A Plane Old Day

Wwwwwwwrrrrrrrrroooooooowwwwwww!

Can anything equal the sound of an Allison V-12 engine roaring by?

Well, maybe the sound of a Rolls-Royce Merlin or a Pratt and Whitney.  But all three at once? Unsurpassable.

(On second thought, a deep-toned steam train whistle is probably better. But I digress.)

Little bitty Lewiston, Idaho isn’t known for much these days. Ask residents of the town where I live, and their first thoughts of the city to the south will mention two things: the Lewiston Grade (beautiful winding climb in the summer, nightmare of Route 95 in the winter) and the stink of the Clearwater Paper plant that pervades downtown.

But it does have an airport. And this weekend, the tiny Nez Perce County aerodrome has a bunch of propellers all over it. The annual "Radials 'n' Rivers" event brings a score or more of prop planes to town, and I went down Saturday to see some vintage craft. There were the usual trainers, a bunch of biplanes, an old chrome-colored passenger plane. But the cream of the crop? The World War II machines: most of the major land-based American craft of that conflict were represented, and all of them airworthy!

I started the event by pulling Red into the grassy overflow parking and sauntering past the long line for the shuttles. The runways were literally on the other side of the fence. What could they possibly need shuttles for? Besides, I needed the exercise. I got it, too; it turns out the planes were all parked on the apron on the far side of the runways,  so that a two-mile loop around the end was needed—and the beautiful, partly-cloudy, 80-plus degree day meant that would be a bit of a sweaty trip. Thankfully, a church acquaintance driving by offered a ride in the back of his truck. I love small towns!

On arrival at the apron, my first choice was to join a stretching, sinuous line to climb inside the great workhorse of WWII—the B-17 Flying Fortress. Carrying a crew of ten, thirteen .50-caliber machine guns and up to 8,000 pounds of bombs, this was the plane that flew deep into Nazi territory during daylight hours to destroy factories and other strategic targets. If you’ve ever watched any amount of documentary footage from WWII, I am certain you’ve seen at least one B-17. The inside was cramped, particularly the foot-wide walkway through the bomb bay—the portly gentleman ahead of me nearly became a permanent addition to the plane. But he squirmed through and I got this lovely shot out one of the waist guns.

Next was the B-24—the Liberator. A slightly smaller bomber than her more famous cousin, the B-17, she had a greater range and was adapted to far more uses, from antisubmarine warfare to cargo transport over the Himalayas. Her bomb bay catwalk was even narrower—a mere nine inches wide. Actor Jimmy Stewart flew 20-plus missions as a B-24 pilot in Europe.

A Mitchell B-25 was also out on the apron, but they had it fired up and running rides for the spectators, at the rate of $450 dollars for a half-hour trip. Would have been tempting if I was independently wealthy.

But the highlight of the day was at 1430, when the all the fighters present were put in the air for a grand fly-by. Two P-40 Warhawks (one of our early fighters), two P-51 Mustangs (late war long-range fighters), and the only surviving airworthy P-47 Thunderbolt, the Dottie Mae.

The Dottie Mae has a fascinating story. On May 8^th, 1945—V-E Day—she was being flown in the Alps to drop leaflets on an Allied prisoner of war camp, letting them know that ground troops were on the way to liberate it. The pilot misjudged his altitude above a clear mountain lake and crashed into it, making the Dottie Mae the last aircraft lost in the European theater. (The pilot jumped out after it hit and was saved by two Austrian girls--in a canoe.) For seventy years, it lay at the bottom of the lake in over two hundred feet of water. In 2005, an expedition financed by an American WWII vet found it and raised it, and after a ten-year restoration (most of the missing parts had to be made by hand) it now flies once again—its original pilot was even on hand to witness the inaugural flight. This air festival was only the third time it had been flown publicly. Its Pratt and Whitney engine (the same one used in the Navy’s Hellcats and Corsairs) had a noticeably lower, smoother tone than the other fighters flying today. Nicknamed “Jugs” due to their milk-bottle shape, the P-47 carried eight machine guns and could load a few bombs as well, making it a favorite ground-interdiction fighter. They took out trains, trucks, or other treetop-level targets.
The planes flew by individually at first, then in groups, and finally did a few passes with all five in formation. And the sound of those engines roaring by in unison is something I hope I won’t forget.

Then it was time for the long walk back around, the drive home (during which I picked up an exquisite Papa John’s pizza for only eight bucks—thanks, junk mail coupons!), and a relaxed evening of watching old documentary footage of those planes in their service period.

Plainly, a good old Saturday, indeed.

Stuck in a Rut

You ever feel like you’re stuck in a rut?

You struggle out of bed, bump along to your standard breakfast, rattle on to your tolerable job, just keep going through the motions, same old tasks, same old people, same old words, lies, sins. Nothing ever seems to change. God hasn’t accomplished anything for you (or with you) that you’ve noticed in months. You’re old and grouchy and tired (no matter how young the calendar says you are) and others keep passing you up on the highway of life every day.

Sound familiar? I have those days. Some days I have them more than others. The days when nothing is really out of the ordinary... but nothing really seems to be a blessing, either. The ones where God seems to have wound you up, spun you... and walked away. The days you’re caught on an alto drone note and just marking time. Meh. Bleagh. So what?

We had a Bible study this morning. In the midst of eggs and sausage and earnest discussion, Proverbs XIII 15 caught my ear.

“Good sense wins favor, but the way of the treacherous is an enduring rut.”

