Analytical, Imaginary and Real

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Where I am no longer present is automotive technology. I parked the yellow MPG Pinto my sister gave me when she couldn't get good money on a trade in 1987. My driver's license expired two years later in 1989. "Some places you can only get to by walking." I could walk to Big Beaver Airport while the widow still owned it and provided training with Cessna 152's and Robinson helicopters. I wanted to go to Sarajevo mostly on a "mortar detection radar" concept but that was way too far. I could also walk to Troy Executive Airport looking for where and when the North Koreans would arrive in 1990. The fence was down was the news to change my mythical participation at the Panmunjom table where the other side could placed loaded revolvers at their place.

Marines infantry kept my ideas humble. Not until 1992 did I join Powerhouse Gym and gradually build an ability to run again from 15 second sprints recommended in an Olympic Weightlifting text as I was working with the IWF in Budapest and learning to write in appropriate script alphabet. Women finally lifted at the Olympics in Sydney in 2000 after missing in 1996 in Atlanta. State wide I met women from Ohio and Michigan in 1995 and 1996 and helped them to get weighed in.

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I just finished reading my Aviation Week & Space Technology, specifically the "Fixed Focus" article by Graham Warwick, their Washington reporter. It says the Alia is only being tested by pilots. It only expects to be in vertical flight mode for 40 second total and will never hover. In the gray panel at the bottom of page 152, it says, "The pilot has an F-16-style force sensing sidestick and a lift lever that resembles a helicopter's collective control. Light fore/aft stick force provides pitch control, left/right force for roll and twist for yaw. The fixed pedals provide only differential braking for steering on the ground. "

My youngest son had a Microsoft stick with haptic forces. I had to show him it needed to be "adjusted" to calibrate after he could only fly a helicopter by skidding it off the top of a tall building and then struggling to remain in the air. My stick now is a Freedom 2.4 cordless by Logitech. Fore/aft for pitch and lean left/lean right for roll with yaw by twisting. It has a throttle as flipping a small lever at the left base forward is + and aft is -. Brakes are on the trigger.

It seems to me if I got a U2 and a Harrier which have bicycle landing gear I could deal with my grandsons need for outriggers. Jump into the air to fit this new Beta Technologies design and use my glider experience from FSX to continue, using my own GECAS previews from my 1969-1978 computer work. !!! Then I look on page 49 at a text tape on the bottom. "Beta has resumed hover testing after completing extensive fixed wing flights with the Alia engineering prototype."??? I knew Stanley Hubbard ex RAF Wing Commander who was hired by Douglas to test their Joint US FRG/ V/STOL until Republic won that and then it was cancelled. He was a member of the American Helicopter Society and had been a shared officer at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School and took me to meet the "wild Weasels" there in 1967.

Jumping ahead another foreign exchange pilot that came from Indonesia where his family owned Bauxite mines. Jan Schallig brought slides of the Northrup P-530 "Cobra." Now sliding back I was told to work with Frank Posch (retired rank unknown to me) a former Navy VX-5 test pilot when I had a weekend to prepare a pitch to Congress on the Hawker-Siddely AV-8 "Harrier" which was just entering test or was the "Kestrel" well tested sufficient? This had been after I was disgraced for using the word "onset" to discuss learning curves based on procedure trainers at Mather AFB. That was in 1968 and Jan Schallig appeared before I went to "Top Gun" in very late 1969 with former Blue Angels commander Captain "Zeke" Cormier (USN-ret'd).

Do I know how to fly? The plot thickens. Who totally ignored me? DDR&E, DARPA, ARPA and the US Coast Guard, why? They believed in guns. Who thought I was flying upside down? the AIAA; But flying in a F-15 from Than Son Nhuit on my side in the dark in min-augmenter all the way to Hanoi? Maybe, before my post about stability derivatives almost anyone.

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I watched Charles Howell III on the EAA podcasts and actually used my EAA member ID. He is 2 years younger than I and got to do some truly great stuff on instrument landing never using terms like CAT I, II or III but moving to Autoland. The right way to succeed with the openings in electronics. Well worth my membership.

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When I first opened my mind to where I was in 1965, I had been an office mate of Don Brimley who was a friend of Don Douglas Jr. He spent most of his days working out reliability predictions for rockets and puzzling about life predictions for reciprocating engine, propeller equipped large transports and helicopters. The media was all into Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense and how he could now quickly make new systems very cheaply with developments in microminiaturization in Avionics and turbofan engines. The examples most focused on were the F-111 and the A-7. The A-7 had been known as the VAL the year before I arrived at Douglas. By the time I arrived, the joint view was becoming frayed as the Air Force version was overweight for intended runways and the Navy version of the F-111 was overweight even with a new engine that was going into what would be called the FX. How could this happen? Mostly, because of a desire for much longer range radars with bigger antennas the nose of the aircraft had to grow. Even today, folks remind me of steps along the path to complete the McNamara era hope.

You should not be surprised then that one of the things I sought out in EAA when I came was how flat panels in the cockpits and GPS navigation would combine with RoTax engines to free up the line between VFR and IFR in general aviation. Carbon fiber fuselage and wings? Supersonic using hexcel sandwiches? It's over 20 years since I stopped buying Kitplanes on news stands on travel with my parents. They both are gone. I needed to do whatever I was going to do in July of this year at Osh Kosh. Now Windows 11 is in the way of even flying common simulation.