Bad cellphone-camera self-portrait with the Cocoa Beach pier in the background. Mary is happy because she's full of margaritas.
I like this photo of Mary.
We had to stop and get a photo of this church. You can probably imagine why.
We spent two days at a beachside inn, in the town of Indialantic. This was the view from the porch while I was drinking my coffee. Meanwhile I think it was snowing back home. Hooray for Florida in December.
A somewhat better self-portrait.
Mary with artsy lighting. A fill light would have been useful here.
She doesn't know how to use the three seashells?
This is Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, as viewed from the observation gantry several miles away.
Vehicle Assembly Building as seen from the observation gantry. Believe it or not, it's something like five miles away from where I'm standing in this photo.
LC-39B off in the distance. What looks like a four-lane gravel road is actually the crawlerway that leads from the VAB out to the pads.
Business end of the Saturn V.
This thing is huge!
Mary provides some scale. Still it's hard to tell from photos how big this thing seems when it's looming over your head.
They did a nice job of restoring and preserving everything. The command module is a mockup, but the S-IC, S-II, and S-IVB stages are all authentic. Not sure about the service module.
Top end of the S-II second stage.
Astronaut Mary playing some kind of futuristic Guitar Hero controller(?).
In the foreground is an Atlas-Agena, used as a docking target during the Gemini missions. In the background is either a Jupiter or a Juno.
This is the actual pad from which Alan Shepard's Mercury-Redstone rocket was launched. It's not much more than a steel cradle standing in the middle of a concrete slab. Obviously the rocket is a reproduction.
Mercury 7 monument. Apparently there is a time capsule buried below, but you can see that the concrete is already starting to crack. I don't think it will last quite as long as they hoped...
This is what remains of Launch Complex 14, where John Glenn was launched to became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.
This is the pad at Launch Complex 34, where astronauts Grissom, White, and Chafee died in a fire in 1967.
Looking up through the pad to where the Saturn IB rocket once stood.
It's a national monument now.
These are the blast deflectors at LC-34, which would have been used to launch Apollo I. In the distance a Delta IV Heavy is being prepped for launch at LC-37.
A closer view of LC-39A, this time taken up close from the tour bus.
A closer view of the Vehicle Assembly Building. This structure is so big that it's hard to get a sense of scale. For reference, the flag on the side of the building is the size of a football field.
This is one of the Orbiter Processing Facilities, where the shuttle orbiters get rebuilt between missions. I thought the cutout in the hangar door for the vertical fin was amusing.
This is a model of Valles Marineris on Mars, with the Grand Canyon shown for scale. Don't fall in!
The skin of the Delta rocket family is machined from a solid piece of billet to save weight. No wonder rockets are so expensive!
On Tuesday I went to the Fantasy of Flight museum in Polk City. If you ever find yourself in central Florida, you must visit this place. It's probably the best aviation museum I've ever seen, although I admittedly haven't yet had a chance to visit the NASM in DC. This is a New Standard biplane (circa 1929) that was giving rides. I wish I'd had a chance to go - it was only sixty bucks! - but I was out of time and had to get back to Orlando. Next time I'll try to find time to do this.
Another view of the New Standard D-25. I really like the colors they used for old planes like this. You don't see a lot of tan-on-maroon paint jobs today.
PBY-5 Catalina sitting on the ramp.
A closer view of the PBY. At this point I was riding on a sort of electric tram contraption, listening to the guided tour of the museum grounds.
In the background you can see the seaplane pond - they use this to launch and recover their collection of floatplanes. The PBY has wheels, but they are "beaching gear", not "landing gear". In other words, it can taxi out of the water onto dry land, but it has to take off and land on the water.
First stop was the engine shop. They had shelves and shelves of old engines stacked thirty feet high. It was like the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, except for old airplane engines.
Almost all the engines along the back wall are Allison V-1710s that are being cannibalized for parts. In the middle foreground are various P&W radials. The engine on the left is some kind of oddball French radial that's water-cooled(!).
Big stack of old props, most of which are unairworthy in some way (due to either age or accident). They keep them around as templates, and when they need a new one they send the original to the Sensenich factory in Plant City to have a fresh duplicate made.
Another view of the engine area.
These Allison V-1710s are still in their original 1940's shipping crates. They have never been run!
More brand-new Allisons. I think some of them are available for sale, but if you have to ask the price you probably can't afford one.
SBD Dauntless dive bomber awaiting restoration.
The four-blade prop is not original - wartime SBD's had three-bladed props. This particular airplane was one of a whole fleet of WWII planes that were used by the movie studios as portable wind machines for outdoor filming. They chopped off the wings and put on a bigger prop to get more wind. The wings in the background are from a different aircraft, and will be restored along with this fuselage to make a single complete SBD.
My uncle was a Dauntless tail gunner for a while.
In the background is a collection of engine mounts for various aircraft.
Believe it or not, the orange thing is actually the fuselage frame from a Hawker Hurricane that's going to be rebuilt someday.
A Lockheed L-1649 Super Constellation.
