Narita, Earthquakes and Tsunamis

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

As you probably know, Japan just had a huge earthquake and tsunami.  The epicenter was just off-coast of Narita International where I layover often. 

I was not there.  It was my huge luck to be at home.  I just got an email from official sources saying that all our crews are safe in the hotel which has power but limited phone and email. 

The news sources say that all US military are safe - my son George and his wife Brook left many friends there when they came back to the states last September.

My heart and prayers go out to the local citizens who weren't so lucky.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Offutt AFB

'War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest thing; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war is worse -- a man who has nothing for which he has to fight, nothing which he cares for more than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself" ~ John Stuart Mills

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Recall that the main reason for this blog is to share with you things I see as I travel. Sometimes, I share things I've never seen but I usually try for an aviation theme.

I got an email from my eldest cousin today. He grew up in Nebraska and has a deep and unabashed love for that state and his country. Like me, his first career was in the Air Force. Offutt AFB lies just outside of Omaha, Neb very near the Missouri River and therefore it's nestled right in amongst some of the best farming land in the world.

Farmers are usually patriotic fellows whose land lies fallow during the cold Nebraska winter. The farmers who live off the end of the runway at Offutt have evidently been using their fields to make billboards supporting the aircrews flying in and out of Offutt for some years now.

Here is the email:

As the fight song says, "There is NO place like Nebraska!"

WHAT PILOTS SEE WHEN LANDING AT OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE...

This is on Hwy 75 south. A farmer does it with his tractor; not sure if he uses a plow or a disc. He uses GPS to get the letters readable. He has done this every fall for several years now.

Here's the view from the flight pattern into OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE (Bellevue, NE just south of Omaha). This is what our servicemen see when landing at Offutt AFB. Hat tip to the Bellevue farmer who made it happen!

Of course this intrigued me and I went to the internet to see if I could learn more. The GeoEye website evidently posts interesting satellite imagery. I stole this image from their site. Click this link to learn more about it. According to GeoEye, this message was plowed just this year in 2010.

Next, I went to google maps to see if the satellite maps there could add more to the story. The Google maps images of Offutt were made back in 2004. I found this:

View Larger Map

So, 6 years ago a different field was used for a different message.

To conclude I give you Mark Twain:

"...the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." ~ Mark Twain
On that happy note,

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Iditarod 2011

"We can't all be heroes, someone has to sit on the curb and clap as
they go by." ~ Will Rogers

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Frankly, I'm bummed. I'm gonna miss the Iditarod Ceremonial Start by one day. The start is two days from now on Saturday morning. It's a good time. I'll miss it because I have to "operate a revenue flight" down to Memphis tomorrow night.

You may or may not remember that I posted a gadabout two years ago about the Iditarod. Click this to see that post. I think it is one of my better posts here.

The Anchorage newspaper - The Alaska Daily News has a web site dedicated to the Iditarod.

It's a very nice web site and I recommend you spend some time looking at it.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

TSA

"Among the most foolish, yet pervasive, ideas in America today is
that, if we are careful with our money and our votes and our diet, we can
live without risk. It's a fallacy that infects our financial lives, our
politics and our personal habits." ~ Louis Rukeyser

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I offer this without comment:

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Discovery's Last Flight

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I did not take this video nor do I know who did. It's just cool. Looking at the geometry of the video, the airliner was cruising above FL300 and pointed north. Probably somewhere northeast of Orlando. Enjoy.

I found this video here and here.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Lunar Venus Eclipse

"It has been conclusively demonstrated by hundreds of experiments that
the beating of drums will restore the sun following an eclipse." ~ James Gregory

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

As most of you know, I'm an astronomy geek. I've made one or two astronomical posts here on this blog. Tonight I saw this picture and it set my inner geek free. Please remember you can click on all of these pictures to blow them up larger.

What you see is Venus and the moon just minutes after the moon has eclipsed Venus in the daylight. Both Venus and the moon are relatively close to the sun so that they show as early crescents. I stole the picture from this NASA website. A Hungarian Photographer / Astrophotographer named Ivan Eder took this picture just after noon on May 21st, 2004.

I have a great astronomical mapping and planetarium program written by Chris Marriot called Skymap. This next picture is setup for Budapest on that date and will give you a rough idea of how the sky might have looked if you could see the planets and the stars in the bright blue sky. In fact, you probably would have needed a pair of binoculars at a minimum to have seen the moon and Venus. Mr. Eder used the very nice TMB 130 refractor at the bottom of this page.

This map faces due south, west is to the right east to left. The straight up zenith is at the top center. Therefore, the moon and Venus would have hung up high in the southeast.

Skymap will let you set the heavenly bodies in motion exactly as they would have in reality. As I set about doing that I discovered some new things. (Not the least being how to make an animated gif file.)

The astronomy of this eclipse is such that it could only happen in the day. But if it had been a deep dark night, this eclipse would have occurred over the top of some interesting deep sky objects. This image will show you that. When you click on it, it will move and show you the eclipse. Please do not click on it yet.

The green arcs in this picture represent the very faint supernova remnant Simeis 147 (Sh2-240). If you click that link you see a picture of it using a 25" telescope that dwarves the little scope that Mr Eder used. The link says that Sh2-240 is one of the faintest objects in the sky and requires hours of exposure using a camera just to 'see' it. At the bottom right of the picture are two green circles. These represent the open star clusters DoDz 3 and 4.

Back to the eclipse. If you click the picture, the moon and Venus will move and give you a taste of the geometry of the eclipse. The first frame starts a 11 am Budapest time and runs at one hour intervals until 3 in the after noon.

I filtered the star brightness to declutter these pictures. The dimmest (and therefore smallest star in the picture is about Magnitude 8 or about the dimmest you can see with a pair of binoculars. The brightest is about Mag 5 and would just barely be visible with your naked Mark I eyeball.

I hope you found this as cool as I did. On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Zoom and Boom

It's better to be down here wishing you were up there, than to be up there wishing you were down here.

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

A friend just sent me this wonderful video. Please watch it now.

Like some others that read this blog, I have a little experience in zooming and booming. I found that video fascinating.

In general, one is not supposed to make a boom close to the ground unless one is operating in "Special Use Airspace" specifically set aside for such activity - these areas mostly exist in the western desert and off-shore. Booming San Francisco Bay is most definitely not such airspace - but the Blue Angels are special too so I guess they get a pass......

The perspicacious reader will have noted that the movies on the ships are way out at sea where such rules no longer apply.

As I have mentioned in other posts, I instructed in the T-38. The student syllabus contained one supersonic flight. It was regulatory to perform this boom ride over 30,000' above mean sea level so that your shock cone did not reach the ground and upset civilians and harm the environment. At that altitude, the only way you could tell that the T-38 was supersonic was by looking at the mach number on the airspeed gauge. If you started around 40,000' in a slight descent, you could get up to Mach 1.2 or so. It was in fact pretty underwhelming.....and you had to complete paperwork when you landed. Most guys didn't like doing it.

High speed, low altitude flight on the other hand is about as exciting as it gets.

When I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy it was accepted as gospel that a flight of F-105s had boomed the zoo in the 60's. As the story goes, they had broken a LOT of windows out of the glass filled architecture that is the Academy. We all retold the story not really knowing what we were talking about but loving a good story. This is the way of many urban legends.

In this modern day of google, I decided to see what the internet contained. I found this fascinating link and this picture:

So, it's not such a legend after all....

I remain,

Dad / Geoff