“Airline pilot” is a fairly standard Halloween costume. Via the addition of a crash axe, a child can become a warrior against colonialism and genocide as well. On the other hand, inexpensive as a Gemtor D56 might be, it is probably not wise to send the 8-year-old out into the neighborhood with one. I found this plastic training version online:
How much would it cost to 3D print something like this? ChatGPT gives a range:
Separately, Hamam al-Hammami finally answered the question that I wondered about in 2008 when TSA would hassle me for having a couple of coins left in a pocket and setting off the metal detector. “Any pilot could just reach for the crash axe so what difference does it make if he or she brings a tiny amount of metal on board? Given aggressive intent, you’d never use a Swiss Army knife if a crash axe were available.”
Who else has been in the news lately who might be a good inspiration for a Halloween costume?
Separately, who has good ideas for regional candies to hand out for Halloween? I don’t want to be boring and get the same Costco assortments that everyone else gets. It would be fun to give out a candy that is not available in Florida at all. We expect 500 to 1,000 children because our next-door neighbor is an insanely skilled Detroit automaker senior engineer who creates a Las Vegas-quality pirate environment, complete with animatronics.
Here are some ideas from ChatGPT:
ChatGPT estimates that full-size candy bars, which some neighbors do distribute, are $1.15 each while the Costco “fun-sized” chocolate assortment works out to about 14 cents per bar.
Let’s close by looking at Hamam al-Hammami’s plan:
NEW: Interrogation of the Omani pilot: the objective was to crash the plane into the terminal building at Ben Gurion Airport.
The assault on the other pilot was timed deliberately. He waited until the aircraft was over Jordan, near Israel, before moving against him.
We have made the decision to stop using X and will no longer monitor our inbox, feed, or mentions. Look for us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube; just search flywithaopa. We'd love to see you there!
— AOPA | Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (@flywithaopa) October 5, 2026
AOPA is the lobbying group for general aviation, especially piston peasants (the Gulfstreamers have NBAA). Their membership is down by about half over the past 20 years, which eviscerates their lobbying power. As the U.S. population booms via low-skill immigration (Pew), members of Congress don’t want to bother with orgs that don’t have at least 400,000 members. Why would AOPA walk away from 85,000+ followers? My comment:
LinkedIn? Isn’t someone rich enough to own an aircraft supposed to be rich enough not to have to check LinkedIn regularly? TikTok? Are you sure that AOPA HQ staff have actually met a GA pilot? Did you hire some tween girls to run AOPA social media? Or maybe I missed the Garmin avionics partnership with Taylor Swift.
TikTok shows that they have only about 38,000 followers there. Similarly, they have fewer followers on LinkedIn than they do on X (about 61,000). I guess because GA pilots are so old, they do have over 200,000 followers on Facebook. But how tough is it to post at least the bigger stories on X simultaneously with the other social media systems? Presumably it can be done automatically, even without AI.
AOPA is important because, without them, any airport too small for a Pilatus PC-24 would be closed and turned into public housing for immigrants. Also, any aircraft smaller than a Phenom 300 would be excluded from ATC services so as to ensure plenty of capacity for the elite and the airlines.
Maybe California billionaires will step in and save AOPA. Democrat thought-leader Ro Khanna says they’ll be just as rich after a 5% haircut, which of course means that they can get another 5% haircut immediately afterwards and still be just as rich, which of course sets them up for Haircut #3… By the time the wise mandarins of Sacramento are finished, California’s Falcon 8X owners will be cut back to SR22-G2 fractional and, therefore, ready to join and support AOPA.
250 billionaires in California are worth $2.2 trillion. This is not a hard issue. They will be just as rich if they pay a 5% tax, and poor California kids + 3.5 million working families will get healthcare.
