It was a dark and cloudy afternoon. Foggy, really – it looks like the mist at the outer boundaries of a Nintendo-64 screen has enveloped all of Seattle. I knew the few days of sunshine were too good to be true – now we go back to six months of shittiness.
I watched too much TV last night, and didn’t get any work done. There was a show on about the Air Force One, another one of those Discovery Channel “Inside Story” things. I actually went on the first jet-powered Air Force One, a Boeing 707, tail number 26000. It’s at the Boeing museum in Seattle – you can walk through it and see various replica seats and desks and fake radio gear behind plexiglass. Actually, I don’t remember if the museum had plane 26000 or 27000, or if it was all fake. But one one of the two was where they swore in LBJ while JFK’s corpse was stowed away in the passenger compartment. Another weird thing on that show – Air Force One is the FAA callsign for the plane only when the president was on board. When Nixon resigned, he was president when he left DC on his way home, but Ford was signed in at noon, when he was midway to California. So the plane had to change callsigns to 27000 while in midair.
The Museum of Flight has so many cool planes there, each with a weird story. Their B-17 was in the film Memphis Belle; their FG-1D Corsair spent 33 years at the bottom of Lake Washington before being restored; they have an A-4F that used to be a Blue Angels plane. I already mentioned Air Force One; their SR-71 Blackbird and D-21 drone is also a one-of-a-kind. Their F-4 Phantom really scored 3 MiG kills in 1967; their P-12 biplane once flew from LA to San Diego, inverted. One of their biggest planes is the prototype 747; one of the smallest is the Aerocar III, a fiat-sized car that can bolt on a pair of wings and a prop for air travel. The Aerocar is pretty kick-ass; you can convert it in only ten minutes. Although it can go about 100 miles an hour in the air, it can only drive at about 65.
I’m bored, and I have a meeting in a bit, so I better cut this short.