Russians in Space

Yulia Peresild

A couple of Russians flew to the ISS (International Space Station) to make a movie. They're back on Earth now, but we have this picture of Yulia is space. Via daily timewaster.

The Return of the Polikarpov Po-2 Biplane

A partisan airplane, the Polikarpov Po-2, during World War II.
(Photo by: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)

During WW2, the Russians, always at the forefront of women's rights (wait, what?), trained up a bunch of women to fly these antiquated biplanes and sent them on bombing missions over Germany.
History.com has the story.

Women pilots of the “Night Witches” receiving orders for an up-coming raid.
(Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)

How effective they were is open to debate, but they did drop several kilotons of bombs on the Germans and they didn't lose too many people, so I guess you could call that a success.

I'm posting this because the Po-2 has appeared here before. That time was during the Korean War.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

A Girl & Her Chopper

Ann Hansen and her Sikorsky Skycrane

Just because Skycranes have been here before, and so have flying girls.

Pic of the Day

Miss NASA in Apollo 8, 1971

We've been infidels for a long time.

Jacqueline Dubut, the first female airline pilot for the French domestic airline Air Inter, sits in the cockpit of her plane in 1967. Express / Getty Images.

Via FlightAware

Quotes of the Day

"A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock".
"The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists".
-Benjamin Graham

Via Ryan

Braniff Stewardess

    My father was a great believer in the stock market. He was spent a great deal of time on it. He had some notable success with Braniff Airways. My mother told me once that Braniff stock had split and split and split. (A stock split essentially means that the price of the stock had doubled. The company splits the stock by issuing two new shares in exchange for each old share. The price of each share is cut in half, which brings it back down to some reasonable level, presumably a price that more people are comfortable with.) Did my Dad's diligent research and brilliant analysis inform his choice of Braniff stock? Or was it just good luck? I have no idea. 

     I had similar good luck with Intel Corporation. That happened due to three people:

1. E. Ray Bareiss, who was the head of software development at Impres, a small computer graphics firm in Austin, Texas back in the 1980's. He hired me, and was instrumental in the company using an Operating System from Intel. I spent a year or so mastering that O.S.
2. Joe Hoover, an Intel salesmen in Austin who gave a presentation on the Intel 432 that intrigued me to no end.
3. Chris Doutre, who I met at Impres. He went to work for Intel a couple of years later and he recruited me to go to work there. I never did figure out what Chris did.

Intel had an employee stock purchase plan. I signed up for it because of my Dad's belief in stocks and because I believed in the technical stuff Intel had been telling me. It wasn't because I did any analysis of the value of the company. It worked out well enough. If I had held onto the first 100 or so shares I got instead of selling them, I'd probably have a considerable nest egg, but I was broke then, needed the money, and while Intel looked like a good idea, no one knew it was going to grow into the behemoth it has become.

Update 2 weeks later, I finally remembered what Joe's last name was.

Watch Me

We start with this ad full of red cloaked demons and a couple of insidiously cute girls:


Pit Stop - Breitling TV commercial
which leads to this video of a guy taking apart a very fancy watch and repairing it


Service and repair of a rusty valjoux 7750 based Breitling watch
Which gets me to wondering about the market for used and / or broken Breitling watches, which takes me to Ebay where I find there are thousands of Breitlings are available (5,954 at the moment). Looking for broken ones turns up 27 listings, and most of those are just for spare parts. Well, how about watches in general? How about a million and a half? The first one on that list:


How can you sell a watch for $2.86? I suppose if they fell off the back of a truck you could do that. I just don't understand. This gets me wondering about watch factories, which leads to Wikipedia's list of Watch movement manufacturers which contains only 15 names. But look! One of them is Russian (two actually). How bizarre.


Never heard of a Russian watch. But if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. They cut themselves off from the rest of world, and they had this attitude that anything the capitalist running dogs can do, we can do better, so of course they are going to make their own watches. Ebay has 13,000 odd listings. Many are mechanical (i.e. not quartz), many are old, some are Russian in name only.

Then we find this:

Raketa has made a giant clock for a children's toy store in the Lubyanka

What?!? The KGB's Moscow prison is now a toy store? Tell me it ain't so, Boris. Actually it's in a department store on Lubyanka square in Moscow, which just so happens to be where the infamous Lubyanka is located.

