War

I Bought the Cheapest Ford Raptor in the USA, Formerly Owned by the BORDER PATROL!!!
I'm reading Lost In Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. It's a true story about a WW2 rescue mission in New Guinea. It's late in the war and the Japanese have been mostly pushed out of the area. The allies have a base on the north coast at Hollandia. It's paradise except for being hot, humid and riddled with mosquitoes, plus there is not much happening until a pilot discovers a valley in middle of the island with people living there. It's not on any of their charts, so it may as well be unknown. They start taking groups of people on sight-seeing flights, and wouldn't you know it, one of these airplanes crashes. Now we have to mount a rescue mission to see if there are any survivors and to get them out. This is a bit of a problem because they can't even see any way to get there. They end up parachuting in.

Anyway, Mitchell devotes chapter 11 to talking about the natives. There are maybe 100,000 people living in this valley. The raise pigs and they grow sweet potatoes and seem to be getting by quite well. However, their main occupation seems to be waging war on their neighbors. It's like an fundamental obligation. It's like the Hatfields and the McCoys, except going on for centuries.

Which kind of explains the Ford versus Chevy rivalry. Whose your enemy? The guys who drive a different brand of truck than me. How do you know he's your enemy? 'Cause he drives a different brand of truck. Geez, it's perfectly obvious. Can't you understand nuthin'?

Peace is an artificial construct, combat is the natural order of things. Peace you have to work at. We've done a pretty good job here in the USA. If you believe what you hear about the rest of the world then this place is paradise. It doesn't take much to upset the apple cart. We've got protests and riots going on all over the place these days. Some say they're protesting the incident in Minneapolis. That may have been the match, but the shutdown of the economy caused by the COVID-19 panic provided the tanker truck full of gasoline.

P.S. I was shocked by the prices in this video. $7,000 for broken truck with 150,000 miles on the odometer, and $50,000 for it when it was new eight years ago. Yee gods. I never thought of pickup trucks as costing much more than a car, but now they seem to cost twice as much, new or used. Has something changed that makes trucks more expensive, or is my memory just faulty?

Rescue From Shangri-La

"RESCUE FROM SHANGRI-LA" 1945 C-47 PLANE CRASH SURVIVOR DOCUMENTARY 70564
I finished Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. In 1945, the survivors of the C-47 crash in the middle New Guinea were big news. Alexander Cann parachuted into this lost valley with a 35mm camera and made this film, though it doesn't appear in IMDB.

Being who I am, I wanted to know more about snatching a glider out of the jungle.


Training Film Glider Pickup by C 47
This training film shows us all the switches, widgets and do-dads involved in setting up the winch in the tow plane. It also includes some slow motion footage of the of the pickup (just after the 11 minute mark).

The winch's main job is not reeling in the tow rope, but rather paying it out in a controlled manner so the glider is subjected to a tolerable amount of acceleration over a few seconds of time. The nylon rope stretches, but not enough to absorb the entire shock. Without the braking action of the winch, the tow rope would snap or rip it's attachment points out of the tug or the glider.


Glider Snatching (1949)
This clip shows the winch brake in action (50 second mark), smoking to beat the band, which explains why they need the ventilators shown in the previous clip.

Here's another video that has a brief shot of what happens to a glider should the tow rope snap on pickup (1:50 mark).

This story and the cloud cover that impedes air operations reminds me of the film The Valley (Obscured by Clouds) that I saw about a zillion years ago. This valley could be the same one as the one in the book or it could be a completely different one. New Guinea is a big place, full of mountains and valleys.