Category Archives: Single Ship

Miscellaneous Topics

That Was When I Was A Lot Older Than I Am Now

Moms and Dads love telling stories on their kids, right? The cute things they said and did, the more embarrassing to the child as an adult, the better. On the occasion of my big Seven–O birthday, my wife Ann announced that she had a presentation to make and asked everyone to take a seat in the living room. She opened an envelope and immediately began to tear up as she tried to explain that my brother had found among our parents’ effects two small note cards upon which our father had written the most memorable (to our parents) sayings for … Continue reading

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The Big Seven-O

We only experience any birthday once in a lifetime, but some obviously arrive with more significance than others. My 60th year was not a good time for me. I found myself looking back with regrets about what might have been and forward with pessimism about what the future might hold. The day in the middle representing current time therefore became prime territory for depression, a condition with sufficient history in my family to be of concern. Fortunately, the ill effects of that milestone didn’t continue. My brother is six years older, but for the 20 days between his birthday and … Continue reading

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Beautiful Aviation Art Lives!

If you have visited this logbook in the past and read any of the parts in the series “Beautiful Aviation Art,” you are probably aware that my sole purpose in posting the images is to pay tribute first to the airmen, and second to the artists who so wondrously capture single moments in the time of a world conflict almost beyond imagination. In Part Four, I mentioned that the originator of the slide show with these images stumbled upon my website during an online search on a totally unrelated topic, and realized that we had flown Phantoms together in the … Continue reading

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Beautiful Aviation Art–Part Five

We continue with the six-part series to showcase some of the finest examples of art depicting events of the WWII air war. I discovered the original images in a gorgeous slide show created by a good friend and fellow fighter pilot, Yago F. de Bobadilla, who rose to the rank of Major General in the Spanish Air Force. Hauptmann Hans-Joachim Marseille, better known as the Star of Africa, was probably the most formidable opponent the British ever encountered in the air. He was victorious in 158 aerial combats against the Royal Air Force, 154 of which were fighter aircraft. Marseille … Continue reading

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Beautiful Aviation Art – Part Four

In Part One of “Beautiful Aviation Art,” I introduced the planned six-part series by speculating that I knew the author. At the time, conjecture was my only option because I had not been able to confirm that he was in fact the same, the one and only, Yago F. de Bobadilla, a captain in the Spanish Air Force on an exchange-officer assignment with the United States Air Force at Luke AFB, Arizona, during my tour of duty there as an instructor pilot in the F-4 Phantom II. But on May 14, 2012 I received the following email: My dear friend … Continue reading

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Men Can Fix Anything

Note: If you are looking at the Home Page Fighter Pilot Header, click on the post title to view its dedicated page and Featured Image Header. Have you ever wondered why no one ever uses the term “handywoman?” Well, now you need ponder that question no longer, because here’s photographic evidence of male practical ingenuity at work designing solutions for a wide variety of problems that can make everyday life troublesome. Don’t have a spoon? I can fix that! Seatbelt broken? I can fix that! TV too large for the old cabinet? I can fix that! Electrical problem? I can … Continue reading

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The Ultimate Christmas Decoration

Whether you are “into” decorating your home for Christmas or not, you probably can’t avoid the commercials that show somebody causing a brownout when plugging in their extravagant display, or the one about hiring Bette Midler to add some pizazz to a local caroling group. Then there’s the jerk in my neighborhood who thinks it’s funny to hang a lighted reindeer head-down from a tree in his front yard with a string of red lights dangling from its throat. And while the pictures that follow might appeal a bit more to pilots than non-aviators, and they represent an airborne “accident” … Continue reading

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Tragedy In Reno – Who Should Pay?

Credit for source photo used in the header: AP Photo/Ward Howes. (If you are looking at the Home Page fighter pilot header, click on the post title.) (Photo credit: posted to Flickr by jeggernot here) As you might imagine, the aviation community is tightly focused on this crash, and the aftermath will reverberate through the news in one form or another for some time to come. You don’t, of course, have to be an aviator to grieve for the dead, the injured, and their families. And as we might expect, like vultures to road kill, “ambulance chasers” will circle the … Continue reading

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Tragedy in Reno

Credit for source photo used in the header: AP Photo/Ward Howes. (If you are looking at the Home Page fighter pilot header, click on the post title.) The annual air races in Reno, NV, can be thought of as NASCAR on steroids. The typical race plane is a heavily modified WWII-era fighter whose sole purpose is to charge around an oval racetrack about 50 feet above the desert at 450-500 mph, complete the required number of laps, and cross the finish line before any of the other contestants. In case you didn’t know, on Friday, September 16, 2011, a P-51 … Continue reading

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Dante’s Texas

If you’ve ever wondered what hell on earth would be like, there are plenty of people in Central Texas who can give you an eyewitness account.

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