Continuing our tour of the USAF Museum (post 1) in Dayton, Ohio…
The second hangar is devoted to the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Walking into the hangar we are immediately reminded that it was American women who did the heavy lifting in the Vietnam War:
Turning 180 degrees we find the Korean War exhibit. The floor signs remind us that, as of July 14, 2025, we’re still fighting our War Against SARS-CoV-2:
Our brave young warriors are also protected from COVID-19 by simple non-N95 cloth masks:
The Twin Mustang was our favorite plane on exhibit in this section:
Tough to believe that these were actually used in combat!
Progressive Democrats have complained about the sometimes-too-cold and sometimes-too-warm air conditioning situation in Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, where noble undocumented migrants spend a few weeks in the UNESCO World Heritage treasure of the Everglades awaiting deportation. USAF pilots and mechanics deployed to Korea spent a year or more in tents without A/C or reasonable heat:
Returning to Vietnam, we lost the war because of failed political leadership:
Dogs and helicopters are appropriately recognized:
We visited the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio on our way to Oshkosh. This is a two-day museum if you want to read more than half of the signs and absorb the history and technical information that is being communicated (vastly more detail than at the Smithsonian Air and Space). The experience starts with words from President Nixon:
The curators are less prone to the Wright Brothers worship that pervades Dayton:
A Jenny is exhibited and also explained:
The museum seems to be run by a separate foundation so they’re perhaps not required to follow Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orders to refrain from dividing military personnel according to victimhood group. The museum celebrates Eugene Bullard, for example, not for being a military aviator but for being the “first Black military aviator”:
The drones that have transformed today’s battlefield were initially developed in Dayton, Ohio during WWI:
Here’s the only surviving Martin B-10 1930s bomber, out of 348 built:
The other side of the first massive hangar is devoted to more familiar World War II aircraft. Visitors are reminded that it was women who fought and won the largest battles, e.g., against bias, of World War II:
At least in the signage, there are few mixed feelings regarding the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. The B-29 that devastated Nagasaki is on display:
On a more cheerful note, a PBY is painted with the rafts of the aviators rescued:
An original Me 262 is displayed along with a cutaway Jumo engine (note the Donald Trump/Elon Musk symbol on the tail):
The B-24 is named “Strawberry Bitch”. Maybe after someone got a bill for an annual on the four-engine machine?
The WWII hangar includes an original Mitsubishi Zero and this unusual Kamikaze trainer (one flight school that it would be great to fail out of!):
When the American flag is displayed we can refer to the official U.S. flag code for guidance on orientation, etc. I’m wondering what the corresponding document would be for the Rainbow Flag, which is far more sacred (it is permissible and protected speech to burn an American flag (Supreme Court) but burning a Rainbow Flag is punished by 15 years in prison).
Here’s what I assume is the proper way to display a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag (flown by Joe Biden in 2023 and reported by state-sponsored PBS):
The trans-enhancing triangle is on the top.
Here’s part of a taxpayer-funded display of the state religion’s sacred symbol in Boise, Idaho on July 1, 2025 (after Pride but before Omnisexual Visibility Day (July 6));
The trans-enhancing triangle is on the bottom. That can’t be correct, I don’t think, but where is the flag code to establish authoritatively that it isn’t correct? (See Big Sky v. Jackson v. Park City as a summer destination for images of a taxpayer-funded display in 2023 where the triangles are on the top, just as Joe Biden set up.)
Speaking of the U.S. Flag Code and Boise, the folks who run the Zoo decided that the American flag fit perfectly into the Olive Baboon habitat:
The backup Baboon American flag boxes were displayed contrary to U.S. Flag Code (maybe a protest against the Trump administration?):
Finally, let’s have a look at post-Pride (July 2025) displays of the sacred flag and related symbols by merchants in Boise:
One establishment reminds the public that a MAGA hat can be considered “Nazi symbology” or, at least, Nazi-adjacent:
Most of the other graphs are flat as well. If you adjusted these for official CPI there would perhaps be a slight downward trend in real dollars.