Can someone explain this? NPR sanctimoniously departed X during the Biden administration, but they had an endless river of taxpayer money to tap into and their loyal readers presumably got a lot of joy when they heard about Elon Musk being starved of traffic and ad revenue. But the typical AOPA member isn’t a progressive Democrat aligned with AOC and Bernie Sanders. How does AOPA benefit by leaving EAA, which already has twice as many members, as the dominant GA voice on X?
In the case the original tweet is memory-holed:
Update: AOPA reversed its decision. They said that they pulled back from X because engagement had fallen. But maybe their engagement has fallen because their X posts are lame? Here’s one that has no photo. It’s just a link to a page somewhere other than X:
Every year at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in Wisconsin, there’s an aircraft that captures the hearts of the crowd. One of this year’s stars will certainly be the Flying Bulls' Douglas DC–6: https://t.co/EdQJfVa1PG
— AOPA | Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (@flywithaopa) July 21, 2026
Is it worth the click? Maybe, but the DC-6 doesn’t have anything to do with AOPA. Very few social media users follow links. They react to what they see in front of them. Compare to this WSJ post. Most people can get what they need to know out of it without following the link.
Google and Constellation Energy agreed to a 20-year nuclear-power deal that would boost output at 11 existing reactors, adding the equivalent of a large reactor to the grid. https://t.co/6Bx4D39SoF
It’s trivial to ask Grok why AOPA has been such a failure recently on X. Excerpts from Grok’s full explanation:
They post like it is still 2015. Almost every item is a magazine lede plus an aopa.org URL. On the current X ranking, an off-platform link with no image is close to invisible. A post that says “click to leave this site” does not get likes, and likes are what get the next batch of impressions. The DC-6 post is the clean example: a crowd-pleasing airplane, no picture of the airplane.
They are not in the conversation. Aviation on X is replies, quote-posts, accident threads, MOSAIC and medical fights, airport threats, and people with airplanes in the photo. AOPA does not show up on breaking general-aviation news, does not answer members, and does not quote the FAA or a member of Congress. An account that does not reply gets treated as a brochure. They also went dark for more than two months, which is enough for the ranking system to stop showing an account to its own followers.
The topics are aimed at a different feed. A large share of the summer posts were event recaps, scholarship notes, “women in aviation” features, and high-school curriculum. Those can do fine on Instagram. On X, the pilots who actually reply want regulatory substance, airplane pictures, and a named human. EAA, the same day AOPA was walking back its exit, posted a C-5 photo and a taco joke and already had more likes than most of AOPA’s July posts ever reached.
The 80% drop is real and mostly self-inflicted. X did change the rules: links are down-ranked, replies and native video are up-ranked, Premium accounts get more distribution, and dormant accounts fall out of followers’ feeds. AOPA says it tried several formats. The samples that are still up are still link dumps, occasional TikTok-shaped video, and no conversation. Other platforms growing does not mean X emptied out. The exit post proved the opposite: when they wrote something people wanted to answer, the same 85,000-follower account reached 706,000 views.
They also do not appear to be paying for a checkmark. For an association this size that is a small, fixable distribution penalty, not the main problem.
It’s my birthday. Soon I will be old enough to personally experience the insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. For this year, though, here’s the latest present to myself…
Like most other low-wing aircraft, the Cirrus SR20 and SR22 airplanes have a fuel tank selector that must be periodically switched from left to right tank. How does this become pilot’s job when he or she (no “ze” or “they” because the FAA has hatefully subscribed to gender binarism, even during the hate-free Biden administration) is trying to fly the aircraft? A high-wing Cessna has a “set and forget” BOTH position for fuel that flows down to the engine via gravity. Shouldn’t a Piper or Cirrus have that too? Perhaps not. If one tank were to run dry, for example, the “pump it up and out” process would result in air from that tank being put into the fuel line to the engine rather than harder-to-grab fuel from the tank that still has something left.
