What a difference a year makes. Saw rain in Pratt, water holes all full, pastures green, and corn just shy of as high as an elephant's eye. Well, maybe a small elephant.
Stan Musial's bridge in St. Louis is impressive and makes navigating I64 and I70 a breeze. My etrex said elevation is about 480 feet on the bridge compared to 1900 or so in Pratt. At one point on I77 in West Virginia, a roadside marker gave elevation as 2550 feet while the etrex said 2562. Maybe 12 feet difference at 75 mph on a $100 machine is not too bad.
We went to the grand opening of the Vernon Filley art museum in Pratt. If you like art of the Southwest, the Filley collection is worth seeing. Dr. Filley was a Pratt surgeon and his widow has donated her collection to a brand new building and institution. According to the brochure, she only bought pieces that she liked. Very high quality and very well done.
I saw Paden Cash and Holy Cow's posts below about Harper and Freeport. I'm sorry I missed them. Maybe next year.
I was based at Mcconnell AFB in 1959 for initial B-47 training. Wichita was real nice, wasn't there in the winter though. If I remember right the worlds largest or deepest hand dug well is kinda close to Pratt. At one time a fellow out that direction had the worlds record for a cord string ball made from baler twine.
After finishing the B-47 transition I was exiled to Schilling AFB at Salina for a bit over five years. Got to taste six winters there. Luckily in January of 1965 the base was closing down and my next assignment was Tucson at Davis-Monthan AFB, quite a difference.
I liked Wichita because there were so many aviation pioneers there and sill alive in the late 1950's. Belonged to a Sailplane Club there. I was 23 years old when I was in the B-47 school. So it was a thrill to meet and listen to the older fellows at the Glider Club shoot the bull. They are mostly gone now.
The last time I drove through that area on US-54, they had started farming cotton.
Jerry M.
>etrex said elevation is about
Thread hijack - Do the consumer units have a geoid model in them? So the elevations could be from the ellipsoid? Nothing in the manual for mine about that. It wanders so much that I've never taken time to do a careful (long average) comparison to a bench mark.
Yes, they do have a geoid model. It's EGM (Earth Gravity Model) but I forget the year associated with the one in mine. There's a new EGM model, but Garmin says I can't have it unless I buy a new receiver.
I've had this particular etrex on the beach at the North Carolina coast. At waters edge, it read 0 feet. Of course, I could probably moved a hundred yards and had it read something else.
Wow. B-47's. I'll bet those were a hoot to fly. Was it six engines with pusher props? We don't get to Rocky Mount much, but we do go to home football games at ECU, but that's 170 miles one-way for us, so we may not do it for many more years.
The bomber with the three pusher props on each side was the Convair B-36 Peacemaker and the last versions of the plane had four jets, two in a pod on the outer part of both wings. So it was a ten engine plane. The B-47 Stratojet was a six jet engine plane with very flexible wings. Three engines on each wing single outboard a drop tank and two engines in a pod inboard of the drop tank. It had a crew of three, the aircraft commander in the front seat, co-pilot in the back seat and the Navigator-Bombardier was in the nose part of the cockpit, his ejection seat went down rather than up. A number of pilots lost their lives trying to get enough altitude for the Navigator to safely eject. The co-pilot was the Navigators assistant, he did the celestial sextant observations, the navigators position would not allow observations on bodies in the portion of the sky back of the plane. The co-pilot was also the electronic countermeasures operator, and could turn his seat 180 degrees and operate the two 20 mm cannons on the rear of the aircraft and they were radar controlled by the co-pilot. The aircraft did not enjoy a very good safety record. It was quite a jump in technology over the B-29 and B-36 and of course a three man crew was quite a drop in the crew members. There were about 1,500 of them made. Boeing was the designer and a lot of them were built in Wichita. The photograph was made in early 1960 on the way to Alaska for a tour of Nuke Alert Duty.
Jerry has a long & great career with the AF. The B47 was only part of his interesting story. If you ever meet him get him to tell you more!
That's a great picture. More commentaries on or from Wichita came to me this past fall. One of my students had just moved to NC from Wichita.
His dad left Cessna to join HondaJet in Greensboro. Yes, it's the same Honda we all know and they're busy setting up production of their new business jet in Greensboro.
Commentary one is Honda entering the jet market. Go to HondaJet.com for more information.
Student said that finding a decent steak in Greensboro was impossible. That's commentary two.
Student's dad said that he hadn't seen a sunset since moving to North Carolina. All the trees get in the way. And that's commentary three.
Saw no cotton on the trip, only corn. Apparently, the drought cost many farmers their winter wheat crop.
