Winglet

I fly American and recently noticed the new wing structure on their Boeing 737s—I believe it’s the 800 series. My first thought, amateur that I am, was that birds don’t have these upward-sweeping appendages, and if anything bird wings tilt down, so I wondered if the winglet is, as a flight attendant explained to me, more aerodynamic than the flat wing we know and love.

Wingtip structures aren’t new—the Wright brothers toyed with them, private jets adopted them thanks mainly to Burt Rutan, some 747s and Airbuses have been wearing them for a while. But now they are moving into US commercial fleets in a big way. Some winglets go up, some down, some are curved (blended), some angle backward (raked), some are splayed. Hmm. Wikipedia says the winglet reduces vortices—by which it means turbulent air—that flow off the wingtips, causing drag on the plane as well as creating potential problems for following aircraft. This last could happen over airports, where planes line up to land. (Lots of engineering and Air Force studies are available online, as well as enthusiastic discussion threads.)

So the winglets improve performance, save fuel, increase safety, and ideally, by allowing planes to fly closer together, could make flights more frequent. I’m not opposed to frequency, in principle, though here the principle is a bit dubious—unless you add gates and runways, more planes in the air only means more waiting, thus defeating the purpose of more frequent flights. No one flying into a major airport wants to arrive early, no matter how cheerily the captain chirps about it over the intercom. Of course I know that the on-time arrival metric is a PR game pilots are ordered to play. I feel for them. I also feel for you and me. We sit on the tarmac. We sigh. We quietly fume. The beverage cart is gone. No more chilled cabernet for you, chump.

But where was I.

It’s a delicate little being, the winglet, and I admire its saucy curve and pert outlook. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, to tell the truth. It’s just one of the 367,000 parts that go into the 737, according to Boeing, but it makes a statement beyond its technical utility. It strikes a romantic note, like a musical flourish, but no less real for that. Perhaps it’s the upward sweep that charms, a symbol of rising, transcending, being airborne, aloft, above, high—and yes, free.

The Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, strikes that same note rather gloriously. Perched on a grassy knoll at Fort Meyer, just across the river from the District of Columbia, its three curving steel spires rise over the beltway, the Pentagon, the lordly Potomac, and the 14th Street Bridge, over which a certain jet was unable to rise in the winter of 1983.

The silver prongs also ascend over the southwest corner of Arlington National Cemetery, where my father is buried. He is practically underneath them, in section 66, at Eisenhower and Bradley streets. A lot of the old WWII aviators are here, so it’s an appropriate site for the memorial, if not the first choice. (The site originally proposed was a bit too close to the Iwo Jima memorial for the comfort of Marine Corps supporters, notably the late Rep. Gerald B. Solomon of New York. A turf war ensued, an injunction and court case followed, the memorial site was moved.)

In the summer of 2006 I happened to be boarding a flight at National Airport when the pilot announced there would be slight delay, as the new memorial was being dedicated with a flyover for which we had to wait. A passenger in the aisle complained to his companion that this sort of military lovefest was not what he paid his taxes for. I hold the opposite view, of course. I didn’t tell him that the memorial itself was privately funded by the members, veterans, families, and friends of the United States Air Force. As for flyovers, there can’t be too many, in my book. Show me the hardware. Yes, I'll wait.

In any other American metropolis, the monument’s spires would be swallowed up in a cityscape of towering glass boxes. In Washington, where no structure can be taller than the needle-like Washington Monument, the Air Force memorial pops into view frequently on both the Virginia and DC sides of the Potomac. Commercial aircraft fly over it day and night, tipping their wings, and possibly their winglets, as they climb over the river, into the clouds, and above even these.

Black Nan

I didn’t know this plane or its story until a few years ago. Only happened across it while putting together photos for an article on WWII B-24 Liberator pilots I happened to be editing. Naturally I went scrounging through the databases of images provided by the Air Force, LOC, DoD, NARA, etc., and immediately snagged the arresting photo below, which most of you know.

The article was published, and a few days later I get a phone call from a reader. Thank you, he says. That picture means a lot to me, since I happened to be flying in the B-24 next to that plane, with the photographer who took the photo. The plane that was hit, he said, was called Black Nan.

The date was April 10, 1945. The location was somewhere over Lugo, Italy, the mission target. Ten of the eleven crewmen on Black Nan were killed either in the resulting crash, or, if they survived, by German forces. All of their bodies were later recovered.

