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Everything posted by CHIEF
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Especially hot Russian big titted women. No need for mail order, just hit them up on Tinder. I'm sure Austin, DFW, Houston, and San Antonio have a few refugees coming around. Probably some Ukrainian ones as well. CHIEF
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Haven't seen any kids wearing Buster Browns lately. CHIEF
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Falstaff is also no longer made. CHIEF
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Is it live? Or is it Memorex? Bought and dissolved by Tandy in 1988. CHIEF
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There is a Gibson's in Weatherford. Was the goto place for ammo a couple of years ago, until I found a guy on a county road a few miles from us that can get about anything, and is priced right. CHIEF
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I was the first to see him, he has been to some of the other hunter's feeders, but is on a "no kill" list. Since I was the first to see him, I get to be the one that shoots him. If someone is seeing him at their stand, I will hunt their stand to kill him. It's kinda set up that way through a mutual agreement. That way no one gets disappointed and no one else feels like a sheep killin' dog. Preserves friendships, which is what's most important. I get texts all day, CHIEF, your deer is at my feeder, I figured he ate $1.56 worth of corn, here is my Venmo info. All of these guys own their own business and are really successful, but act dirt poor. I picked up a carport from my wife's modular building company for $13.18 just to get it off their books. Told the group I expect their $1.32 when we get it here. One asked if he could pay it in installments. CHIEF
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Got back from the 8 day hunt in Benjamin. The rut is on, we saw a bunch of good bucks, all 10 hunters have, at least a 150" class deer coming to their area. The big ones won't go into the feeder pens unless the road corn gets eaten, and they absolutely have to. Here is our "Big Toad". We all looked at pictures and couldn't get him to 5.5 years, so he walks until next year: CHIEF
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Deuce against the vaunted KU run game defense doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. CHIEF
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It's funny, all the guys I hunt with are from Temple/Killeen/Belton/Salado, they drive 5-5 1/2 hours each week to hunt in Benjamin. CHIEF
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Was gonna leave tonight but CHIEF Jr. is still in a class giving a presentation. Also, my late father's sister passed, and visitation is tonight. We are leaving in the morning for the lease, in Benjamin, won't be coming back till Monday the 28th. CHIEF
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Did the quake shake Midland pretty hard? CHIEF
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5.5 Magnitude earthquake in Pecos just now
CHIEF replied to High Plains Drifter's topic in Daily Texan
I've never felt an earthquake, or if I did I attributed it to something else. Why do y'all get to have all the fun? CHIEF -
I can't wait for this, work a few years to pay for a robot worker to replace you. Send it to work each morning, go back to bed, wake up and lay on the couch drinking beer and watching Andy Griffith reruns. CHIEF
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My thinking is that the Ukes make one more offensive to take the Highway at Melitopol, cut off the food and equipment supply to Crimea, cut off the water from Kherson, and sit back and wait. Let nature take its course. Russian citizens escape by walking across the Kerch Bridge, Russian soldiers will be shot trying to cross. No winter uniforms, nothing to eater drink, no more ammo or equipment. By February, Russian soldiers will be reduced to cannibalism and drinking each others blood. Ukraine walks into Crimea without firing a shot. CHIEF
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CHIEF
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Sorry to have struck a nerve. Didn't mean to come across that way. For four years I was with my boss at airshows in Abilene, Breckenridge, and Waco. I witnessed Don Knapp's fatal P-51D crash (faulty fuel gage) I have about 400 hours with about 60 or so in formation (following my boss from an airport where he had purchased a broke down piece of shit plane for peanuts). I have flown a Cherokee 140 with no interior while sitting on a five gallon bucket. I have flown a Bonanza (not even type rated) where we aired up the flat, weather cracked tires, and a windshield that had so many micro-fractures that I could nearly see him in front of me a thousand foot. He talked me into some stupid shit. His excuse? I have a family, and you need the seat time. Shit got real and extreme changes came after 9/11. I haven't piloted a private plane since. Clifton was close enough to Crawford (George Bush Jr. Ranch) that it wasn't worth getting escorted by F-16s to the nearest airport and footing the bill for the scramble. Our crop-duster's business was shut down, things just got crazy. CHIEF
