howardwhite

O.K. enough of the wimpy, look it up in Janes quizzes. This is for the drivers. What airplane cockpit is this? And did you ever fly one? HW

The wiki is the place to go for all the technical stuff: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home As the documentation that comes with the XO consists of four very uncrowded pages, the wiki is the source for all knowledge. There are a few non-standard bits of terminology; what would be known in other contexts as "applications" are called "activities" on the XO; the user interface is called "Sugar." HW

Well, I live only about 30 miles from MIT, home of the OLPC project, so maybe my order got in faster than yours .....yes, that's got to be it. HW

The May, 1971, Parachutist carried an article "Why They Jump: A Psychological Study of Skydivers," by John Lattimer Delk, a clinical psychologist at the University of Arizona. The executive summary: "...the typical skydiver is: of superior intelligence; free from anxiety, phobia and depression; open and lacking in defensiveness; somewhat socially deviant and anticonventional; inclined to reject traditional religious beliefs; self-confident and positive; impulsive and oriented toward action; hedonistic and thrill-seeking; social and extroverted, and; free from health worries." Some other excerpts: "...a significantly large number of skydivers admit to having indulged in unusual sex practices, doing dangerous things just for the thrill involved, and using alcohol to excess." "Is the act of skydiving sexually symbolic? A psychoanalytically oriented psychologist or psychiatrist might say that leaping from an aircraft into the wild blue is really celestial intercourse, an incestuous relationship with old mother earth. I simply cannot accept that..." Etc., etc., ad nauseam. The article is four pages long, too long to post here. But if you want a copy, pm me with a mail address that can accept a 3mb PDF file. HW

They have started going out. I signed up for mine the first day of the Give One/Get One program (in which you buy one for yourself and another to be donated to a third-world country.) It came a couple of days ago. $400 plus shipping; $200 is tax deductible. Plus you get a year of T-Mobile wireless, which is supposed to be worth $350. (I've already logged in with my XO at the local Borders T-Mobile hotspot.) I saw one at a conference in Montreal in May and decided I had to get one. (For the geeks, it runs RedHat Linux and it has a terminal, so you can poke around inside. Plus it has three USB ports.) HW

This is the XO-1 laptop from One Laptop Per Child. It has wireless built in, so one of the first things I checked was... Yes, it's true. Soon, little children in third-world countries will be able to tune into The Bonfire. Seriously, the "$100 laptop" is now real (though it's come in at $188 at the moment.) It's an impressive piece of work; the wireless reception is better than that on my "other" laptop, and it's got a really nice though tiny screen (dwarfed by my desktop monitor.) It seems pretty indestructible -- I guess it would survive a beer spilled on the keyboard, though I haven't tried that. It has a video and still camera built in, as well as lots of neat applications aimed basically at elementary school level kids. Check it out at http://laptop.org/ HW

I don't think so. The paint job is different. These pictures are the Bird Machine. Same picture -- the second is just a closeup; I'm guessing that's Bird in the blue and red rig. HW

Well, the one on the right appears to be the one of which I posted pictures earlier, here: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2828660;search_string=lodestar;#2828660 One Lodestar was probably the one flown by Nate Pond,D-69, at Turners Falls, MA, that year. I was talking with Nate about it a few weeks ago and he recalled flying it at Z-Hills when one of the engines seized up so quickly and firmly that it was actually ripped from the engine mounts and hung on only by hoses and wiring. Nate, of course, shut everything down in a hurry. His copilot asked why. "We're going to crash, and we don't want a fire" was the approximate response. After they got on the ground and sat for 30 seconds or so, a voice came from one of the jumpers in the back of the plane. "Is it o.k. if we get out now, Mr. Pond?" HW

(1) can't possibly be me, because I never make obscene gestures toward photographers...although I do recognize and indeed may still have a similar T-shirt and I have a Leica IIF that looks much like the one around the neck of the individual in the picture. HW

I remember Dennis Jet(t) as a TwinBo mechanic at Turners Falls, MA for one unhappy season in 1989. (The unhappiness had nothing to do with DJ, but with the owner of the airplane -- but that's another story to be told sometime.) DJ was prominently featured in a half-hour Boston TV show about a Caribou boogie. In one memorable moment, he says (approximately)..."I don't have a death wish. At 2,500 feet I really want to live." HW

