Chapter Notes: Air Tour (Destination Unknown) · 2:40am Feb 18th, 2022
What’s a mare to do while waiting for the airplane museum to do? She could trot over the road and try to get a ride on a commuter train, or she could go on a flying tour of Puget Sound . . .
Thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for pre-reading and penguincascadia for suggesting locations in Seattle for Sweetsong to visit!
The Stearman Model 75 or Stearman Kaydet is a biplane designed as a training airplane for the US Army Air Force and the Navy. It’s possibly one of the most iconic biplanes, and a fair number of them are still in flying condition—according to the Planes of Fame website, over 1000 in total (mostly in private hands) are still flying.
The aircraft has two cockpits in tandem, and I believe the front cockpit was intended for the student, while the instructor would sit in the rear (obviously, it can be flown from either cockpit). It was largely wood and canvas instruction, and I assume based on its original design intentions and the sheer number of them that are still flyable that it’s very forgiving, very simple, and very durable.
Some of you may know that there is an author named Pegasus Rescue Brigade. That’s also the working title of a story I’ve been slowly poking at for the better part of a decade, where a group of six or seven pegasi are working for the US Coast Guard on rescue missions, flying off a Jayhawk helicopter.
I did mention in a previous blog post that I’d put a number of references and callbacks to other stories of mine, I might not have mentioned that this is the second reference to a story which hasn’t been published yet. 
Anyway, while on the one hand I’m disappointed in myself for not finishing up on that project at some point in the last few years, at the same time I was able to use a lot of the research I did for it in Silver Glow’s Journal and Sky Sweeper, Flight Medic.
This probably isn’t the place to put a teaser for it, but it’s my blog post and I’ll do what I want. Besides, this is what Sweetsong is referencing:
Sargent Jones turned back to the cargo area and gave a thumbs up, and Flitterheart reached a hoof up for the helicopter door. “Remember, drop down so that you're under the blades, and then glide out until you're clear of the rotor wash. Don't come back to the helicopter without getting approval from the crew.”
Everypony nodded—they'd been briefed on this countless times before. The Coast Guard and their handlers all had a deep-seated fear of a pegasus getting tangled up in the rotor blades, and it had taken every ounce of diplomacy and wheedling that the team possessed to even get permission to leave the helicopter in flight.
Dainty Dove went first. She was the lightest of the team, and most likely to be affected by the rotor wash. Everypony else would be able to see by her flight just how bad it was.
She dropped nearly fifty feet before spreading her wings, and wavered slightly before circling clear of the helicopter. Since she'd made it out okay, the rest of the team quickly followed her.
As soon as Scoop had dropped out of the doorway, Captain Bethell angled back and away, giving them more clear space. Now the only purpose of the helicopter was to serve as overwatch for the pegasus rescue brigade.
South Town Pie is located in the South Park neighborhood (I think). One of their specials is called a unicorn, and it’s a Birra pizza at the time of writing. It may change.
Penguincascadia suggested that Sweetsong would like the Museum of Flight, and I agreed. As Sweetsong observed, they have a lot of notable airplanes—many firsts, a few rare aircraft, a replica of Amelia Erhart’s airplane, and the AIcor, which is a high-altitude glider, something I didn’t know even existed.
While I think that pegasi generally wouldn’t be fans of pressurized, commercial aircraft, I could see a pegasus or other flying creature from Equestria really taking to gliders. I think that their inherent flight instincts might let them really do well with such a craft, and it’s possible (although I don’t know) that the requirements to fly a glider are far less stringent than most other types of aircraft. I would further assume that gliders have fairly simple controls . . . point is, if somebody wants to write a story about a pony—or other flying creature—operating a glider here on Earth, I think that would fit squarely in the Not-A-Contest wheelhouse and I’d love to see it!
Wikipedia of course has an article on the Museum of Flight which gives you an overview of their collection . . . the red barn really was barged in; the museum bought it from Seattle (who owned it after Boeing abandoned it) for $1.00.
If you want a closer look at their collection, the museum has a website that, among other things, offers virtual tours inside some of their aircraft. Check out the flight engineer’s panels on the Concorde!
The attitude indicator/artificial horizon is an instrument that shows what your bank angle is compared to the horizon; these days it’s often combined with other instruments to give pilots more information at one glance. Typically, the ‘ground’ is brown and the sky is blue, and ideally you want the blue side to be up and the brown side down.
I’ve seen Mentour Pilot wearing a T-shirt with an inverted attitude indicator on it and the phrase “This is how I roll,” and while I couldn’t easily find that one online I found that one online without much difficulty. I also found this:
Which you can get at teepublic.
