The Microwave Is On The Move

Edited, with my sincere apologies to Pennsylvanians, to correct the name of Harrisburg.

My microwave has gone from Harrisburg, PA, to Louisville, KY. I hope it's getting on a big brown airplane bound for Southern California. gother package itineraries are representative, it'll get to Ontario Airport[1] at around 0300 and be in Lancaster by 0600, so it can be out for delivery by 0800. It should be at my house at about 1430.

It will be welcomed with open arms. I've had to actually cook dinner, rather than reheat a frozen meal, three nights in a row and I'm running out of ideas (and food) unless I go to the grocery store.

[1] This Ontario Airport isn't in Canada but in SoCal. It's one of five airports in the LA Basin with scheduled airline service (Los Angeles International, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, & John Wayne).[2] Ontario gets a lot of air freight business because it's got less air traffic and it's in a good location for trucking stuff around. The other airports in the Basin are really busy (LAX) or have shorter runways (Burbank) or are in noise-sensitive areas (John Wayne).[3]

[2] OK, Palmdale Airport has scheduled service, too, but it uses the USAF Plant 42 runways and stuff and isn't really an independent airport and it's not in the Basin, although it is in Los Angeles County. Van Nuys Airport doesn't have scheduled airline service, being a general aviation airport, but is still one of the busiest airports in the US. UPS could use it, I'm sure, but it's in a noise-sensitive area.

[3] Why people buy a house near an airport and then complain about the noise is something I do not understand. If you don't like airport noise, don't buy a house by an airport! You don't hear me complaining about Plant 42 or Fox Field or Bermuda Dunes Airport. Which reminds me of a funny story (a lot of things remind me of funny stories, probably because I'm easily amused). For background, you have to remember that Edwards Air Force Base is the USAF's flight testing base and does most of its flying between 0700 and 1600 on weekdays, unlike the regular Air Combat Command bases.

So, here's the story, from back in the days when realtors didn't have to warn prospective buyers about everything. Some family, who lived Down Below (that's what we call the Los Angeles Basin up here), came to Lancaster house-hunting on the weekends. They were looking for a little acreage and settled on a place out in the northwest corner of the valley. They moved up on a Saturday, got all settled in on Sunday, and were sleeping the sleep of the just on Monday morning when the first wave of USAF sorties launched at 0700 and a couple of the airplanes made runs down the Alpha Corridor into the bombing range at low altitude and high speed. The version I've heard says that the couple just about levitated out of bed, thinking they were under attack or something, because they hadn't heard or seen any military aircraft on the weekends and didn't realize how close the base really was.

This would have been a better story a decade or two later, when NASA started landing Orbiters at Edwards. Those come in from space dragging a spectacularly loud sonic boom that would have really jolted the folks out of bed.

Scandal At NASA

By now everyone has probably heard about the NASA woman astronaut who drove from JSC, in Houston, to KSC, at Cape Canaveral, to assault another woman astronaut, supposedly because of a third, male astronaut. I've known a lot of astronauts, test pilots, and military pilots in my career and I have to tell you that this is really weird.

I mean, no one gets to be a captain in the Navy, a fighter pilot, and a test pilot, much less an astronaut, as this woman has, by being unstable. Obviously, I don't know what happened to her, but I'm pretty sure that after the psychologists and psychiatrists get done figuring it out, they're going to use a lot of Latin- and Greek-based words to tell us she flipped out big-time.

Of course, NASA has reacted to all of this scandal by a) standing behind their astronaut, b) suspending her for thirty days, and c) promising to examine and tighten up the psychological tests they give to aspiring astronauts. The last is about as stupid as NASA gets. There is no magical "astronaut profile" that they can define and measure with all their tests and they're kidding themselves if they think there is.

I'm not saying that any of the astronauts are crazy, mind you, but some of them are a little odd. Sort of like management, if you know what I mean. NASA doesn't give would-be managers a battery of psychological tests before promoting them, though. Maybe they should start....

Space Shuttle Orbiter Landing

Well, on Friday we almost had the Space Shuttle Orbiter drop in on us out of a clear blue sky. Literally. The sky here was clear and blue, while the sky at Kennedy Space Center, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, was gray and rainy. The Orbiter usually lands at KSC but it can’t be flown through rain (that erodes the thermal protection tiles on its underbelly) so NASA was looking seriously at bringing it in to Dryden, at Edwards AFB here. They don’t like to do this because it’s inconvenient and expensive and sets back the schedule. However, replacing all the TPS tiles would be vastly more inconvenient and expensive and would set the schedule back a lot more.

Besides, it’s Christmas. I’m sure this wasn’t a primary factor in their decision-making process, but it had to weigh in a bit. If the Orbiter had landed here in California on Friday, the entire recovery team would have had to fly out here immediately, since Dryden only has a skeleton crew to get the Orbiter safed and parked. Can you imagine having to find airline seats for a couple hundred people two days before Christmas, when the entire air transport system is nearly at a standstill because of the Denver blizzard? I don’t see how they could have done it; they probably would have had to ask the US Air Force for help. Now that would have been fun, a cross-country flight in a C-141 or C-17, for the recovery crew. A great way to start off a ten-day to two-week deployment away from home and family during the most family-oriented holiday season we have.

It’s not just the recovery crew that would have plans scrambled, but a lot of support people at Dryden and at Edwards. Normally, both organizations come pretty close to shutting down. There’s no flying, no meetings, just a small fraction of the workforce working, usually because the workers don’t have any annual leave or vacation time. It’s actually not a bad time to write a paper, because there are no interruptions, no meetings, no flights to support, or any other distractions. The most inconvenient thing about it is that the cafeteria is closed, so lunch comes in a brown bag, out of a vending machine, or at whatever is open over in the Base housing area. If the Orbiter had landed here, it wouldn’t have been like that at all. All the local people needed to support the recovery operation would have their holiday plans disrupted, as would their families, at the last minute. Some key people might even have been recalled from their holiday trips, via the snarled-up air travel system.

I’m certain that everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Space Shuttle management decided that the weather at KSC would give them a safe landing window. Sure, everyone would have stepped up and done their jobs out in California and families would have understood and accommodated the changes, but everyone has to be a lot happier that everything went as planned.

Still, I kind of missed hearing the distinctive BOOM-BOOM and seeing the big white Orbiter swooping down to land. Orbiter landings used to be kind of routine, as routine as I’ve seen a lot of Orbiter landings at Dryden, starting with the five Approach and Landing Test flights that used Enterprise. I think I’ve only missed four or five of the landings, usually because I wasn’t even in California at the time.