of evil values and the technology of transportation and equipment that could have allowed another dark age to spread across our globe were stopped and done away with by the flying machines we admire and the people who took them to war. If you look at what the state of the art was in 1945, and you think about flying those airplanes for 8 hour missions, you can appreciate what a serious business it was and the courage of the pilots and crews.

I think that Von Clausewitz would have offered the view that the armies and governments of Japan and Germany in 1942 were a direct product of the values of the cultures and the populations of those nations. He might argue that to effect the radical change of those cultures to purge the population of those evil values once and for all required the destruction applied to those nations, up to and including those first atomic bombs.

So my belief is that what you see at OSH is multidimensional. I admire the sleek lines of the P-38. I also admire my aged P-38 recce pilot friend who's pictures are now declassified and show interesting european locales decorated with the black puffs of anti-aircraft artillery bursts as the Germans did their best to keep him from bringing his photos back to base.

Looking at Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, I am not sad on the anniversary. They are vital busy cities full of productive citizens trying to make their part of the planet a better place. That it took an atomic bomb to make that possible is something for sober reflection, but not regret on our part.

And getting back to aviation, you might be surprised to find out where Japanese pilots go to train today. A friend works at a flight school in California where they have models of Japanese airplanes on the shelves and pictures of Japanese pilots on the wall. Its a changed world.

Best,

Wes
N78PS