Dover Mini-Reunion Planning for 8 Oct 2011

The idea is to have a Saturday evening dinner with a cash bar at Dover Downs, and before we get specific, we'd like to know how many of you have serious interest in attending. The AMC Museum could be open in the afternoon, with wine and beer available as before.

We don't intend to make a mailing, so our e-mail list and word-of-mouth is our total "marketing plan." If you are seriously planning to attend, contact anyone you know who may also be interested, and within the next ten days (by 2 Aug) let me know at the following e-mail address your intentions and the number of people we could count on from your party. Then Sandy and his Dover team will come up with a specific plan (i.e. menu options, cost/person and a deadline), and I'll get back to those who reply by e-mail.

Contact: Dick Hanson at rehanson342@me.com

THANK YOU!!

Airwar, by Edward Jablonski

These two large books have been waiting to be read for four years. They are classics and are excellent! Jablonski covers the entire WWII period and tells the stories of the Battle of Britian, Pearl Harbor, English night bombing and the Dambusters raid, among others. He has lots of names, some never heard of and others well known (Billy Mitchell, Yamamoto, Guy Gibson, "Sailor" Malan, Barnes Wallis, etc.). We have all heard or read these tales, but Jablonski's treatment is as exciting as Dale Brown's works. These books are a painless way to refresh yourself on air power and its applications from the 1930s until the A-bomb.

Discovery Flight Deck

Thanks to Bill Neely for this link to a website for a 360 degree view (both side-to-side and up-and-down; don't miss the ceiling with the up and down arrows at the bottom) of the Space Shuttle Discovery crew cabin flight deck.

Click on:
Discovery Flight Deck

Discovery (OV-103), the third of NASA's fleet of reusable, winged spaceships, arrived at Kennedy Space Center in November 1983. It was launched on its first mission, flight 41-D, on August 30, 1984. It carried aloft three communications satellites for deployment by its astronaut crew.

Other Discovery milestones include the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope on mission STS-31 in April 1990, the launching of the Ulysses spacecraft to explore the sun's polar regions on mission STS-41 in October of that year and the deployment of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) in September 1991.

Discovery is named for two famous sailing ships; one sailed by Henry Hudson in 1610-11 to search for a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the other by James Cook on a voyage during which he discovered the Hawaiian Islands.

Flying Status for Flying Safety

Know any "old pilots" out there? Thanks to Jerry Coleman, here's an authentic military order, dated 22 May 1939, from Chief of the Air Corps, Maj. Gen. H. H. Arnold. I know you can't read the fine print without a magnifying glass, but it says that the Chief is "deeply concerned that senior and older pilots take no unnecessary flying risks and thus jeopardize their valuable experience to the Air Corps.," and basically any pilot over 47 years old, regardless of rank or experience, must ride "shotgun" for a younger pilot.

Dawn over Kitty Hawk

Thanks to Cal Taylor for his following comment:

I just finished Walter Boyne's excellent book, Dawn over Kitty Hawk. It is a fictional account of the entire story of the Wright Brothers and their contemporaries, from before the first flight until long after. Boyne does an excellent job of detailing the rivalry, cooperation, accomplishments and failures of Langley, Bell, Chanute and many others. It's available in paperback, probably at your local used paperback store.


To find it online @ Barnes & Noble for $1.99 paperback (or $6.99 Nook book), click on:

Dawn over Kitty Hawk

Also to go to an interesting related website reported earlier on this blog, click on:

Wright B Flyer Website