Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

We decided to stay an extra day in San Diego since we had not really had a chance thus far to actually see the town of San Diego much. Our plan was to take a trolley tour of the city, much like we did in Santa Barbara, to get a good overview of the place. The nice thing about the tour that we chose is that you had the option of getting on and off at many different points along the way. They run the tour buses on a regular schedule, much like a city bus, so you just jump on and off as you please. At one of the stops was the aircraft carrier USS Midway which is now a museum and is available to be visited. I thought that this would be a great way to introduce the kids to the whole concept of being at war … much more interesting than reading about it in a text book. I think I was right. First we toured around the interior and saw the huge hanger, below the main flight deck, where they store the planes when not being used. Next, we were introduced to the incredibly cramped living quarters of the navy personnel. As we toured the interior further we came across an area where they had set up some flight simulators. André-Paul asked the man running the “flight school” if the simulators actually moved as you were doing your flight. The man responded, “No. Well, they *can* move but I turned off the motion because many of the kids would barf and I don’t really like cleaning up barf.” Ah yes, I just love that direct military style of communication. Next stop was the flight deck where we went to check out the aircraft on board. For me, the F-14 Tomcat was of most interest simply because of my familiarity with it in the movie Top Gun. That movie was actually filmed in and around the San Diego area and the Miramar Navel Air Base just north of town. The cool thing was that we had purchased the movie Top Gun the day before and planned to watch it tonight, while we were in the city where much of it was filmed. I told the kids to take a good look at this plane as we were going to see what it can do in the movie tonight! We were also treated to three separate sessions where veterans would talk to you about life on USS Midway. One gentleman talked us through the whole landing process on an aircraft carrier, USS Midway in particular. He did this while standing behind a jet on the landing area with its tail hook down around one of the arresting cables strung across the deck. Did you know that there were only 3 cables available to stop the plane? And did you also know that when the wheels hit the deck the pilot immediately goes to ful throttle? This is done just in case the plane’s tail hook missed all 3 cables and they have to take off again. And this doesn’t cause a problem with a normal landing because it takes the jets about 3 seconds to spool-up, so if you do catch the arresting cable you just pull the throttle back again. Very cool to hear about this while you are standing on the very deck where it all happened. Then we got a tour of the helm and the equivalent of the air traffic control tower on the carrier. One interesting thing I learned was that the flight controller would have two off-duty pilots in the tour with him in case he had to consult them on certain details of one of the planes attempting to land or take-off. Given that they would typically send off between 25 and 50 planes at a rate of more than one per minute, I think you would want to have instant access to as much information as possible. And finally, if not exactly in the perfect order, we finished with a talk at the front of the deck about the take off procedure. That whole procedure is unbelievable. To this day they still use huge steam-driven pistons to hurtle the plane off the front of the ship. They attach the plane to the deck via a small piece of metal called a dogbone. They bring the jet engines to full throttle but the plane doesn’t move because it is attached to the deck. Then, when the pilot gives the A-OK signal, they release the under-deck, steam-powered catapult and the force is so strong it simply shears the dogbone and the plane is fired off the ship! The USS Midway actually saw military action in the Korean War, in Vietnam, and in the Gulf War where it proved to be indomitable. It also had the unusual history of having had 3 hulls! Everytime they made changes to the flight deck the ship seemed to become less stable so they simply built a new hull around the old one to give it better balance. My guess is that with that mentality, many of these engineers ended up working for one of the Big 3 carmakers. The whole thing was incredibly impressive and I would have liked to have stayed on board for another couple of hours but … we had to get moving. We boarded the tour trolley and they ended up pointing out a few of the places around town where certain parts of the Top Gun movie were filmed during the remainder of our tour. The funny thing was that one of the places had a banner indicating this year was the 20th anniversary of the debut of this movie … ouch, I’m getting old! I remember when Top Gun came out because at the time I was working in a hardware/software lab and we were trying to create a video-wall. To test out our creation we needed different video sources and one of them was a laser disc. Remember those? They were about the size of an record album and were the precursor to the DVD. Anyway, the only laser disc we had was Top Gun so we just let it play over and over again, 24 hours a day for testing purposes. It wasn’t that distracting because we were only using the video, not the audio. I got to know the movie pretty well that summer. I remember my friends would ask me, “Hey Jeff, have seen Top Gun?” I’d reply, “Sure, about 200 times … but I’ve only heard it once.” I loved using that line. Anyway, then it was back to Old Town where we slipped into one of the very nice restaurants there for a lovely seafood dinner. After that we retired to the MoHo to gather around the computer with some popcorn to watch Top Gun. It was kind of cool to pause the movie at certain points and say, “Hey, we were right there this afternoon! Oh, I almost forgot, yes, it was a pleasantly warm sunny day … of course!

Today’s word:

indomitable \in-DOM-ih-tuh-buhl\, adjective:
Incapable of being subdued or overcome; unconquerable.