After 21 years, I suddenly had trouble switching between left and right tanks in our SR20-G2. After that first switch, which required some muscle power, it was fairly easy to switch tanks, but it still felt like there was a hitch or click in the system somewhere. Our local Cirrus service center owner: “I’ve never heard of this problem.” Cirrus Field Support: “The O-rings in the selector could be swelling up but I haven’t run across this issue before. I polled the group and they mentioned they haven’t run across this before.“
Always nice to have a problem that has never previously been reported in a fleet of 10,000 machines!
The mechanic went to the hangar where the airplane lives and fiddled around with the selector, including lifting up the safety to turn the selector to OFF (something you’d do during maintenance or as part of a crash or parachute landing). “we took the side panels off and inspected and tried to lubricate it, it is a sealed unit , the fuel selector has failed internally, it is stuck in the off position I have ordered a new fuel selector…”
I had thought that the simple interlock that the pilot can touch would be a separate part from the functional valve buried deep in the plane, but that’s not the case. Here’s what the complete part looks like:
It struck me as odd that Cirrus had a stockpile of these spares if nobody had ever needed to replace one, but apparently there are more than 40 in a warehouse somewhere:
Here’s the final damage from the local shop (it was quoted as requiring 8 hours of labor, but apparently took more than 10):
In the old days I would have said that I was leaving this here on the Web so that a fellow Cirrus owner or a mechanic could find it with a Google search. Now, of course, I’m leaving it here so that AI can find it.
(What were the previous presents in this same general area? The electric fuel boost pump in the Cirrus was beginning to sound louder/different. This pump is necessary for starting, so I had it replaced in July 2025 while at Oshkosh. The mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, which does most of the work required to get the fuel out of the tanks and into the fuel injectors, was declared to be leaking in July 2026 at the annual inspection and send out for overhaul (both the leak at the mixture control connection and the blades (carbon, I think, and subject to erosion)). At around the same time, the year-old electric boost pump stopped working intermittently. Absolutely dead when throwing the switch. The mechanics couldn’t reproduce the problem so they replaced the switch and the circuit breaker. The boost pump remained intermittently INOP. That’s when I learned that there is also a relay in the system. So they replaced that. So far the boost pump, which is required for starting, seems to work. Maybe it is time to save money on maintenance by buying a $1.5 million new Cirrus SR22? A friend did just that and went through three engine-driven fuel pumps in the first year (problems maintaining the correct pressure). All covered by warranty, but quite a bit of downtime.)
Twenty-five years ago at 10:03 am, United Flight 93 was crashed into a field after a struggle between four jihadis (from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia) and a group of passengers and flight attendants that included at least Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, and CeeCee Lyles.
The last portion of the CVR transcript, which ends with “Allahu Akbar”:
As I noted then, RIP especially to the crew: Lorraine Bay, Jason Dahl, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, LeRoy Homer Jr., CeeCee Lyles, and Deborah Welsh. Airline crews enable us to live richer lives by assuming a higher level of risk every day than those of us who earn our wages by flying desks.
The plane is reported to have crashed at 1758Z, two minutes before 2 pm Eastern time. Based on recordings at liveatc.net, however, it seems that the crash was closer to 1753Z. Here are the weather reports before and after:
Although the closest report to the crash is the 1753Z METAR and the wind was 19017G26KT (from 190 true at 17 knots, gusting 26), shortly after the crash the ATC Tower is heard telling listeners that the wind was only 190 at 8 (source: ATC app, an interesting new service). Depending on which weather report we think was applicable at the moment of the landing, there was a tailwind component of somewhere between 3 and 8 knots on Runway 30 (magnetic 304; true heading of about 300 (Miami magnetic variation is 5W)).
It is unclear why the heavy Boeing was assigned Runway 30, which is only 9360′ long and, due partly to a displaced threshold, has a “landing distance available” (LDA) of 7913′. That’s enough to allow a B767 to land in 60% of the available runway, but doesn’t leave a lot of additional room for error considering the typical final approach speed of 130-140 knots. Runway 27, by contrast, offers nearly 13,000′ of LDA and has more favorable alignment with wind coming from 190.
