All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.
Napoleon Bonaparte
This is a series of photos, all taken at the US Naval Air Museum on base at NAS Pensacola, of US Naval frontline fighters made by Grumman Aircraft introduced to service between the years of 1935 to 1970.
In that short time, front line aircraft evolved from biplanes with open cockpits and a couple of .30 cal MGs as armament to jets at the edge of the atmosphere firing supersonic radar guided missiles from close to 100 miles away. Top speeds went from 260 MPH to 1,560 MPH and rate of climb from around 2,000 FPM (feet per minute) to around 50,000 FPM. State of the art evolved even faster if the 1950’s design F-4 is taken into account.
The subject of these pictures is US Naval frontline fighters originally introduced from 1935 to 1970.
F3: The only aircraft in this series not labeled a cat of some description. The F3 was introduced in 1935 and used as the basis of design for the much more successful and capable F4F. There might have been at least some F3’s around in the Navy at the start of WWII but not many.
F4F Wildcat: The Wildcat was the Navy’s frontline fighter through 1942 and until September 1943 when it was replaced by the F6F. The F4F’s main adversary was the Japanese Zero which outclassed the F4F in a number of aspects. The Navy pilots had to be incredibly brave to get into fights with a much superior fighter. Two things happened: First a mostly intact Zero was found on an Alaskan island, refurbished and intensively tested. A large Achilles heel for the Zero was discovered: in a dive at speed, the Zero’s ailerons froze and it could not maneuver, especially to the right. If you got into a fight with Zeros, dive away, don’t even try to mix it up, or you will die. The second leveling is a result of the Japanese decision to leave their pilots on frontline service until they died or were wounded beyond any possibility of further service. The Americans took their best pilots and shipped them back to become instructors. The Japanese entered the war with supply of the best combat pilots in the world. 18-20 months later of near constant combat atritted that supply to a fraction. By the 1944 Marianas “Turkey Shoot” there were nearly no well trained Japanese pilots still living and functional to face the hoards of well trained American pilots in their then new and far superior fighters.
F6F Hellcat: Speaking of new and far superior fighters, The Hellcat and its contemporary, the F7 Corsair, would be that. The F6 Hellcat combined with the atritted Japanese skilled pilot pool certainly changed the dynamic of Pacific Theater air combat. The F4F shot down 5,600 Japanese aircraft with a kill to loss rate of 19:1. Admittedly, the average Japanese pilot in 1945 was not even a shadow of an equal to the pilot pool in 1941. Despite the competition of the US Corsair, the F6F was the numerically dominant US fighter in the theater until the end of the war.
F8F Bearcat: Bearcats were a stripped and lightened improvement on the F6, with significantly improved performance in the metrics of agility, climb and speed. A little too late though, they were just being introduced as the war ended. You still see racing versions of F8’s at Reno and other pylon racing events.
F14 TomCat: F14’s of “Top Gun” fame were the frontline Naval fighter, replacing the F4 starting in 1970 until being retired with the last units leaving service in around 2006. They were heavy, gas hogs, maintenance heavy, complex, expensive but damned effective. It’s fighter replacement, the multirole F18, isn’t as effective as a pure fighter
Tom’s World – 09SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 1
Tom’s World – 18SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 2
I’ve got a busy day today but I figured I’d look around at the news and see what was happening before heading out into the world. and right now most of the news seems positive.
Hurricane Milton did some damage but for the most part it wasn’t the hell storm some had been warning. Thank God.
But it looks like the Democrats are being pretty open about the fact that the numbers coming out of private polls are not good so good for Vice President Word Salad.
Halperin is a Leftie but he has been hosting a large relatively bi-partisan zoom call and he has tried to allow both sides to talk about what they see is happening in the race without the one-sided echo chamber hiding the truth. He says the people in the know on both sides think it’s not going Kamala’s way. Hmmm. Sounds promising.
Camera Girl is a courageous woman. She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice. Unfortunately, she usually does this when it puts me in the firing line of whoever she is challenging or berating. This can get a little dicey for me.
So, she has the heart of lioness, except when it comes to mice. The poor girl is terrorized by the diminutive rodents. Something about their tails fills her with horror. And so, she wages a war of attrition against them in all the outposts of the Compound. Specifically, the garage and the large shed that houses the yard equipment. My own feeling is that areas outside of the house and its various attachments are outside of the jurisdiction of polite society and so a mouse or two more or less is not cause for alarm. But she disagrees vehemently. Part of the reason is that she has to go through the garage to bring the dogs to the fenced in areas she lets them out into at night. And if the dogs sense that mice have been in the area, they become interested and this frightens her into thinking that one of Stuart Little’s relatives might make an appearance and trigger the dogs to catch and eat it. For her this would be even worse than one running by her.
And so, she has taken to mining the garage and shed with mouse traps. Interestingly, seeing a dead mouse in the snap trap is not frightening for her. Once rendered inert, she discharges the traps at the edge of the pond and literally caws for Moe the Crow and Poe the Raven and their ancillary corvids to partake of the murine feast provided. I find this to be one of her most eccentric rituals.