They said this airplane has actually been bought by Lufthansa, but they haven't been by to haul it off to their museum yet.
A Fiesler Storch observation plane. With a takeoff distance of only 200 feet, it was the next best thing to a helicopter during WWII.
Polikarpov PO-2, a Russian training biplane. In the background is the wing of a B-24.
A Travel Air 4000. This was one of the last planes built by the Travel Air corporation before the principal owners split up. You may have heard of them - their names were Walter Beech, Lloyd Stearman, and Clyde Cessna.
A rare Curtiss TP-40N, the two-seat training version of the P-40 Warhawk.
I wanted to get out and drool on it but the tram was on the move, so I had to snap these pictures as it sped by.
They were doing some engine work on it but I didn't learn exactly what they were up to. Like many of the aircraft in the collection, it is maintained in flying condition and apparently is flown regularly.
Now into the museum hangars for the indoor displays. I will try to group these photos in a somewhat historically-correct way. This is a Curtiss Pusher... just a few years after the Wright brothers first flew, airplanes were starting to get a little more airplane-shaped.
I believe this is a Thomas Morse Scout. My WWI-era airplane identification skills could use some improvement.
I like the way they left the internal structure exposed so you could see how it was put together. Old wood airplanes are so pretty. More on this later.
Top-down view of the Scout from the upper level.
Morane A-1, a French monoplane design from the end of the war. WWI fighters had such interesting paint schemes.
This is a Nieuport 28, another French design that was flown in Europe by the American Expeditionary Force. Note the sign promoting the connection to the movie Flyboys - most of the vintage aircraft in that movie were either CGI or full-size flying replicas, but this one was real. Pity it was such a terrible movie, since the flying scenes were pretty good.
Aerial view of the Nieuport. I'm pretty sure that, when I was a kid, one of the plastic models hanging from the ceiling in my room was a Nieuport.
This is a Standard E-1, an American design that was too underpowered and lightly-armed to be much good as a fighter. A few were used as trainers late in the war.
This is a Standard J-1. This particular airplane was used in the Howard Hughes movie Hell's Angels. To my untrained eye it looks a lot like a JN-4, but the Jenny was a completely different airplane made by Curtiss.
This is a replica of a Fokker Dr.I, the airplane made famous by Baron Manfred von Richtofen.
You might known him by his nickname, the Red Baron.
This a replica of the Ryan NYP used by Charles Lindbergh for his New York to Paris flight in 1927.
Note the lack of windshield! Also, you can see that this replica has brakes and a tailwheel, which the original lacked. The enigne is also a Lycoming instead of a Wright, but I wouldn't have noticed.
Not much in the cockpit except a few rudimentary instruments and a whole lot of fuel valves.
Wicker seat to save weight. Imagine sitting here for 33 1/2 hours.
Lockheed Vega, a six-passenger transport from circa 1929.
This Vega has been restored and painted in the colors of Wiley Post's famous airplane, but this is not the actual Winnie Mae.
It's quite streamlined considering it's all-wood!
The Bucker Jungmeister was sort of the 30's-era sporting gentleman's aerobatic biplane, I suppose.
Note the Olympic rings on the tail. This Jungmeister is painted to match the plane that flew an aerobatic demonstration at the 1936 Olympics... inside the stadium!
A Z-model Gee Bee racer. This is of course a replica, since all the originals had a bad habit of crashing and killing their pilots.
If I'd been thinking, I could have set up a better shot here and used this for next year's christmas card.
A different Gee Bee replica. I forget which model this one is. They were all pretty much just a huge engine with some stubby little wings attached.
Love that Pratt & Whitney eagle.
Avro Cadet.
The Cadet was, as you might imagine, a trainer. Notice that the magneto switches are located on the outside of the fuselage... that way the guy swinging the prop can make sure that no dumb student has left the mags on before he pulls the prop through!
This particular Ford Trimotor is the one that was used at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
This looks like a British Tiger Moth, but it's actually a French Norde Stampe (pronounced "stomp"). I can never tell them apart, but supposedly the Stampe was a much better airplane. I've flown a replica Tiger Moth and its handling was terrible, but I suspect it was just a poor replica.
Bucker Bestmann. It's German.
This Grumman F3F is one of the few biplanes I can think of that had retractable gear. If you look close you can see the lines of the F4F, which was a much more successful airplane.
Here's a Grumman F4F Wildcat. Note the family resemblance.
Aerial view of the F4F. To the left is a North American AT-6, and the F3F again. Above is the tail of a B-25.
North American B-25J.
An earlier variant of this medium bomber was used in the Doolittle raid in 1942.
This one has been restored to all-original condition. Well, almost - the face on the pinup girl was changed to resemble the owner's wife!
North American P-51D.
The unmistakable profile of the Mustang.
So shiny.
Vought F4U Corsair sitting on a replica carrier deck.
This is the nose section from a gunship variant of the B-25. At first I thought it was an H-model, but Adam corrected me... it's another J-model, with a different armament package.