Why are memory prices more or less stuck at 2023 levels? Is it that fewer companies are making RAM? That the AI Boom (TM) has increased demand? (economics proves that immigrants don’t drive up prices for housing, but Econ 101 says that demand for memory drives up prices for memory)
Roughly 70 million humans die every year worldwide. Via a tortured statistical analysis, the nerds now say that it would have been 70.5 million per year for 2020-2024 but for the life-saving miracle of COVID-19 vaccination. Roughly 1.2 million people die every year in traffic accidents (WHO) and they’re typically much younger and healthier than a COVID-19 victim. If we’d ignored SARS-CoV-2 and implemented my Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? and Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.? ideas, in other words, we would have saved far more lives, and vastly more life-years, than we did by forcing people to accept experimental injections.
(A skeptic might say that the difference between 70 million people dying and 70.5 million people dying is too small to be noticed reliably and that, therefore, it is just as likely that the COVID-19 vaccines didn’t save any lives or actually resulted in a higher death rate by encouraging people to take risks after they were vaccinated, e.g., attending a crowded Taylor Swift concert (note also that the best way for a progressive Democrat who expresses concern regarding inequality to redress social injustice is to spend $10,000 on a Taylor Swift weekend rather than giving the $10,000 to the poor).)
eVTOL air taxis are a few years away, just as they were at Oshkosh 2018 (see Transitioning to electric flight (lectures at Oshkosh)). The static displays that appeared at Oshkosh 2025, e.g., Joby’s, seemed too large to fit comfortably into our car-oriented world. The U.S. population keeps growing, thanks to the miracle of immigration, and developers keep developing more suburban sprawl. Should each new reasonably elite neighborhood include a “super drone zone” where an eVTOL air taxi can land and depart without annoying or endangering anyone?
(Also, if eVTOLs start to work as advertised does that mean that the rulers of the U.S. will stop making any attempt to make surface transportation tolerable? If elites go everywhere by private air taxi why would they care that peasants must endure a Mumbai-/Delhi-like experience when they try to go somewhere by “surface car”?)
So that the zone need not be a fenced-off blight when not in use perhaps it could be a “smart LZ” in which a low perimeter fence of lights begins to flash when an eVTOL is inbound (i.e., the inbound eVTOL robot or human pilot can activate the “move away from the pad” lights). The same fence can be equipped with cameras and other sensors to detect the presence of humans and other obstacles and warn the eVTOL if the landing zone isn’t clear.
Here’s the Toyota-funded Joby in the new-for-2025 Toyota booth at EAA AirVenture:
(This was one of the places where I heard about the FAA’s new-since-November-2024 religion of productivity and consequent hope for certification.)
I spent a few days traveling around Mount Desert Island, Maine in a Lucid Air Touring. The back seat of this machine is truly palatial. The ride is solid and comfortable. Every hospital that profits from treating traumatic brain injuries should love this design because the dimensions are optimized for hitting one’s head while getting in and out (a common issue noted on the Interweb; example). It’s far easier to get in and out of a C8 Corvette without hitting one’s head than in/out of a Lucid, front seat or back.
Folks in Maine love Lucid so much that we parked next to two Lucids in the same color. Here’s one:
When it was my turn to drive, some of the limitations of the EV-smartphone integration became apparent. There apparently isn’t a way for an owner to authorize a friend as a temporary driver of the machine. I wasn’t able to register and log in for a Lucid account because there isn’t a vehicle registered to me. There is no “share this car” option in the Lucid app. I had to get my friend’s username and password and log in on the app on my phone. After that, we spent about five minutes trying to pair the car with my phone and finally succeeded after turning off Bluetooth on his phone. The car isn’t smart about whether it has been started with a phone or a key. If you have no key with you, but only your phone, it reminds you to take the non-existent key after parking:
My trip in the vehicle was on paved roads in what Mainers call “summer” (cloudy with light rain). We were rich in error messages. One concerned the failure of the LIDAR system with instructions to clean the lens:
This disappeared for no apparent reason (we neither found nor cleaned any sensor). Another error message concerned the stability control and regeneration systems. This cleared itself.
