WW2 British Aircraft

Walrus Flying Boat
Click me to go to the album

I'm still mucking about with pictures, trying to find some way to organize them, trying to figure which is the best tool for the job, which web site I like the best. Picasa is a little trying, but it does seem to do most of what I want. Like I said earlier, Stu sent me a link to a page full of pictures. I really don't like these kind of things, you constantly have to fiddle with the controls to get the next picture on the screen. I like slide shows. Press the go button, and then click once every time you want to see the next picture. No fuss, no muss. Well, mostly. Still haven't it gotten it completely sorted out, but it's still better having to scroll through one long page of pictures.

I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to organize this bunch, and I finally came up with a sequential order that makes a sort of sense.

Biplanes on the water
Walrus Flying Boat
  Swordfish on floats
Biplanes on aircraft carriers
  Swordfish over the Ark Royal
Swordfish on carrier deck
  Swordfish on grass
Fairey Albacore landing on carrier
Mono-planes on aircraft carriers
  Fairey Fulmar
Royal Navy Corsairs on hanger deck
  Royal Navy Corsairs on flight deck
Seafire & Pilot
Land based monoplanes. We start with a couple of American planes.
  Mustang, or so the label says, hard to tell just what it is, but the angle of the shot is cool.
  P-40 Warhawk in North Africa with a crewman directing the pilot from the wing tip.
    Oh, the Glorius Spitfire!
    Crew tinkering with a Spitfire on the tarmac
  Pilots talking while crew tinkers
  Crew tinkering with a Spitfire on the grass
  Crew tinkering with a Spitfire up on stands
  Spitfire being painted in D-Day stripes
  Spitfires on the flight line ready to go. I don't think they ever looked this good during the war.
  Loading a camera into a Spit for photographic reconnaisance
  Ready to go
  Really ready to go
  Photo reconn taking off
  Airborne
  Battle of Britain
  Squadron formation
  Landing craft on the beach in Italy, dead Spitfire in the water
Typhoon
  Arming
  Small formation in flight
Gliders
  100 Gliders on the ground in Operation Market Garden
  Hamilcar Glider
Twin Engine Bombers
  Baltimore nose
  Baltimore dropping a bomb
  Beaufort front end
  Group of Blenheims and Hurricanes over North Africa
  Blenheim on the ground
  Pair of Hampdens in flight
  Crew going aboard a Douglas A-20 Havoc
  Hudson on the tarmac
  B-25 Mitchell being serviced
    My favorite, the Mosquito
  5 Mosquitos on the grass
  Mosquito gun test
  Crew going aboard a Mosquito
  Mosquito in flight
Four Engine Bombers
  Halifax in flight
  A whole bunch of Sterlings on the tarmac, pre-D-day
  3 Sterlings in flight
  At least 5 Wellingtons on the ground
  Servicing a Whitley
    Oh, the Glorious Lancaster
  Nose turret
  Tail turret
  Big wigs walking under the nose
  Big crowd standing around
    Lancaster / Armament
  Bombs en train to loading
  All loaded
Armament
  Bomb menu
  Mucking with fuses in North Africa
  Preparing rockets
  Ammo belt assembly
Pilots
    Bomber crews
  Bomber crew
  Two stories
  Looking forward
    Fighter
  Pilot
  Brit pilot and mascot, North Africa
  Hurricane cockpit check in snow
  Earl Stanley Lock & Friend, Ace
  RAF Pilot
  Hurricane pilot Ginger Lacey, scored 18 kills in Battle of Britain
Hurricane pilots
  Hurricane pilots hanging out by their caravan
  RAF Trainees in Mesa Arizona
Home front
  Plotting room
  Making terrain models for RAF, UK 1943
  Assembling landing gear in the factory
  Short Sunderland flying boat factory
  RAF Brass
  Moral Boosting Poster
  Lancaster on display at War Rally, Trafalgar Square, London
  Wellington recovered from Loch Ness

Update March 2019. Picasa has died, but it appears that all of the my pictures have been moved to Google Drive, so the link under the picture at top should take you to the album.
Update May 2019. Fixed.

WWII American Home Front

WWII American Home Front (dead link), a set on Flickr.

So this is the way Flickr works. I uploaded these photos and put them in a "set" and then "shared" the set to my blog and I got this bunch of thumbnail images. Click on any image and it will take you to the larger version. From there you can step through the whole set using the Next and Previous buttons.

I found these photos on The Atlantic dot com thanks to a link on Military Photos dot net (dead link). I thought they were pretty cool so I uploaded them to Flickr. While I am going through them, checking the captions, making up titles and so on, I discover that they are from the Library of Congress's collection of photos which is also hosted on Flickr. There are 17,000 of them. This particular group is from their collection of color photos from the 30's and 40's, of which there are 1,600.

You will notice that there are 24 thumbnails here. There are 45 pictures in the set I got from The Atlantic. I am not sure who decides which photos get a thumbnail and which don't.

Update December 2016 labeled dead links. Flickr account is dead, so no photos until I come up with a replacement.

Parallel Landing

When we were coming into the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport I noticed another aircraft apparently hanging in the air off to our left. I imagine it was actually flying, but it was going noticeably slower than we are. This airport has two main, parallel runways, and there are always multiple aircraft queued up for landing in both lanes.

American Airline Torture, Part 2

Executive Summary It took us almost 13 hours from the time we left my inlaws house in Rockwell City, Iowa till we got home to Hillsboro, Oregon. Allow 45 minutes for driving and schlepping luggage at each end, and knock off half an hour because it wasn't quite 13 hours and I don't want to be accused of padding the numbers, means we were in the custody of the airlines for eleven hours. Total flight time comes to five and a half hours (5:30) which means we spent another five and half hours sitting in the airport or sitting in an airplane on the ground. Why is sitting and waiting on a plane so much worse than sitting inside the airport? Cramped seating perhaps? I don't mind when we are actually going somewhere, it's just when we are sitting on the ground. The absolutely worst part is when they have pulled up to the gate and door isn't open yet. This happened both times on the small hopper. We have landed and pulled up to the "gate", but now we have to wait for the ground crew to do something. Unload the luggage maybe? It wasn't long, maybe a couple three minutes, but it was really irritating. Same thing happened when the 757 landed in Seattle, though that could have been due to sitting in the back of the plane and it just takes forever for the 240 odd people in front of me to scurry out the one and only door. I think the TSA people were doing a better job than the last time I flew. Of course, there was virtually no line when I went through security either in Fort Dodge, which I expected, or in Portland, which I did not expect. The TSA folks have spiffy new uniforms, too, which helps their image. I had to pull my CPAP machine out of my backpack so they could run an additional test on it. I expected they were going to turn it on, make sure it was really what it was, but all they did was swab it for explosive residue. At least that appears to be what they did. Here's some photos.