Update January 2019 replaced missing video.

Skyhook

James Bond and Claudine 'boob-a-licious' Auger in Thunderball

All airports have airport codes. Anyone who has traveled by air in the USA is probably familiar with some of the big ones like Atlanta (ATL), Chicago (ORD), LA (does anyone even say Los Angeles anymore?) (LAX), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) and Portland (PDX). Okay, not everyone knows PDX, I just threw that in there because I go there ten times a year. Even no account little podunk airports like Hillsboro (HIO, my neighborhood airport) and Pinal Airpark (MJZ), just North of Tuscon, have codes.

Pinal Airpark, Marana Arizona. Notice that you can see the entire 6,000 foot long runway AND you can count the airliners. Flippin' airliners are big.

    Iaman paid a visit to MJZ this week and saw a bunch of airliners parked there. Last year when Boeing's Dreamliner was grounded a bunch of them ended up here. Seems that since Boeing went to so much trouble to set up their international assembly line to build these planes, they were loath to shut it down just because the FAA says they weren't allowed to fly them. Well, they could fly them, they just weren't allowed to carry any passengers. I mean how else were they going to get them from their final assembly plant in Everett (just north of Seattle), Washington to Tuscon, which is where MJZ is?
    MJZ is currently the largest boneyard for civilian aircraft. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is just down the road and it dwarfs Pinal by a factor of, oh, I dunno, a zillion to one or so. Typical Americans. Whine about having to pay an extra $50 for airfare but willingly fork over thousands of dollars every year so the Air Force's flyboys can go for joyrides anytime they want in their supersonic hotrods. That's democracy in action for you, although I fail to see how this aspect is any different than communism. Never mind, that's all beside the point. I'll try to stay on track here.
    There is another civilian boneyard in Roswell, New Mexico. They store old airlines, but they are also strong in the scrap metal business.

Pinal Airpark got it's start in WW2 training pilots for the military as part of the "50,000 pilot training program". During the Vietnam war it was home to the CIA's Intermountain Airlines. Intermountain eventually became part of Evergreen Aviation, based in McMinnville, Oregon (just down the road from here), which is where the Spruce Goose ended up.

     Robert Fulton started development of his skyhook there. Hard to tell how often it was used for real, I mean it was basically a clandestine activity. We do have videos from some of the tests and the ones in the movies. The Air Force kept it in their back pocket until 1996 when they finally decided to let it go.

There is also an automobile racetrack here. The local Porsche club seems to be only ones who use it.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.

Jerrie Mock

Comrade Misfit put up a post about Jerrie Mock this morning. It didn't mean much until I followed the links and found she flew from Columbus, Ohio. That rings a bell! I was in Columbus then, and I remember there was a big fuss about Mock somebody. This happened right around the time Kennedy got shot, and that kind of overshadowed everything from that time period. Poking around, I came across this newspaper clipping:

Front page of The Columbus Dispatch, January 19, 1964, Via dispatch.com

So it wasn't just Columbus, it was Bexley, the same small suburb of Columbus where I went to junior high school.

Statue of Jerrie Mock at The Works

     More digging uncovered a statue erected at The Works in Newark, Ohio. Newark is about 40 miles East of Columbus. After we moved to the farm near Highwater, Newark became the local 'big city', i.e. where you went if you needed something more than a loaf of bread. I'm not sure why Newark got the statue.

Jerrie's flight path. Joan's flight path.

At the same time that Jerrie was making her flight, Joan Merriam Smith from California was making her own attempt.

Three Eight Charlie - Amazon has one copy of her book available for $500. Phoenix Graphics is selling paperback versions for $18. Kindle doesn't count.

P.S. I was delivering The Dispatch then. Did you see what it said on the front page? 208 pages! I don't think you could get 208 pages if you piled up an entire months worth of The Oregonian.

Focke Wulf Fw 61 - luftwaffe test pilot Hanna Reitsch

In February 1938 Hanna Reitsch demonstrated the world's first practical helicopter by flying it indoors at the international auto show in Berlin, Germany. It subsequently set several records for altitude, speed and flight duration culminating, in June 1938, with an altitude record of 11,243 feet and a straight line flight record of 143 miles.
    This makes the third post about twin rotor helicopters in three days.