This is a dorsal gun turret from a P-61 Black Widow night fighter. I had a relative who flew those.
Obviously it's a remotely-operated turret, no room for a guy in there.
This is the nose section of the actual B-29 mothership that carried the Douglas D-558 rocket aircraft.
Signed by Paul Tibbets, Scott Crossfield, and Robert Cardenas. Look 'em up.
Bell model 47G helicopter, as made famous by the TV show MASH.
There were a bunch more airplanes to see in the exhibit hangars, but I didn't want to miss the once-daily tour of the wood shop. Here they let us see the restoration of a Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" up close and personal.
The walls of this very large room were hung with original wood-and-fabric wings from a variety of airplanes, which were between 70 and 95 years old.
More wings. Most of these are too rotten to be airworthy, but they can be used as templates to make new wings. The museum also tries to reuse as many pieces of the original wood as possible when restoring an airplane.
Here are the lower wings for the Jenny, post-restoration. The internal structure of old wood airplanes is such a beautiful combination of engineering and woodworking that you almost don't want them to hide it under the fabric skin. Seeing this in person just about knocked me down.
The darker-colored wood is original, and the lighter stuff is new replacement wood.
The mixture of science, art, and craftsmanship here is amazing. I came away with a much greater appreciation for how these old airplanes were built.
This is a wing rib jig for the Ryan NYP.
Here's the fuselage of the Jenny. You can see that the restoration is pretty far along.
The fuselage has wood, steel, and bracing wires going every which way. When you look at it up close it's almost hard to focus your eyes on any one feature, since there are so many things to look at.
Hey, I have those same clamps in my airplane workshop!
A view of the instrument panel. Vintage instruments, of course.
The thing that looks like a pencil sharpener is a booster magneto, which would be cranked by the pilot during starting.
I think I was starting to succumb to detail overload at this point!
A view of the pilot's seat and control linkage.
When the guide wasn't looking, I stuck the camera into the tail and took a picture looking up the longitudinal axis. From this angle it looks kind of like a bridge truss.
The Curtiss OX-5 engine that powered the Jenny.
Note the exposed rocker arms. Lubrication consisted of squirting on some grease every few hours!
This engine was considered obsolete as soon as it was introduced.
Next was the metal shop. One of the aircraft they're restoring in here is one of the three surviving Seversky P-35s left in the world. If you know your planes, you can see the shape of the later Republic P-47 in its design.
The vertical stabilizer has been rebuilt already. The construction of it is actually pretty similar to the vertical fin on my RV-7.
This is a new tail fairing they made for the P-35. I can't even conceive of the level of metalworking skill required to build this. Gorgeous.
This is a section of the P-35's flaps, post-restoration. It's been cleaned up and repainted and is ready to go back on the airplane (except for that missing rivet?).
Original manufacturer's part number tag.
They built this massive steel fixture to help them rebuild the P-35's wings. These guys are serious and they have a lot of money.
This is a Stinson YO-49 undergoing restoration. This one was another WWII-era short-takeoff observation plane. It was apparently a great performer, but wasn't used in wide numbers because it was too expensive compared to the L-4/L-5. Which is probably why I'd never heard of it.
I think this is an N2S, the Navy version of the Model 75 Stearman (Army PT-17).
It'll take a lot of work to get this one back into the air. I think it came out of a South American jungle, and it looks like it had a rough life.
They didn't say what this was, but it's obviously some kind of big early-1920's-era mailplane. I looked it up later and decided that it's probably a DH-4.
More fine woodworking on the mailplane, albeit a lot more massive than the Jenny. I've decided I love how old wood airplane structures look.
This is Ken Kellett, giving a little lecture on fabric airplane restoration. In the 70's he built and flew a replica of the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer. Behind him is (I think) another Stearman, and a wrecked P-38.
Even the museum cafe is awesome. It's done up like a 1930's diner, and the walls are covered with art deco murals. The windows look out on the flightline. My cheezburger was actually pretty good and quite reasonably priced for museum food.
While I was doing all this aviation sightseeing, Mary was at the Orlando convention center hustling for a job.
Later in the week I went to the Valiant Air Command museum in Titusville, which was extremely "meh" compared to Fantasy of Flight. Here's an F-5 (not a T-38) that's been modified for supersonic research.
It looks kind of like a pelican. I guess this helps cut down the intensity of the sonic boom, but the displays were less than helpful.
Apparently the tail section of the F-8 is held on with not too many bolts. But they're torqued really tight.
Cockpit of an F-106.
This is the trailing edge of a MiG-15's rudder. Note the double-flush rivet technique with the rivets set in alternating directions, just like on my airplane.
It's about as wavy as mine too.
Every time we take a vacation to somewhere that has a beach, I end up with a sequence of photos involving Mary taking off her shoes and running into the water.
It must be some kind of Pavlovian thing.
She's kind of like a dog chasing a frisbee.
"Wheee!"
"Well, got that out of my system for another year or two."
Full moon reflected in the ocean. I wish I had a tripod for this shot.