Typical Florida summertime heavy rain does not seem to have been a factor in this accident, but in any case all of the runways at KMIA are grooved and that’s supposed to prevent hydroplaning (the “dry” braking distance is used for planning even if the runway is actually wet). ATC communications with other aircraft before the accident don’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. The accident aircraft did not declare an emergency or report any issues prior to the accident.
Most runway overruns are caused by excessive energy: too much airspeed and too much altitude. It is tough to dissipate this energy if one lands halfway down the runway at a higher-than-standard groundspeed (remember that kinetic energy varies as speed squared). Why isn’t there a computer in an expensive jet that looks at the GPS position relative to the runway and the groundspeed and shouts “Go Around!” if an overrun seems likely? There is, but not for the typical jet. Airbus ROPS (Runway Overrun Prevention System) was introduced in 2009 on the A380 and has now been extended to the entire family of idiot-proof airliners. It says “Runway Too Short!” if it expects an overrun. Embraer has something similar called Runway Overrun Awareness and Alerting System and deploys it on airliners as well as on the single-pilot Phenom 100 and Phenom 300 personal jets (where “personal” means “affordable for Nvidia and AI company employees”). The Embraer system arrived on the Phenom 300E in 2020 and has a clearer warning: “Overrun; Go Around”. The Europeans are supposedly trying to require that all newly registered airliners have something like this.
Not a great day for aviation and, so far, not enough information to begin to guess at the cause of the accident.
Update (attempted go-around after touching down, which was abandoned four seconds later):
Updates from the NTSB on the runway overrun of the 21 Air 767 in Miami. All times = number of seconds before end of the Flight data recorder.
-0:30: Nose gear + Right main landing gear touchdown at 158 kt ground speed -0:23: brakes applied, 146 kt -0:19: Left MLG touchdown, 134… pic.twitter.com/wiNDDOSVC9
Amazon cargo 767 runway overrun at Vancouver in 2024: after some mechanical problems, which they knew would require a higher approach speed (no slats), the crew ran off the end of 08L, 9,940′ long. The same airport has an 11,500′ runway, 08R, but it was closed for maintenance at the time (on the third hand, it was immediately opened for use after the overrun so presumably the airport could have cleared the maintenance personnel and made 08R available). They had enough fuel to go to Sea-Tac, only 110 nm away. That has an 11,901′ runway. Lesson: if you know you’re in trouble, go to the biggest airport you can reach!
Not so great, however, was the lack of public desks at which to work. DJT has at least 100 workstations at which one can sit at a laptop with reasonable ergonomics, plus the laptop into 110V, etc. LGA has chairs with power outlets for aimless scrolling on one’s phone and loungers for even more laziness, but nothing for work other than perhaps in the Delta Sky Club, which is so elite that they don’t sell day passes.
Readers wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t supply photos for a PhD in Masketology. Here are examples of (a) chin diaper, (b) under-nose mask, and (c) surgical mask worn correctly (but still useless due to not being an N95?):
If people feel unsafe after entering a place where 100 percent of the humans have been screened by TSA, Starbucks is a Safe Place:
A full range of Pride gear was for sale (August 22, so still roughly a month before National HIV/AIDS & Aging Awareness Day and Bisexual+ Awareness Week and after Southern HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and Gay Uncles Day (full calendar)). Are these for people who are arriving in NYC and realize that they forgot to pack Pride gear? Or for people who didn’t realize that they were 2SLGBTQQIA+ until they visited NYC for a weekend and need to buy Pride gear before returning home?
Here’s one approach to female modesty that is common in NYC, the niqab:
By contrast, here’s an image that could be considered haram due to the amount of female bare skin on display:
NYC is likely already a predominantly Islamic city as measured by hours spent in religious observance. How long before the people whose idea of proper dress is Image #1, above, vote to forbid the female outfits in Image #2? Maybe an adult in a niqab can tolerate this shameless display of flesh, but would she want her children to be exposed to this kind of lifestyle?
