One of the absolutes in military aviation is you would much rather die than be recognized for making a stupid mistake. A classic pilot error that happens with regrettable frequency is forgetting to lower your landing gear and making an inadvertent wheels-up landing. Oh, the humiliation such a miscue will bring … if you survive. […]

Pilots making forced landings into the sea during World War II often became disoriented when the aircraft flipped over and sank. To train aviators to survive such a crash, the Navy developed a training device, affectionally known as the Dilbert Dunker. The Dunker was a simulated airplane cockpit mounted on rails above a deep-water swimming […]

The Brilliant, discussed in the book, The True Adventures of Jim Stark, is a sixty-two foot, two masted schooner. Eight of my fellow Sea Explorer scouts and I went aboard the Brilliant for a week-long cruise when I was fifteen-years-old. The boat, located at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, was built in 1932 to a design by Olin Stephens […]

Following World War II, the Army Air force, touting its long-range B-29, was striving to be the only military service to control all flying aircraft. The Navy, wanting to maintain its jurisdiction over maritime operations, designed the Lockheed P2V as a long-range patrol aircraft, yet, needed to demonstrate its endurance superiority. The Navy, therefore, established […]

In 1976 25,000 people had run marathons. Thirty-four years later in 2010 ½ million people had started and finished a marathon, 41% of them were women. The fastest official marathon time is 2 hours, 3 minutes, and 23 seconds, set by Kenyan Wilson Kipsang. The slowest was set by Lloyd Scott wearing a 110 pound […]