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But how much of that 34,000 hours were in the P-63? I have that many hours in a pickup truck, but not a Shelby Cobra. It's the familiarity/proficiency. To join up with that B-17 he would have had to have known he was there, and be running about 100 mph slower. The Tora Tora Tora planes are T-6s, they maintain formation, and everyone steps back out of their way. T-6s are a dime a dozen, it is the F150 of airshows, a 230 mph plane. This was the only P-63F in existence. CHIEF
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After getting out of college, getting married, and raising a young family, I didn't keep up with it much, other than the occasional trip over to view the static display and the occasional takeoff and landing at the Burnet show. The CAF was kinda the first Collective warbird club. There were still a lot of WWII vets that were young enough and familiar enough to have turned wrenches on, or flown these aircraft in WWII. They were in their 70's, and still pretty spry. I think losing that generation, their knowledge, and the fact that when they were young, they did this for 24/7 for four years with a gun pointed at them has cost most of the loses. They were all trained by the US Government with no regard to cost, and had literally repaired or replaced thousands of parts on these planes. It is hard to translate that knowledge over to the younger generation of pilots and mechanics. CAF has been around long enough to have the most experienced pilots and mechanics, and the largest knowledge transfer, probably contributes to their safety record. CHIEF
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Mostly dogfights, or structural issues. The engines were pretty simple and reliable, but the planes, themselves were made of fabric and wood. Pull too many Gs and it would rip the wings off. Not a lot of R&D stress testing back then. CHIEF
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I bet ol' Orville shit his pants when his Wright Flyer actually left the ground. WWI fighter pilots didn't have parachutes, and a life expectancy of just a few weeks. A whole different mindset. Dying famously seemed like the trend at the time, going out in a blaze of glory doing what you loved. Here, again, you have a Commerative or a collective of guys with pockets not deep enough. They do, it purely out of passion. But passion alone isn't safe enough. The plane can't be flown often enough to keep the pilot proficient. It's like being accurate with a rifle at 600 yards, it takes practice, you can't maintain that accuracy only shooting 5-6 shots a year. CHIEF
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Absolutely not a maintenance issue. It was a pilot proficiency issue. The pilot should have known about the blind spot, he wasn't paying attention early enough. He was directly over the B-17, it was under his nose, impossible to see from any angle unless the B-17 were to turn before the P-63 when the P-63 pilot could have seen it before his leading edge covered him up again. The air boss should have made the P-63 pilot aware that there was a B-17 under him, and to maintain altitude. Who knows? Too many planes in the air in a congested area, and too many changes in altitude. The P-63 never made any last second effort to avoid the collision, thus my hypothesis that he never saw him. These pilots pay too much money, or maintenance time to want to just fly straight and level. Who wants to buy an F1 car and drive it 60 mph around the track. Airshows are like that, and they are all "Newbies" in a sense. I bet none of them have over 100 hours of seat time in anything they fly due to cost. I remember when you could purchase a P-51 for between $300-500k. My dream plane. As soon as I made enough money to purchase one, that was what I was going to do, and people would get to watch me at airshows. Big dreams for a 16 year old. After being around Don and Howard, I realized that the purchase price was just a drop in the bucket. You needed to pour that much into it, annually, for maintenance and enough fuel to stay proficient, and this was on $2.00/gal 100LL. These warbird pilots are living their dream, however, they were completely unaware of how much extra dough you must have above the purchase price to be safe in it. Something that my time as a mechanic and being around warbirds, and their owners taught me. It was a bitter truth, and a crushed dream. I remember throwing full blown toddler temper tantrums when we had to go to church on Sunday night (my Dad was the song leader) and missing Baa Baa Black Sheep. No VCR, no recording it. I think my mom was the one that called ABC and had it moved to Tuesday night. I slept, ate, and drank WWII warbirds. Yeah, F8F, I was bourbon typing, had to look this morning and see what I had typed. CHIEF
