Today in aviation history

Good afternoon fellow ECAHF’ers.  If anything, what scares you about flying?  Though I didn’t dwell on the possibilities too much when I was flying USMC aircraft, when I did think about it or when we discussed the subject in the ready room, consciously burning to death in a crashed aircraft was my #1 fear.  Crashing […]

Good evening fellow ECAHF’ers.  *Warning* Don’t read this just prior to, during, or just after a meal. “War is hell” Union General Tecumseh Sherman was quoted as saying, and it certainly is as evidenced by the firebombing raid on Tokyo only a few months prior to the devastation of the two atomic bombs dropped in

How many times have you heard (so-called) leaders use this excuse for being risk averse?  What did an abundance of caution ever get us other than lost opportunities?  Of course, this is just my opinion (for what that’s worth…not much…) but leaders who are skewed toward using an abundance of caution do not engender confidence

Good afternoon fellow ECAHF’ers, For those of you in Eastern NC (I think that would be all of you, me being the only “outlier”), I know things were shut down for days there with your recent snow.  Here in Southern Pines/Pinehurst we got far less than you did, but it was a beautiful inch or

Good evening fellow ECAHF’ers.  Aviation history is a wonderful world of exciting firsts peppered with a sad world of depressing bursts.  Even today there are risks in aviation, even with all our rules; procedures; navigational aids; high tech weather forecasting (so why are the forecasts still wrong much of the time?😊); inspectors and inspections; intense

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  If you were not informed, or if informed but didn’t look closely, you might mistake the Piasecki (and then the Vertol) H-21 Shawnee pictured below as the CH-46 Sea Knight flown by our esteemed ECAHF chairman, Major General (USMC, retired) Tom Braaten. In fact, they’re so similar in appearance that I

Good Friday morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  Today. Eighty-three years ago in 1941. The day before “a date which will live in infamy”. We Americans like to think of ourselves as a people who don’t start wars, but we sure as hell can finish them. Some historians might disagree with that premise of Americans being a people

Students’ ‘homemade’ rocket soars faster and farther into space than any other amateur spacecraft — smashing 20-year records Good Saturday morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  Wow.  If only.  But alas, we kids were true amateurs and could only dream.  We launched bottle rockets from pop bottles before we turned the scorched bottles in at the local drug

Good morning fellow ECAHF’ers.  As an “early bird”, I’m up before light (it’s 5:45am as I type this—early get-ups were “beat” into me by the Marines).  And like most of you, I’m sure, I’m always in bed after dark, especially these days of “fall back”, Eastern Standard Time.  And we still have over a month

Good Sunday afternoon fellow ECAHF’ers. This aviation history vignette is less about history than it is about “current operations”.  And it’s a story not about me although I was a bit player in it, emphasis on the word “bit”.  So, I hope by telling it I don’t come off as “tooting my own horn” because