The B-24 Liberator flew an absurd number of missions in the European Theater. It was large, held 8,000 or more pounds of bombs, and boasted hefty fuel tanks. When flak found these—as it did in the photo—explosions followed. Miraculously the B-24 could find its way home minus an engine, half a wing, most of a tail. The cockpit was tiny and preposterously cold. It smelled of gasoline.

Liberators performed famously in the skies over Ploesti, Romania, in August of 1943, by destroying oil refineries key to the Reich. There were a few snafus during the raid, and heavy aircraft losses of roughly 30 percent—not uncommon in the history of this plane. The refineries were only temporarily disabled, but five crewmen who flew that particular mission received the Medal of Honor.

So today when U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Sal Giunta received his Medal of Honor for extraordinary acts of valor in Afghanistan, one of the images that passed before my mind’s eye was this photo of Black Nan, going down. And one of the phrases that crossed my mind was C’est la guerre. It was a saying Americans had liked and borrowed. It was mocking, or snide, or self-deprecating, or just French. It rolled around on the tongue like champagne, and it pushed the deadliness away. It said, how can I be responsible for events that are bigger than I am? If there’s an answer to that question, I don’t pretend to know it. I only point out that the name Salvatore, like the phrase C’est la guerre, conjured up for me remote and romantic images of an old war.

The aviator who phoned me that day probably knew all about naïve and romantic notions of war, but he didn’t go into it. He was only calling about the plane, to tell me its name—Black Nan. Today after the medal ceremony I looked up the names of Black Nan’s crew, and sure enough, no Salvatores were on board. More’s the pity, since Salvatore means “savior.”

TFFWASC

Well, Good day, and thanks for tuning in.

This is a blog about air power—yes, military air power. I'm going to talk very loosely and amateurishly about planes, guns, bombs, rockets, and the people in, on, under, and behind them—plus related matters topical, tropical, frivolous, and deep. I’ll include sharp remarks on strategy and philosophy when and if I can make them, but don’t expect a lot of that, and don’t expect technical expertise. These are strictly personal asides. Valentines, even.

I’m going to admire aircraft all over and up and down, and I’m going to pass along a few good stories that have come my way, and I’ll probably indulge in the occasional rebuke of folks who think we don’t need jet fighters, short- or long-range bombers, massive transport planes, UAVs, ICBMs, manned spacecraft, the Mars rovers (I don’t care how much they cost), or multiple military museums preserving and celebrating all of the above. I know who you detractors are, and you’re all good people. You’re just wrong.

What you won’t find here are links. At least not in the text. If I refer to something I’ve read or seen I’ll be sure to give you the details you need to find it. Then you look it up. Because no, I’m not doing this to save you time. I’m doing it to save my sanity.

Now for the full disclosure: I have an attachment to the USAF—my father was a lifer. But that doesn’t mean I'm insensitive to naval, marine, or even commercial aviation. As Jerry Brown would say, “I concede: they exist.”

It should go without saying that I’m a civilian. I have no orders, no superiors, very little shame, and not a damn thing to lose. So I’ll just let fly.

About that acronym. A warm, wet, virtual kiss to whoever decodes it first.

Postscript: Carrier

I don’t want to go all service branch on you, but since that smart-alecky remark above I feel a need to make amends to the sisters.

The first thing, of course, is that if there is anything remotely as magnificent, heroic, and gorgeous as an aircraft, it’s a ship. After that it’s a sub. After that it’s a horse. Some of you might put a Beretta or a Humvee before the horse, I don’t know. This is my list.

The second thing is Carrier, the film. I don’t have to tell you what a thing of beauty that was. You know it, everybody knows it. It’s up there with Das Boot, A Walk in the Sun, Paths of Glory, Grand Illusion. (Didn’t see Hurt Locker, sorry.) I believe this film is now so beloved that the poorer public television stations have set it on endless loop. Good for them. Here in Tashkent it shows up in marathon reruns in the summer and around holidays—any holiday. It’s good for the Fourth, Christmas, Passover. It’s interfaith, interhuman.

I loved everybody on that boat. I loved their little dramas and intimacies and failures and loneliness. I loved the pace of sweltering days, the pitching deck at night. I loved the E-3s and the flyboys and the halos of duty that hovered over them. I loved the jokes. I loved the musical score. I loved the ship—a theater on the ocean, a sexy beast. Most of all I loved the shooters, those tiny Orions vaulting our warbirds. Here’s to them and their dancing boots.

Yes, I’ll get back to the birds next post. And if it’s all the same to you I’d like to begin with—Black Nan.