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Thats the thing, this is 75 year old "cutting edge" technology. Basically flathead Fords going 450 mph. It is getting tougher and tougher to source parts, so mechanics and machinists are having to repair broken parts manually (welding, duck tape, remachining taking off material thickness). But the biggest problem, is the operating costs. These planes were designed to fly on 100/150 AV gas, they weren't designed to fly on 100LL, but 100LL will work at lower power at lower altitudes. 100LL fouls the plugs horribly, the plugs need to be cleaned after a 6-8 hours of flight. We had a crop duster at our FBO that used an AgCat with an O-650 P&W (single row), built in 1943. I cleaned his plugs every other day during spraying season. Also, the 100LL was bad on the brass valve seats. We eventually had a machinist make some out of billet nickel for extra hardness. Considering this, and the cost of 100LL, pilots can only afford to fly them a couple of hours a month. There is no way to maintain proficiency at the controls. You do not have the US government providing unlimited fuel and a sea of mechanics to maintain these aircraft, they are too cost prohibitive. CHIEF
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Old Warbirds are just inherently very dangerous. I was a mechanic at the FBO in Clifton, Texas during college. I knew three people who were killed in a P-51, an 8F8 Bearcat, and another warbird that I can't remember: Don Knapp, in 1989, cool dude. Owned a P-51D, a triple row Wasp F4U that won the 1949 Cleveland Air Race, and, at the time, the only Me-262 (all in parts in crates) known to exist. He ran his P-51 out of gas at the air show at Dyess, in Abilene (his home base) in 1989. My boss' wife was from Abilene, we would go out there every year for the airshow. Her brother was an A&P at the American Eagle repair facility, next door to Don, in the same sized hanger. I was lucky enough to get to sit in the cockpit of both the P-51, and the F4U. Another amazing airshow, we would go to, was in Breckenridge, Texas. My boss and Howard Pardue were pretty good friends. Howard had an extensive restoration facility at the airport. You could walk into his hangar, and there would be partially assembled Spitfires, P-51s, F4Us, you name it. His pride and joy was his 8F8 Bearcat, couldn't wait to get it in the air. Well he did, and it killed him in 2012. His daughter, Kimberly, was killed in a warbird, that she was piloting in 1984, at only 19 years of age. I never wanted to bring it up, and ask Howard what she was flying when she crashed, I guess you could also say I didn't know her personally, but he named his 8F8 after her. One year, my boss had this great idea to fly this piece of shit to Breckenridge: https://www.pietenpolaircraftcompany.com It was all painted up like the Red Baron, Iron Cross, the whole enchilada, from Clifton to Breckenridge, Stephenville was our midway stop to refuel (his wife was waiting with car gas). We had rebuilt the 1935 Lambert five cylinder radial to power it. It didn't have any pistons when we got it, but standard 350 Chevrolet pistons fit it perfectly. At that time, Stephenville had a crosswind runway, and the wind was out of the west, so away we went. On the climb out, the engine sputtered and begin to loss power, we were descending directly into a big power station with huge transformers, heavy gauge wire, etc. Asshole puckering moment, it cleared up after about 5-6 seconds. My boss just looked back, smiled, and winked. The control sticks were two sawed off baseball bats, no instruments, and a float gauge for the fuel level (it had a marked wire, you knew how much fuel you had by how far the wire stuck up out of the fuel cap). There were no trim tabs, so it was like fighting a Grizzly, the whole way. You could look down, and old farm trucks were pulling on you. We flew the highway, and made a deal to switch, as the pilot, at each town we came to (about 12 miles apart). It was absolutely exhausting. The only cool thing was spitting over the side, and realizing you had just spit 3000 feet. I also had the chance to buy a Cassutt from my high school history teacher and aviation teacher's FIL: https://www.cassuttaircraft.com But with less than 100 hours, he said we would have to rename it "Casket". Could have bought it for $5k in 1986. Also had a chance to buy a Pitts Special biplane that had been flooded in the Leon river bottom for $9500 around 1990 from a guy that lost his leg in an airshow accident, and had lost his medical. My Boss nixed that. Like I would have been with those planes, the people flying these warbirds are getting in over their heads. Their money lets them hotrod in hot planes that even airline pilots with thousands of hours aren't qualified to fly. In wartime, this was probably a daily occurrence you never heard about. The flight hours to be competent gets shaved by deep pockets. These planes are not very reliable, Howard was killed due to engine problems, Don had a faulty fuel gauge. It's dangerous enough to fly them with no one else in your airspace. Get them in close proximity and showing off and you get midair collisions. CHIEF
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My minor was history, if I took four semesters of a foreign language I would have a B.A. One of the things that really stuck with me, in a military history class, Dr. Pierce (my professor) had a hypothesis that rifled barrels were the most significant development in warfare. He said it was what ultimately won the American Revolution, and was responsible for the carnage of the Civil War. The accuracy of rifled barrels has single-handedly killed more humans than practically anything else. CHIEF
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Was about to post the same thing. CHIEF
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