Let me close by pointing out a triumph of operations research. There are two UP escalators (from the gates) and one DOWN (to the gates), presumably because someone figured out that people are more likely to arrive in a big group (plane pulls in) than they are to depart in a big group.
This was the first year that the UK’s Red Arrows appeared at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). It’s a quiet understated elegant display compared to what the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds put on and they fly the BAE Systems Hawk, a single-engine jet trainer from the 1970s. The Red Arrows have a “trademark Diamond Nine shape” but for whatever reason only 6 or 7 of them were able to fly at Oshkosh, depending on the day (during one show, a Hawk had to return to land due to a missing gas cap).
Who are the pilots? They appear to all be “legacy Britons” with names such as “Jon Bond” and “Rob Thomas”. As Keir Starmer pointed out (while wearing a mask, of course!), “Our nation’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths” (maybe when our copies of Jason Arday‘s autobiography show up we will learn that Prof. Dr. Arday, Ph.D. was at one time a Red Arrows pilot, which is certainly easier than running 30 marathons in 35 days):
Here’s the whole routine:
What else was interesting at the air shows? Jared Isaacman put the “Admin” in NASA Administrator by zooming around in his personal MiG-29:
In other “Don’t mess with NASA” news, the agency also brought one of its F/A-18s and also an F-15:
The Wisconsin National Guard was pathetic this year compared to 2025 in which they’d fire off a 155mm artillery round every 15 seconds. They also didn’t bring their tanker. Maybe the artillery rounds had to be shipped out to Ukraine and the tanker went to our surrender-slowly-to-Iran project? Fortunately, we haven’t had to turn over our Goodyear Blimps yet:
Check out the killer tail number:
Let’s definitely not give N1A to the Iranians!
Traffic after the evening air show wasn’t fun, so maybe stop at SOS Brothers for refreshments and music rather than being in the middle of a Ceuta-style wave of humans:
Legal filings from the 2019 dispute also give some of the history between EAA and the brothers:
In 1996, Winnebago County took 1.2 acres of land from the brothers through an eminent domain land acquisition. The move was part of the federally sanctioned Airport Improvement Program to increase the space between EAA crowds and air show flights.
The brothers sued after the county later turned the land over to EAA, which began using it for its own concessions. The county and state paid a combined $800,000 to settle the lawsuit.
Circling back (so to speak) to the Red Arrows, here are Jason Arday’s official portraits as a team member:
Graham Platner was able to farm oysters, run for Senate, and have sex with every progressive female in Maine while receiving a disability pension from the Veterans Administration for 100% disability. What’s next for this noble fighter for river-to-the-sea liberation? How about airline pilot, a job that requires a First Class medical certificate from a Federal Aviation Administration medical examiner. Is it possible to be 100% disabled under the standards of one government agency, and receive a share of the $150+ billion that the VA pays out for disability, and 0% disabled under the standards of a sibling government agency? The answer, we learned at Oshkosh, is a resounding “Yes!”
Here’s a booth of specialists who help with the magic:
We also stopped by the Graham Platner Veterans Administration Service Center in Wisconsin (100% of parking spaces marked in blue):
What else was worth seeing among the vendors? I liked WingTent, despite the fact that it won’t work for us low-wingers:
“With standard wheels, the [16 lb.] WingTent can produce an enclosure that is approximately 220 sq ft. at the base”
On the back of a truck and sadly not for sale:
Here’s a bizarre one: Flare Bourbon. Covidcrats in all of the lockdown states deemed alcohol “essential”, but should a group of pilots get together and make booze?
