It’s About Making Babies!

So there I was, browsing through my Bloglines feeds, and New Jovian Thunderbolt goes on about how he is ‘late’ with the 5 Planes meme. So he lists his five favorite planes. Cool. I went looking for the 5 planes meme, and found Captain of a Crew of One had also written about the five planes meme. Only neither gentleman linked back to whoever originated the exercise.

Biplane Evermore

I can’t help it. The one plane that stands out as having more to do with shaping my life is .. the song by the Irish Rovers. I liked a lot of their earlier music – Whiskey on a Sunday, Bare Legged Joe, Goodbye Mrs. Durkin. I find that novelty songs hold much more value for me than classical music, and that I listen to rock and country – for the novelty cross overs. Like Dexy and the Midnight Runners and Come On, Eileen.

Boeing 707

The Boeing passenger liners are the symbol, for me, of commercial aviation. The 707 and 727 are phenomenal workhorses. Each were produced in prodigious numbers without acquiring a reputation for failure. I imagine the 707 especially had the advantage of all the lessons learned in building scads of war planes, and later Strategic Defense Command assets.

The F-4 Fighter

I served a year and a half on the USS Saratoga CV-60, back about 1978. Part of my duty assignment as Electronics Technician was the UHF radio room on the 0-10 level, about 6 decks above the flight deck. I loved watching the F-4′s launch. They bolt the plane onto the catapult, raise the deck exhaust shields behind the planes, and the engine turned up. Watching the flame in the in-fuselage engine grow, the venturi flare out, and .. gone. Amazing.

Vought A-7 Corsair II

This US Navy war plane was magic to me, growing up in the 1950′s and ’60′s. I loved the profile, the proportions – the pictures, the models. And it worked really well as a hand-thrown balsa glider, about 5 inch long as I recall. Ah, the days of Ambroid glue, butyrate dope, a couple sheets of balsa and an Exacto knife. In college a friend taught me to use a wire brad for a nose weight to balance the plane, and get the wings moved closer to scale position. We found that reversing the nail and gluing it in place let the plane stick in the ceiling or doors. Funny how no one got hurt ..

E-2C Hawkeye

Again with the subjective delight. I like the looks of the plane, with its great radome (radar dome) suspended above the plane. This one even beats out the majestic B-52 Bomber for me, for sheer cachet. The early electronic monitoring post in the air placed the detectors and operators ‘on the scene’ to collect and interpret remote information – and enable the rest of the Navy to do its normal, excellent job.