The driver assistance features are similar to those on a modern gas-powered car. The driver is warned about lane departure, cars in blind spots (the A and B pillars are huge!), and obstacles nearby when parking. Lucid doesn’t seem to be competing in the self-driving world so this is a car for the EV-lover who wants to drive him/her/zir/themself.
How would Mindy the Crippler like this vehicle? It’s a few button presses to get into “Creative Comfort Mode”, similar to Tesla’s Dog Mode:
I agree with my owner-friend (see below) that is a great car from the driver’s perspective, at least assuming that he/she/ze/they has recovered from the skull-roof impact. Loyal readers familiar with my passion for reducing inequality in American society won’t be surprised that my favorite moments with the Lucid were parked at a taxpayer-funded city-run charger. Here are photos documenting the transfer of wealth from peasants driving 20-year-old pickups to the person fortunate enough to own a $90,000 Lucid:
Here’s a sign posted at a pottery shop in nearby Islesford, Maine:
I haven’t figured out which of the above things that we must do covers “pay taxes so that owners of $90,000 SUVs can charge for free.”
Just before Oshkosh: “Garmin introduces its largest TXi touchscreen flight display yet”. If you want to spend $200,000 on an avionics upgrade to a -G2 Cirrus airplane that was worth $150,000 in pre-Biden dollars in pre-coronapanic times you can now get a 12″ display from Garmin. Did they fix the absurdly low 1280×768 resolution on the 10″ displays that made approach plates illegible unless the pilot wanted to remove his/her/zir/their right hand from the controls and pinch/pan to view different parts of the plate sequentially? It seems that Garmin’s latest and greatest 2025 display has the same resolution as the old one, i.e., 1280×768. This is the resolution that consumers got in 2014 from the Samsung Galaxy Mega 2 ($150 pre-Biden dollars).
How does it look? (ignore the red bands, which are artifacts from the camera/display interaction)
I guess the theory is that the Garmin autopilot is so good the pilot doesn’t have anything better to do than pinch/zoom/pan.
The same company, for a little more than 1/100th the price, introduced a “smart buoy” that keeps track of SCUBA divers (press release). I can’t figure out why it is so difficult to deliver 1080p resolution (1920×1280) to aviation customers.
The company’s “CTOL” aircraft was on display in a spacious six-seat configuration. It can supposedly travel 150 nm with a reasonable reserve (215 nm absolute range) with all six seats occupied. An efficient cruise speed is a Robinson R44-style 105 knots. Against a typical headwind maybe the range is more like 130 nm. Make sure not to run out of battery power because the stall speed is 80 knots, which would mean hitting the ground at over 100 mph.
BETA plans to certify the aircraft under FAR 23, which limits single-engine aircraft to a stall speed of 61 knots unless the manufacturer can demonstrate above-and-beyond crashworthiness. This has been stretched to 67 knots by a couple of companies, e.g., Cirrus for the Vision Jet and Pilatus for the PC-12, but nobody has ever gone anywhere near 80 knots. If the BETA has only one propeller how can it get FAR 23 certification? Maybe the answer is that the single propeller/motor combination has two independent motors internally? Thus, the aircraft could actually be considered a centerline twin?
The actual plane at the event has accumulated 250 hours. The pilots who’ve flown it say that it is quiet enough that they remove their headsets when in cruise (electric engine in the back). An air conditioner is coming soon. Finally we might have an aircraft as comfortable as a Honda Odyssey?
(The tail number is N916LF in memory of Lochie Ferrier, a young MIT graduate and former BETA employee who died in a homebuilt aircraft accident in January 2024. We don’t yet have a final NTSB report, but there appears to have been a power loss in a piston engine that may have been unrelated to the aircraft’s experimental status. 9/16 was Lochie’s birthday.)