My vote for best vendor ad:
For about $220, I was able to purchase a “women owned” banana (Aviator’s Club North):
I purchased a T-shirt from the NGPA:
And, of course, for fans of Christopher Nolan’s latest magnum opus, the best product of all on display at Oshkosh:
A Greek guy reviews the film that is named after the minivan:
A friend paid a ticked for me to watch Nolan's Odyssey. Despite all of my reservations about the way the movie was marketed, I really wanted to like it. But it was worse than I expected, much worse. The casting and the costumes were the least bad thing about it.
Here are some…
— Stelios Panagiotou (@Panagiotou90St) July 18, 2026
I dragged a friend to a Phillips 66 talk at the Lycoming pavilion and we found that Phillips 66 had dragged out a team of four experts, including the company’s top “scientist” in this domain, to answer questions from piston peasants.
What did we learn? A preference for straight weight 100W is purely superstitious and, even in a reliably warm climate such as Florida’s, it is smarter to use Phillips XC 20W-50 (bizarrely, the “50” in the multiweight and the “100” refer to the same “SAE 50” spec for viscosity at higher temperatures).
If you have a Lycoming engine, you should definitely use the “Victory” version of Phillips, which is preblended with a Lycoming-recommended anti-wear additive. For Continental owners, the representatives who were present leaned toward either the Victory version or XC plus CamGuard if the plane isn’t flown frequently.
Since every group needs at least one obnoxious person, I asked “You have a huge team of PhD scientists. All that CamGuard has is a snake. Why can’t you put something in the oil that will prevent corrosion for a plane that doesn’t fly regularly?” Unlike America’s Greatest Scientist, the chief scientist at Phillips 66’s oil division did not invoke the 5th Amendment. He answered that corrosion is an almost undefeatable enemy. There is always some water in the oil, even if a plane is based in the Arizona desert and even if the owner puts a Drybot in the filler tube (sadly, suitable only for T hangar royalty; those of us in shared hangars can’t expect the line guys to keep unplugging it and plugging it back in when the aircraft is moved). There is thus no substitute for flying regularly (“at least monthly”, but of course weekly is better).
What about the FAA-industry dream of unleaded gasoline in 1950s engines? So far, there isn’t a great one-fuel-fits-all solution. Patrick Ealy, a master’s student at University of North Dakota, gave a talk about capturing the lead out of the exhaust stream (about 40 minutes in; the first part of the talk is more about how aviation 100LL is falsely accused of being a significant contributor to America’s falling average IQ; he points out that even “unleaded” car gasoline has some naturally occurring lead in it and there are a lot more ground vehicles out there burning dinosaur blood than there are piston aircraft).
Related:
“Unleaded fuel takes center stage at AirVenture” (AOPA): “the FAA plans to release new versions of the transition plan after each phase. … The first phase includes authorizing fuels and doing comparison testing. … The third and fourth phases focus on the wide-scale transition—first in the Lower 48, with a goal of completing the work by 2030, followed by Alaska two years later.” (for the Cirrus SR20 with IO-360-ES engine… no unleaded fuel is approved by Cirrus, though GAMI G100UL is approved for this engine/airframe by the FAA)
They reminded us that the B-52, which first flew in 1952, was considered a temporary aircraft that would hold us until we had a full fleet of supersonic bombers. The requirements that turned into the B-1 (“B-ONE” or “Bone”) were first set forth in 1955. The B-1 evolved so slowly, changing from a very fast high-altitude machine to a barely-supersonic low-altitude machine, that Jimmy Carter, running for office in 1976, was able to promise to strangle it in its crib. During the Carter administration, the USAF managed to continue some testing of the prototype B-1s against Russian radar systems that Israel had captured in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. (Oshkosh is pretty much the opposite of New York City; speakers referred to “our friends in Israel” when mentioning various forms of military cooperation, e.g., Israel providing the U.S. with MiG fighters to seed a secret training and testing squadron in Nevada. Nobody enthuses about river-to-the-sea liberation, Queers for Palestine, or anything else that is sacred in the Mamdani Caliphate.) The B-1s got through much better than the B-52s.