For those of you with fond memories of the Noorduyn Norseman, here's a model created by my friend, Jim Holston. Jim is a lifelong Orange, MA, resident. He worked as a desert rat (chute shagger) and made his first jump from a Norseman when he was 16. He's been an avid collector of Norseman history and has created many models. This is his latest. He describes it as follows: "The model is made out of bass wood and spans 15". After assembly, the wood was sealed with lacquer sanding sealer, and then airbrushed with Testors model master enamel. PI blue is a difficult color to match! Lots of time masking and painting After scanning a PI logo from an old brochure and making the N numbers in Word, the decals were printed on an ink jet printer using using a special decal film. It has a detailed radial engine made from nylon screws (look like cylinders) music wire and strip styrene. The prop hub is a small piece of aluminum tube with hand carved wood blades (yes, the prop spins!) Wing struts are small pieces of bass wood, tail rigging is music wire, and the tail wheel is a button." HW

That's a pretty picture. Mind a little very quick 'n dirty Photoshop fixup? HW

Some more findings in the Nostalgia bin... HW

If you're really interested, you might want to check out this book (cover pic attached.) Readily available from Amazon.com, etc. Among other things, it has a lot of info from Garth Taggart about the wingsuit jumping in the movie "The Gypsy Moths. A quick look at the index indicates no info about Cecil Mackenzie, but there's a lot about Clem Sohn jumping batwings in 1933 and 1934. HW

I seem to remember something odd about the lower front of the door of an Islander; an angle instead of a straight corner. Or, rather, my calf remembers it from hitting it hard on a late diving exit -- maybe at CPI. I also vaguely remember a Trislander used for jumping; I can't remember where. In any event, if you feel nostalgia for jumping/instructing out of an Islander, you could move to Iran. http://www.paaviation.com/skydiving-in-iran.htm HW

Right, again. Do you have the book (published by BPA, I think) from which these were scanned? The picture was almost certainly taken at Thruxton DZ (UK), as was the attached. HW

This one, perhaps. I think these are from the OhHoHo ski area airport, which had a sharp drop-off at the end of the runway. CPI had some sort of fund-raising boogie there. Recognize anyone? HW

Correct. Apparently about 300 were built; this one may still be airworthy. It is similar to the Chipmunk, but look at, e.g., the wheel struts. There's at least one in the U.S., apparently, at Oxnard, CA. So, from the same source, here's another. This one is a conversion. What is it and what was it converted from? I found a picture of another of these used on a demo jump as recently as 2006, as well as another picture of this plane on the ground at a DZ. HW

1. Yes, lots 2. When the USPA Board was debating whether to consider frappe hats to be protective headgear, he said "you got a ten-cent brain, put it in a ten-cent helmet." (Well, it was funny when he said it.) 3. The USPA financial report. HW

i think it would be tough to fit three people in a Chipmunk. HW

This one was sent to me in a PM from someone who apparently wants me to have the glory of posting yet another really obscure one. The registration info has been crudely obscured because this plane seems still to be registered; I've found at least one other picture of it. The contributor knows (obviously) where he got the picture, but not much more about the details. But he also sent me another which is, if anything, even more obscure. I suspect someone will recognize this one, if only from the same source, but it would be interesting to have more detail. Probably not the best platform for a static line, but whatever... HW

Brilliant! Spot on! The only thing to add is that neither of the airplanes on the ground (I don't know what they are) is a C5A.There had been one at the previous year's Open House but the threats of demonstrations by "Communists," as the Stars and Stripes headline described them, seemed to have scared off the Air Force's plans to have one there. (A few months earlier, two home-made bombs were found in a C-54 on static display at Tempelhof -- they were disarmed.) Tempelhof is as it appears in the picture -- a mid-city airport totally surrounded by dense urban population. But it gained world-wide fame in the early cold war years as the focal point for the Berlin airlift, when Allied aircraft kept the population of West Berlin alive by flying in supplies while the Soviet Union barred land acccess to the city. I spent a month in one of those "towers" in the terminal building on TDY shortly after the Berlin Wall was put up. Tempelhof is still in limited use for domestic commuter flights, but probably not for much longer. Attached is a little chunk of the Stars and Stripes story (along one one from the 1973 event.) HW (The original picture was published in Parachutist in 1973 and the canopy landing picture of the "Challengers" 7th Army team was published in Stars and Stripes, as were the news snippets attached here.)

Here's a contemporary newspaper picture of the same event. (The event, by the way, has some minor historical skydiving significance.) HW

Are you by chance referring to "Transpo '72" at Dulles? If so, very bad stab. HW

I'm east of you, Jon. Doesn't snow here.