Anyway, a crisis has emerged. A year or two ago we switched from the venerable wooden spring traps to a newfangled jaws-like version made of plastic. She liked these better because they made it easier to release the dead mouse from the trap. But recently these traps have begun failing. Apparently, the mice were now able to extract the peanut butter that she baited the trap with, without the trap snapping. She would come back from her trip to the shed, filled with a sense of dread and tell me this tale of woe. The world turned upside down!
Because Camera Girl had never developed the knack for setting the older wooden traps I have, of course, been recruited to become the baiter of traps. And also, I have been tasked with solving the mystery of the failed plastic traps. And it has been implied that if I fail to diagnose the problem and correct it, I will have failed as a man, a husband, and an engineer.
O tempora, o mores!
So far, I have installed the wooden traps with the prescribed bait that was provided to me by Camera Girl. That much have I done. But I have only just begun to investigate a cause. Could the traps be defective? Could they have gotten rusty and thus less sensitive? Might the peanut butter have become old and therefore easier to remove?
My mind has raced to encircle this mystery within a thicket of possible solutions. But these are deep waters. I cannot be too hasty. A proper plan of attack is needed. I’ll need a budget to purchase supplies, tools and instruments. I’ll need a detailed schedule to properly scope the project and I’ll need a scapegoat in case the project is a failure. Maybe one of the dogs. Updates will follow but I felt this project was important enough to warrant an introductory post to benchmark the effort.
The single guys out there probably assume I’m suffering the beginnings of dementia. The married men will probably understand that this is just one of the many accommodations a man makes to keep a wife happy. And after all the expression, “Happy wife, happy wife,” Is not far from the truth. But I do wish someone would invent a mousetrap with lasers. It would make the who thing much more fun.
Update:
War Pig commented:
Mamaw used peanut butter in her traps as well, but when the diminutive rascals found out how to defeat that, she went to bacon grease. Mice, in Ohio at least, cannot resist bacon grease. Also the plastic traps tend to not give the same force as the wood-and-spring traps. A healthy mouse can get out of them and resist a broken neck due to their lack of dynage. Living on a farm meant constant vermin control. The little buggars aren’t stupid. We have to change out methods and baits from time to time. Thankfully, a generation of mice comes along a few times per year. So anything learned from the last generation is lost to the grandchildren.
Due to an error by the webmaster (me), TomD’s latest post on military aircraft “Tom’s World – 10OCT2024 – Museum Aircraft – 5” was not published this morning as it should have been.
Instead it will appear tomorrow at 9am eastern time.
Please excuse this lapse. I’ve been juggling a few too many chainsaws of late and it’s beginning to take its toll.
photog
People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned — it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned — and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.
Charles Alan Murray
All my best wishes for you folks down in Florida. I’ve spoken to my friends and family down there and surprisingly, they don’t seem overly concerned for whatever reason. Maybe this one will be less than feared rather than more.
I thought of an interesting choice for tonight; the 2023 movie “Nefarious.” I hadn’t watched the movie since it came out last year. I had forgotten how good it is. The malevolence and twitchiness of the Nefarious character and the step-by-step demolition of the psychiatrist’s composure and then his mental balance is fascinating to watch. The creative team (including the actors) crafted an intricate little machine that advances the plot one ratchet tooth at a time and then brings us to the electrocution room in the penultimate scene.
And the electrocution of the demon’s host provides all the horror that is needed for a Halloween movie. They even have to “fry” him twice for good measure. And even though this film was made by a “Christian” production studio and has a clear message concerning the reality of evil in the world, that messaging does not overpower the dramatic balance. The story works as a story for any audience. I guess for non-believers they’ll just have to chalk up the strange events to psychological phenomena, such as multiple personality syndrome and autosuggestion.
Comparing this movie to other films I think the confrontation with Nefarious is somewhat akin to Agent Starling interacting with Hannibal Lector in “Silence of the Lambs.” Of course, not exactly because there was a certain sympathy that Lector felt for Starling. Whereas Nefarious is wholly bent on the destruction of everyone around him including the psychiatrist. But there is the same sense that a malevolent genius is toying with his jailors.
And the other comparison that this movie conjures up in my mind is C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters.” In both works you get to see the demon’s point of view. Nefarious at a certain point has to prove to the psychiatrist that there is a logic to the whole idea of demonic possession. He has to explain how it’s done and how it advances the goals of Nefarious’ master. And from what I can tell I think he used pretty orthodox doctrine on how and why Satan carries out his war against Heaven and mankind.
So, all in all I think I made a pretty good choice for tonight’s movie. Of course, whether I watch the movie for Halloween or Easter is a matter of mood. After all, you really can’t consider Hell without contrasting it with the establishment run by the power whom Nefarious calls “the Enemy.” But even for atheists I think Nefarious is a pretty good choice for this time of year. And to round off this post I’d like to say that all of the actors in this little teleplay acquitted themselves very ably. But the actor who portrayed Nefarious was especially good. If they gave Academy Award nominations to actors in movies made by Christian production companies then he would have deserved one for the performance he gave. And the actors who played the psychiatrist and the warden were also top notch.
Well, if you’re looking for a good scary movie, I highly recommend Nefarious. Give the devil his due.