Month: November 2016

Builders,

Today I was running errands in support of our second Corvair finishing school this weekend.  Steve Glover, Local host of Corvair College #37 ( Corvair College #37, more photos.) ,  flew in yesterday. We spent the day moving parts and equipment between the Airport and the SPA/Panther factory, where the finishing school will be held. During one of the trips, we stopped by the hangar of my side kick Vern Stevenson.

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Vern was down at his hangar complex, welding up a heavy I beam to act as a cantilever roof support in his ultralight hangar. The welder he was doing this with was a classic, made in America, Lincoln 225 “Buzz Box” AC stick welder. 

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Above, Vern and his Lincoln welder. The top of the 20 foot I beam is in the foreground of the picture.

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In previous stories like: Why “Made in America” matters to me.  and  Made in America – data plates – obituaries to US manufacturing jobs, I speak strongly as an advocate of American tools and products, produced by American workers. Here is the perfect example of my point, the same one I argued in this story: Machines vs Appliances Part #2.

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READ THIS SLOWLY: Vern is 64 years old. The same welder he used to weld many feet of high strength beads, has also welded countless other project for him. It is one of his most used tools. He bought this welder brand new, when he was 15 years old , 49 years ago.  He has used it to weld miles of beads, and it has never failed to work, nor has it ever had a single day in the shop. It just works period, because it was built by Americans, when we expected both our tools and society to simply work, reliably.

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Want to improve the quality of your life? Make things with your own hands, and use quality tools when doing so. This will add a richness to the hours of your life that a person fooling with consumer electronics in search of entertainment will never have.  Vern may have owned a TV set at some point in his life, but it didn’t last 49 years, and it never gave him the opportunity at the end of an hour to step back, survey the results of the time spent and say “I made that.”

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-ww.

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Alert: This post contains no technical information. It is provided as a stimulus for thinking only.  The reader decides if they wish to participate. No answers provided, just concepts to ponder. This particular story is the first in a short chain or related questions to consider or ignore.

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Builders:

During the Soviet purges and mass executions of the 1930s, Winston Churchill was a harsh critic of the Soviet Union, and this continued when they joined the Germans invading Poland in  September of 1939, igniting WWII.  21 months later, the Germans turned their fury on the Soviets, who now found themselves on the allied side of the war.

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Churchill, by then Prime Minister, was put in a difficult positon of now supporting the Soviets as an ally. His political opponents called him a hypocrite. After short consideration, he decided that on very rare occasions one must decide between the lesser of two evils, and defended his choice with the famous quote:

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“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

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Above, Churchill holding an American M1928 Thompson submachine gun.

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This week in America, about 100 million voters are facing their own Winston Churchill moment.  I have no advice to offer, save this: 25 years ago I decided that I would only vote for people or ideas not against them. There is a lot less heartburn simply voting one’s conscious and ignoring all the media, polls and amateur strategy. In a normal year, such action might anger 40 or 45% of your friends, but this year affords the opportunity to anger up to 98% of them, and in doing so you can give them something they will have in common.

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In the last 25 years I have heard countless times “A vote for X is really a vote for Y”  or  “You will be throwing your vote away”.  I will politely listen, but what if a vote for X is really just a vote for X?  Perhaps you are never throwing anything away when you are acting with your conscious. In the long run, the best way to stop being served choices between two evils is to demand a choice which isn’t evil.

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Your Aviation Connection:

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Countless times in a single flying season, you will hear pilots, mechanics and builders, all frame questions in aviation as a required choice between two evils, when a clear minded  person listening will reject it as a false choice;

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You will hear pilots say: “we have to either fly VFR on top or scud run below the clouds.”  The pilot making the statement is framing it as a required choice between two evils, when it isn’t. One simply has to decide that it isn’t flying weather they are ready for.

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When you are at the airport, be alert to any proposed action which is presented as a choice between two evils, as almost invariably, there are better options, even if taking one of them hurts someone’s feelings. Keep in mind that it is your well being and life, and you don’t want to ‘throw it away’.

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-ww.

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Alert: This post contains no technical information. It is provided as a stimulus for thinking only.  The reader decides if they wish to participate. No answers provided, just concepts to ponder. This particular story is the first in a short chain or related questions to consider or ignore.

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Builders:

My understanding of underground and resistance fighters doesn’t come from movies, it is from my 7th grade French class. I attended a small, tough private school that afforded our instructor a chance to share her personal experience. When she was 15 and her sister was 17, living in Paris, they ‘entertained’ German Officers and collected information. Her sister was caught and tortured to death by the Gestapo, our teacher evaded capture. She never said what happened to her family.

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As a 13 year old, I listened and quietly understood that I wasn’t made of the same kind of flesh and blood as my teacher. The story brought an honest humility that prevented any daydream that I inherently had the same courage. For a young man it was an uncomfortable awareness. As an adult, I was glad to have traded hollow bravado for a realistic understanding and appreciation of the fact some humans can control their fear better than others. I also understood one couldn’t generalize who they were by appearance or claim, just by their deeds.

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Above, A Polish youth, fighting to the death against the German SS during the 63 day Warsaw Uprising in 1944. His submachine gun is a “Blyskawica” an ingenious all-Polish design made by the hundreds in advance of the uprising, right under the noses of the German occupation force. The resistance fighters killed over 8,000 German soldiers in savage fighting.

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They had hoped to liberate the city, timed just as the Soviet red army arrived. The Soviets halted and allowed the Germans to exterminate the resistance, because it eliminated most of the potential post war Polish democratic leadership, and made way for the Soviet puppet government. Churchill and the west were outraged, but powerless to force Stalin on the issue. Arguably, this is the first move of the Cold War.

