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August 15, 2005

Gaza, Yo-Yo's & Crashes on Lobster's Day

Charles Johnson of Little Green Football provides Gaza Watch, a photoblog (servers occasionally overloaded) featuring raw, unedited photos from residents of the Gaza Strip, as Israel prepares to carry out its disengagement plan. Take these pictures at face value.
We hope the disengagement will not kill anybody. Is easy to say it was approved and planned (with striking contrast within the Israeli government), a different story altogether is to get these people out of their very own houses, rid of their memories, abandon jobs and fields they cultivate. This ain't gonna be easy.

While mostly everything is shutdown on Lobster's Day (a.k.a. Ferragosto, today) we are still carrying out some design work for clients that are not on vacation on the other side of the world. In the meantime more domestic-type duties are being taken care of. Our child woke up today from dreaming about a yo-yo that she absolutely needs, a life impending catastrophe. Name anything harder to buy on a day when toy stores (plus everything else) are closed. Put that together with much needed, but fairly easier to find eggs (we need to make brownies) and off we go, me and the kid. We actually managed to scavenger down to a korean stand that had little toys on sale, not a yo-yo, and kid was diligent enough to adopt this little battery-powered cute puppy, named Huatai, instead of the chinese willbilly stretcher. Life's easy when kids decide to learn from what they see.

The stand was lying by a pool of smaller tables, each with 4 old men playing cards. The total number of players must have been close to 80.

The recent disaster involving a B-737 out of Larnaca, Cyprus, impacting a mountain right by Athens, Greece. What to say? I can tell about a conversation I had several years ago with a B-737 pilot, one out of the 50 of this type the US Navy bought in order to replace their aging fleet of DC-9. I do not mean this to prove anything, especially if it will be demonstated that the aircraft was hijacked by terrorists. Asof now bodies have been found that were solid-frozen even after impact.

The US Navy received these 50 B-737, re-named them C-40 taking over the commercial name from Boeing, and sent them around to several bases, one to the NAS base here in Sicily. I was full-time working at tower at that time and was receiving this craft crew for brief and flight plan submission. We were pretty excited to receive our first C-40 and were full of questions for the crew. I can tell they were not excited at all. They said the craft was crazy to balance and limited to fly below 2000 feet. Below 2000 feet? Is that reasonable? No, it is not and the rationale behind this limitation was that several sections of the fuselage freeze at high altitude. They said that they were going to report to their command and release the aircraft back. The crew refused to fly it on active missions and our first C-40 had to be brought back to the US with report of major safety hazards. The US Navy reconditioned all 50 aircrafts at their expenses. Boeing refused to do it as they could not reproduce conditions. The whole pressurization system was replaced (not by Boeing). Now these aircrafts are flying, one is for official US State Secretary Support but apparently it was an expensive experiment for the US Navy and definitely not a good deal.

How many airliners have done what the US Navy had to do (with some major injection of money) in order to make these aircrafts safe? And here I stay as beyond these simple notes I know I may make your life a lot scarier that what it already is.

Recommended movie for Lobster's Day: The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear.

Posted by lck at August 15, 2005 11:39 AM

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Posted by: zib at August 16, 2005 12:56 AM

Posted by: lck at August 16, 2005 01:11 AM

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