The vehicle is huge. If a conventional airframe company built this it would have to sell for $3 million just to pay for the aluminum and carbon fiber construction.
How are the legacy piston-powered companies responding to this innovation? A new paint scheme at the Cirrus pavilion:
Here’s a report on two days of driving an $80,000 Mercedes EQE SUV rented from Budget in Dayton, Ohio. What does it look like when parked in front of the kind of house that Mercedes owners deserve?
The FBO gave me a lift to the main terminal to pick up the vehicle. “It’s impossible to hire anyone competent,” said the line guy, “so the rental car companies are extremely short-handed these days and can’t drop off cars with us anymore.”
(Dayton is rich in immigrants and getting richer every year so the line guy’s lived experience is not consistent with economic truth regarding open borders being a surefire path to an ample labor supply. City of Dayton: “Between 2014 and 2019, the total population in the City of Dayton decreased by 0.2% while the immigrant population increased by +25.9% during the same time period.” (remember that a falling population of the native-born and a growing population of migrants is not a “replacement”))
There was a Fall of Saigon scene in the terminal. All of the companies except Avis/Budget were out of cars. Those with Avis/Budget reservations were told they’d need to wait several hours beyond their reservation time due to a shortage of vehicles. My electric reservation, however, bumped me towards the front of the queue.
I was admonished to return the vehicle with at least 80 percent charge or face a $75 failure-to-charge penalty. I discovered later that this would have been a challenge due to the fact that the car was set up to stop charging at precisely 80 percent (i.e., you’d have to tow it or push it from the charging station to the airport in order to achieve the 80 percent charge return goal). The vehicle was delivered to me with a 79 percent charge:
The fancy electronics immediately disappointed. There is a navigation system with points of interest, but it couldn’t find the long-established FBO. Fortunately, unlike with a Nazi-tainted Tesla, the entirely Nazi-free Mercedes supports Apple CarPlay.
The driving experience is very different than in a Tesla. There are instruments directly in front of the driver, rather than off to the side on an iPad stapled to the center of the dash. The EQE feels solid and quiet. It doesn’t accelerate any faster than our Honda Odyssey minivan (0-60 in 6+ seconds), but why would anyone in the U.S. (population headed toward 600 million sharing roads designed for a nation of 150 million) need blistering acceleration in a family car?
Charging infrastructure proved to be a challenge. We were in a brand-new hotel with a brand-new parking structure, shared with an office building, and I didn’t see any chargers. The USAF museum has a parking lot that can hold perhaps 600 cars. It has 4 chargers, all of them free (thanks for paying your taxes!), 2 of which were broken. Over a 48-hour period we never went anywhere else that had chargers. Near the end of the rental experience we finally waded deep enough into the menus to find the “eco” setting was preventing a full charge:
Keeping your $80,000 investment from being destroyed is as simple as following the rules on these two full screens of text:
At every startup we were prompted to download a Mercedes USA app and sync it to the car. Here’s what Mercedes USA shows as typical customers:
Here’s the EQE, at the forefront of ground transportation, in front of a building in the neighborhood where the Wright Brothers did their work at the forefront of air transportation (before they figured out that patent litigation made more sense than engineering!).
Conclusion: Although it feels like a better car than any Tesla if what you want to do is drive yourself Point A to Point B, I would rather have a Tesla than an EQE. Tesla seems to be getting its FSD act in gear (so to speak) and Tesla offers Dog Mode as well as cabin overheat protection so that Mindy the Crippler and her canine brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters can be kept safe (also good for infants and toddlers who might be sleeping back there, sometimes forgotten). Based on our experience in not finding chargers I wouldn’t want to own any electric car unless I had a charger and home and owned a gas-powered car for actual trips.
(I returned the car at about 70% charge to the FBO. It took Budget a couple of days to pick it up, presumably due to their short-staffing. They didn’t charge me a “failure to charge” penalty, but they did charge for one day more of rental than I actually used (I had reserved three days and used two).)
