The Lake, Airplanes, Treason, and Flowers

Greetings fellow humans.  How are things?  Things have been warm here, and the forecast is for more really hot weather.  Good thing there is no climate change.  There has been riding to the lake.  Why, you wonder do we keep riding to the lake?  The answer to that would be because it's largely in the shade.  Once it cools off, we will ride other places, but until then, it's the lake.  This is what we've seen lately.

See the yellow horizontal stripe close to the other shore?  We're not sure what that is.  It could be blooming lake weeds, or the way the sun is hitting lake vegetation.  It's weird how yellow it is.

Kayaking is very popular here.  This truck had many in the bed. 

The sandy area is a volley ball area.  Kids like to dig in the sand, some will pretty much bury themselves if left alone long enough.  This little girl has rolled in it and made sand angels.  She's making dinosaur noises as she moves on her little brother.

She got him to roll a little bit, but his heart was not in it.

Yesterday we had breakfast with Dave and Suzi from Beluga at Skyway Cafe, which is on Felts Field.  Felts is a general aviation airport.  They also have a nice airplane museum there, the Historic Flight Foundation.  We went to the museum after breakfast.  The planes there are just gorgeous, the restorations are beautiful.  There are too many to show you, I have picked two.

This DC-3 began life in the Douglas Aircraft Co. Long Beach plant as one of the 300 C-47s built specifically for the China-Burma-India theater of operations.  Unique features include long-rang fuel tanks and supercharged engines for performance at altitude.  Delivered to China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) in Calcutta, it supplied U.S. armed forces and Nationalist Chinese. In 1942, the Burma road was lost. Up until August 1945, the CNAC pilots made more than 38,000 trips over the Hump (the Himalayas).  They transported 114,500 tons of supplies and people.  After leaving that service, the plane was shipped to Grand Central Aircraft Company in California for conversion to a Super DC-3, and began life as a VIP aircraft. She flew for 50 years in that configuration.  The museum acquired the airplane in 2006.  Restoration began shortly thereafter with the intention to recreate a Pan Am DC-3 airliner from 1949, while preserving the interior luxury enjoyed by corporate executives of the time. The museum flew the DC-3 to England for the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.  (Text is largely cribbed from museum informational sandwich boards.)

These are the VIP luxury accommodations.

I'm guessing people slept here, but I could be wrong.

Look at all of the teeny tiny wires! The pilots had to know where every wire went and what it did.

This is the cockpit.  This is before the advent of using i-pads for much of the work load.

It's amazing to me that a plane this old and slow made it to England.

The other cool plane was the Hamilton Metalplane.  At the age of 16, Thomas Hamilton formed Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company.  He built over two dozen designs, many of which flew.  After WWI he became interested in the aerodynamics of propellers.  Hamilton Standard was founded to make propellers.  The Hamilton Metalplane was designed by James McDonnell, who later went on to found McDonnell Aircraft Company.  At one point Mr. McDonnell worked for Ford, which may explain why the Hamilton Metalplane looks so much like a Ford Tri-Motor.  Both planes were manufactured in Milwaukee, 29 Metalplanes were built, this one was the 22nd off the line.  In 1929 the Hamilton company became a subsidiary of the Boeing company.  The Metalplane was the first provider of transcontinental service, flying at a whopping speed of 105 mph.  This is the second oldest Boeing aircraft still flying, and the only Hamilton Metalplane in existence.

Notice the ribbed look of the fuselage and the wing.  They're corrugated, which provides extra strength and reduces drag.

Who remembers what the horn like thing on the side of the plane is?  On our trip to Escalante we learned the following.

The horn shaped thing on the plane is a Venturi vacuum system for the instruments.  The shape of the horn creates a Venturi effect which produces enough suction to drive the gyros of the Attitude Indicator (AI) and the Directional Gyro (DG).  The system was sub-optimal because it didn't work on take off or landing, and was very susceptible to icing.   The system was phased out in the 1960s in favor of electrically driven instruments.

The Hamilton is a cool little plane.  Tri-motors are still flown, we saw one in Tucson.

So, the orange ectoplasm continues to have a bad week.   A judge has ruled that the criminal trial against the Trump Organization and CFO, Allen Weisselberg, can proceed.  His hours long deposition with NY AG Tish James resulted in him taking the 5th 400 or so times, and his getting a pretty good idea of what they have on him.  As it turns out, the search warrant served on his Florida property, which is NOT his home, was in service of an espionage investigation.  That carries huge punishment.  Thus far his explanation of how the documents came to be in a storage closet can be summed up like this.

I can not explain Schrodinger's cat, so for more on that go here.

Another tweet put it this way.

This is also from twitter, welcome to the new reality.

Finally, here are some big flowers in the neighbor's yard.

That's it!  That's all I've got.