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People debating  private firearm ownership today can hardly restrain themselves from trying to draw parallels to resistance to the Third Reich, and what effect it might have had. The discussion is never nuanced, and it ignores the most obvious factor, people living today are mostly marshmallows addicted to IPhones, a different species than Poles in 1943-44.

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There is an often cited American anti-gun ‘study’ which claims private gun ownership in Europe would have been meaningless, and the resistance in Warsaw only killed 20 Germans. The idea that this ‘study’ was written by some modern urban American writer, living in freedom and safety is frankly, repulsive. Everyone can have a point of view, but this is a grotesque distortion of a history which belongs to the memory of some of the most courageous people in the 20th century.   The Blyskawica shows how determined the Poles were to be armed, and crucially the number of German dead is from a notorious SS propaganda document called “The Stroop Report”, which is actually about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.   No matter how badly I wanted to win an argument, I am not going to resort to intentionally misapplying ‘data’ from Nazi SS propaganda to do it.

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Your Aviation Connection, in two parts:

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Can you accurately access your own skills? Pilots are notoriously poor judges of their own skills and abilities.  Some have sound training and judgement, but lack confidence, often because an instructor subtly sent the message the student was not trusted. The other end of the spectrum are pilots full of unwarranted self assurance, which prohibits them from honestly assessing their skills in comparison to exceptional performance. When listening to pilots this month, watch for both of these to be present. Determine that you will fall to neither extreme. Set yourself to have skills and judgement, and a realistic measure of their quantity and quality.

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Is the information presented valid and applicable? Aviation has ‘studies’ and data also, and most of them are not valid.  In the consumer world, people understand that ‘studies’ associated with products or ideas are just an extension of marketing, and they are written out of thin air to support a position, sell a product or provide you a preformed opinion. Aviation is no better, and it might actually be worse. Pilots have much larger than average egos, and they do need to be ‘right’.  They will frequently find any statistic or article that can be employed to substantiate their old wives tale. Be alert for this when looking for the answer to any honest aviation question. Be selective about information, put effort into evaluating not only its validity, but if it is even applicable to your situation.

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_ww.

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Disclaimer: No technical information follows, just food for thought, a nutrition that zealots have no taste for.

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Builders;

Tonight I fly back to Florida, having completed a 9 day shift caring for my parents in NJ. The time spent with them affords the chance to look back on the world we came from, and take a moment to consider both its blessings and its challenges.
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My mother, age 36, with the four children. ( That’s me in the stroller ). We are sitting on the tailgate of our 1961 Buick station wagon. The photo was taken by my father in front of our tiny house at 433 Woodrift lane in Pleasant Hills, PA.  The negative was printed backwards, the driveway was actually on the left hand side of the house. My parents bought the house when it was brand new for $14,000 in 1958. During my fathers 33 years in the Navy, the moves were frequent enough that this was the only home my parents ever purchased.

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We lived in the Pittsburgh area because dad was the project officer at Shippingport, the worlds first atomic power station. It was a joint Naval Reactors/Atomic Energy Commission project, the reactor core being identical to the ones used in Navy ships and subs. Six years was a long time to be on one assignment by Navy standards. My father had a diverse career. He went straight from Shippingport to Vietnam.

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About 18 months after this picture, my father deployed to Vietnam. Before leaving, he sat with my brother, then 14, and gave him a short set of instructions; He was to follow my mother, without question or hesitation; he was to remain positive at all times, school and at home, set an example for us; and if my father did not return, he would then be the eldest man in the family. This last point required no detailed instruction, he would just faithfully follow my fathers example of conduct. With that, he departed, was gone for 14 months.

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There were letters, but not a single phone call.  This was the beginning of my brother’s lifetime of being absolutely loyal to a trust or an oath, without further reminder nor reward. If you find the above paragraph moving, it is actually a commentary on America today, because in 1965, that type of conduct was expected, not the exception worth noting.

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While it is easy to remember the summer of 1963 as a time when we had passed the missile crisis, the space program was getting into high gear, a time when no president had been assassinated in 62 years, there were still many things wrong. One sixth of Americans were systematically denied the right to vote. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI as a dictator, in a way that was a serious threat, not just to individual liberty, but to the lives of many Americans he personally defined as enemies. Hollywood still depicted Native Americans as savages to be treated with little remorse. People who were different, just as God made them, were afforded no place in society, far less an equal one. We were hardly beginning to understand the damage we were doing to the environment, the home we all had to live in, with rampant pollution.

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I listen to the calls to “Make America Great Again” with some understanding, although my personal concept of the idea focuses on individuals returning to ethical lives and treating each other with simple decency, more than plans to make everyone rich. They are not mutually exclusive, but the former can lead to the latter, and the latter by itself is hollow and meaningless.

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There are many people who claim that anyone stirred by the slogan secretly desires the return of many of the darker things I listed above. That is a pretty broad brush, one I don’t particularly appreciate being painted with. I am an individual, and it is my absolute belief that people should be treated as such, and their sole measure taken by the ‘content of their character’. I carry the fair expectation that anyone who wants to assessed as an individual, will resist painting others with broad brushes.

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I say that with no malice, and a fair amount of understanding for people who don’t think anything in this countries past was better than today. I actually feel sorry for them, because it tells me they never met anyone like my brother, to understand that we once generated a very different kind of teenager, a person well prepared to take their place as an adult in America, and that is the missing keystone, the element too rarely spoken of.  I have my doubts that it will be brought to the center stage, and commonly understood as the issue, but lack of public awareness is no excuse for an individual to retreat from a better path.

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-ww.

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