Wait. The treacherous get stuck in ruts?

I know this the alternative translation, the one in the footnotes, but to my mind, it is far more picturesque. At one summer camp in my youth in Texas, there was a piece of the old Chisholm Trail where you could still see 150-year-old-ruts, etched by covered wagons, inches deep, in solid rock. Those teamsters rolling north were set in their ways, it seems—just like the treacherous.

But these treacherous ones require a direct object to their verb. To whom are they treacherous?

A) A loyal servant?

B) A friend?

C) A king?

The correct answer is, for the Christian, “All of the above” for Christ fills all those offices. If Proverbs is right (and it is) only the fools, the wicked, the ungrateful are left to plod down life on the same road, shoulders bowed and bulling through by the main force of their will. Glance at the preceding part of chapter thirteen. They are unable to turn away from the “snares of death” because they have no good sense. And sense comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. And this reverence for the commandment mentioned earlier extends to all God’s words, not just his written ones.

Has he spoken you a rainy, grey, textureless day? Thank him for the blessing of crops that grow and water that goes down cool. Has he spoken you a slow, meandering life? Thank him that he knows your frame and did not burn you out in a flaming lesson on overconfidence. Did he give you a community where you seem the least among the brethren, able to contribute nothing of value? Thank him for the opportunity to grow and learn if not to give. And if you’re growing and learning, you won’t feel left out and static.

Wake up and feel stuck in a rut? Thank God and wait. Sometimes he’s just waiting for you to let go of the steering wheel.

Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... there was a farm kid. That farm kid found a couple robots and an old peacekeeper, got in way more trouble than he bargained for, and ducked into a bar. In that bar he found a cowboy and a walking carpet, and they agreed to give him a ride off his dustball in their own special, piece of junk transport—

And the rest is history.

Nine movies, three animated series, a few one-offs and a billion and a half toys later, Star Wars is a global phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing down; in fact, it has a good chance of being one of the things scholars study a millennium hence to attempt to understand late-period Western culture, the same way we study the Greek myths, Canterbury Tales or Beowulf. The latest entry in that corpus? Solo, the spin-off that tells us exactly how that cowboy and walking carpet met.

I went into this movie freshly scarred from The Last Jedi and not expecting much (having, you might say, a bad feeling about this.) Rian Johnson’s take on the saga did what I thought was impossible and turned in some moviemaking that was as bad, or worse, than Episode III. Spectacle at the expense of coherence, politically-correct characters jammed into the plot, and a deliberate abandonment of all the story and saga that came before left me feeling betrayed that it made as much money as it did. Poe Dameron and one cool dogfight with the Millennium Falcon were not enough to salvage all that dross.

So I was three-quarters expecting more of the same. That’s not what I got. If The Last Jedi was a movie written by a PC Disney bureaucrat, Solo is a loving nod to all those sixteen-year old boys who wanted to strap on a DL-44 blaster, jump into the left-side pilot’s seat of a YT1300 Corellian freighter, and yell “Chewie, punch it!” (My nerd is showing. I know.) We get to see Han’s steampunk-meets-Detroit-slums homeworld, Han saving Chewbacca’s life and earning the famous “life debt,” and the Kessel Run. And most of it is pure fun.

"What a piece of junk..."

This movie runs strongest when it’s bringing to life what fans already know happened. We’ve always known Han won the Millennium Falcon from Lando in a game of Sabacc, but now we get to watch him do it (although that may not happen quite the way you’d expect.) We’ve known that it made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, but we didn’t know how good that was (twenty-plus is normal!) or why he had to do it (so his ship wouldn’t explode.) We’ve known Han saved Chewie’s life, but him doing it on the side of a snowy mountain monorail during a crazy heist is perfect. And we get to see why the Falcon looks quite so junky when we meet it again five or so years later. There’s just a lot of good, old fashioned shoot-em-up thrills.

Not that it doesn’t have a few weak spots. This is no Rogue One, (the very late change in directors probably being to blame) and it shows the most when Solo is trying to connect all the preordained dots. Han’s love interest is supposed to be a femme fatale “survivor,” for instance, but comes off far too heavy on the femme and way too light on the fatale. We enter the movie knowing she’s going to betray him and leave him the cynical smuggler we find on Tatooine, but when she does it mostly fails to land—whether from lack of on-screen emphasis or poor acting, I don’t know. Part of the fault lies with Alden Ehrenreich, who tries his best but just can’t quite capture Harrison Ford’s ability to be scared out of his wits and way out of his depth, and still be gruffly charming. He mostly just comes off as lovable, and this movie never quite completes his journey to the grouchy side. Part of that may have been mandated to save room for a possible sequel, but if so, it was a bad move. Paul Bettany tries his best as a scarred crime lord but is never quite up to the looming threat of Jabba the Hutt. There’s also some brief weirdness with Lando Calrissian and his droid that I shall simply choose to ignore when this movie is mentioned. Like midichlorians. Also, I never heard a Wilhelm scream. And that is just sad. But moving on...

My favorite single moment was a cameo that probably utterly bemused and puzzled those who have only watched the movies, but filled in a huge lingering question for lovers of the Clone Wars animated series. Well done, Disney.

The final ranking? I’d own it and watch it again. A good 7/10 or so, above the prequels (and waaaaaay above The Last Jedi) but below Rogue One, Clone Wars/Rebels, and the OT.

Hope that’s helpful, Star Wars fans. Here’s to better times ahead for the franchise. Chewie—punch it.