The machine that first flew in 1974 (more than 50 years ago) is still in use today, e.g., as part of our gradual surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran (maybe Jimmy Carter was right; he surrendered to Iran in 1979 and if our foreign policy is to surrender to anyone tougher than Grenada then why do we need the B-1 or, indeed, an air force?).
The WSO (“Wizzo”) talked about bombing Iraq in 1973. Bombs and missiles are loaded into a rotating carousel and if conditions change, e.g., someone thinks there is a chance to drop a particular bomb on Saddam’s head, it is necessary to jettison other items in order to get to the desired munition. Here’s how this is loaded up:
A couple of B-1s made low passes, but none stopped to visit this year (2018 was the last time?).
It was common in airshows and talks at Oshkosh for those who’ve served in our military to be praised. Of course, a percentage of these folks exhibited remarkable bravery and took significant risks. Guess who didn’t receive any praise, though? The taxpayers who made it possible for the machines on display to be designed, built, and operated! Eighty percent of federal income tax receipts come from roughly 20 million tax returns (Tax Foundation). Even assuming that over half of these are joint returns, that’s just 10 percent of the U.S. population that is dumb enough to work and pay significant tax. Would it be so difficult to say “If you paid tax on more than $150,000 in income last year, thank you for your service and for enabling us to have F-35s, F-22s, B-1s, aircraft carriers, and all of the other amazing stuff that we’ve been using as part of our surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran”? Speaking of the F-22, here’s one parked at the FBO:
Circling back, so to speak, to the B-1… what is a likely role for the aircraft in a world of ever-more-advanced drones?
How much do attendees at Oshkosh love bombers? Have a look at the simulated bombs that are an essential part of every airshow at EAA AirVenture:
Somewhat related,
“The destruction of Germany’s great war industries was accomplished almost entirely from the air. No one can stand among their ruins without a feeling of awe for the devastating power of such attacks. The courage and skill of our pilots and their crews in these operations is legendary. They deserve the highest tribute of our people.”
— The Honorable Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War
Found on the cover of a book about the B-24 at the Aeromart within EAA AirVenture:
(We seem to have chosen the opposite approach with the Islamic Republic of Iran, i.e., allow them to continue as an industrial power and ask them nicely not to use their industry to make weapons.)
Boeing now takes credit for the B-1B, which was entirely developed and built by North American Rockwell. Boeing lost the design competition circa 1970 and acquired Rockwell in 1996, 22 years after the B-1’s first flight. What else does Boeing take credit for? At the Boeing pavilion’s gift shop, the Black Americans who won World War II:
ChatGPT, regarding the Tuskegee Airmen:
the display in your photograph is best understood as modern corporate and cultural messaging
they did not fly Boeing aircraft operationally (the Stearman was used for primary training, though)
No Tuskegee Airman officially qualified as an ace during World War II (vs. 1,279 non-Tuskegee pilots)
The group encountered enemy aircraft on only 35 of its 179 Fifteenth Air Force bomber-escort missions, partly because it entered that campaign relatively late, as German fighter opposition was declining.
Elsewhere on the field, we are informed that the “fearless” pilots who fly the B-29, an actual Boeing plane, were not the men who plowed through 16 hours of thunderstorms round-trip to Japan, but rather “fearless women” who operated the B-29 over the Continental U.S.
ChatGPT:
Many male test pilots, instructors and crews were already flying the B-29. [Enola Gay pilot Paul] Tibbets himself trained the women, and a male instructor or aircraft commander was involved in their qualification. The aircraft could not have been developed, tested and fielded otherwise.
The reluctance concerned a troublesome new aircraft, not a universal refusal by men to undertake danger.
The women were selected partly because Tibbets expected the gender comparison to embarrass reluctant male crews. The stunt depended upon the period’s assumption that a man ought to be ashamed if a woman undertook a flying risk he avoided.