The Biscuit Bitch is a real restaurant, and it’s another one of those places where words alone can’t do it justice, you’ve got to see it to appreciate it:
It’s owned by a woman named Kimmi Spice . . . you can’t make this stuff up.
The track that Sweetsong sees stacked up is what’s called track panels—it’s basically the real railroad’s equivalent of Atlas Snap-Track, pre-assembled with ties and rails and everything, and meant for temporary or emergency use only. Sometimes pre-built switches are made, too. The general idea is that in an emergency, it’s better to have some pretty good tracks to lay down quickly rather than no tracks at all.
Jet blast is plenty strong enough to blow over a car or a truck or a pony who finds herself behind a jet. It’s easy to say that, and if you’re interested, you can find a few videos on YouTube of vehicles behind a passenger jet getting blown over. But what always sticks in my mind when thinking about it is a moment on a TV show I saw years ago.
I can’t tell you what the show was, because I don’t know. Nor do I know what network it was on; it was playing at one of the group homes where I was working. What I gathered from what I saw was that it was a: a knockoff Mythbusters, and b: that they largely attempted to recreate accidents for insurance purposes (or for fun).
They were investigating the story of a person who was sitting in their mobile home, minding their own business, when a tornado came by, sucked them out of their house, and gently deposited them hundreds of feet away in a bean field, completely unharmed. [Living in a state that occasionally gets tornadoes, I can completely believe that this happened as described.] Since they couldn’t easily get a tornado to do their bidding, they had the bright idea to have someone stand on airstairs behind a jet spooling up, which would get them the windspeed they needed. A safety harness on the stuntman would let him slide along a zipline.
Since this was Science! they had an anemometer attached to the airstairs, right next to the bar the stuntman was going to grip until he couldn’t any more, and of course a high-speed camera.
Imagine, if you will, a stuntman with full safety gear hanging on to a steel bar for dear life, imagine him perfectly horizontal. Now, I don’t need to tell you that he lost his grip and the crew decided that a tornado could fling you a good distance if it wanted to, but what really stuck in my head was in the instant before the stuntman went flying, the anemometer disintegrated, in glorious slow motion. However fast that jet blast was, it was faster than the instrument to measure it could cope with.
That is what jet blast can do.
Hey, it’s Gordon Lightfoot again! Weirdly thematic, it’s got rain and trains and a Boeing.
I think Gordon Lightfoot and Sweetsong would get along real well.
If anyone knows that TV show, or has some idea what it was, let me know. The other bits I remember from it was replicating a Suburban vaulting off a dirt pile and landing atop a house, and someone going down a waterslide. Best guess it would have been on cable more than five years ago but less than fifteen, and given that I only saw it once, it probably only went one season.
5637068 So what you're saying, bitch, is that we're hitting that place next time we're in Seattle?
5637068
IIRC, someone got killed while filming a stunt for the 1983 Twilight Zone movie. Laws got passed forbidding the use of any footage where someone got killed making it. Since then they're at least a bit more careful about stunts.
I remember watching Lee Majors as Colt Seevers in Fall Guy, he was a stuntman and a bounty hunter.
I hope you manage to publish this at some point, it sounds really interesting!
5637068
I think I saw something similar once on Brainiac: Science Abuse, but I'm not sure if that's what you're thinking of.
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Mythbusters Episode 90: Supersized Myths
Mythbusters taxi and school bus flip by jet airplane
In combat aircraft (and hobbyist racing drones), there isn't much in the way of discrete displays anymore; all the information is fused together and displayed on a single interface, overlaid on the pilots vision, either as a heads-up display or an on-screen display.
However, we still refer to the individual pieces of the interface using the names of the instruments that they originated from.
Just a random video for funsies:
My eyesight is terrible. I swear that Airwolf has a Derpy transfer image on its side?
If the emergancy patch track was better, would they use it more often as it would be cheaper on floaty bags and inflatable strip than hard engineering in places?
Both perfectly cromulent "humanified" pony names
You listed attitude indicator twice in the tags. Mistake, or joke I'm not getting?
In any case, at last I'm caught up! ...With this story, at least! :D
Thanks for writing, blog post and chapter both. :)
Oh, and good luck with the writing!
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I don't know if that helicopter is an Airwolf, but it does appear to have Derpy painted on its side, yes.
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Kinda feels like we should, although it’s a long haul from the convention site.
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I don’t know if they’re actually forbidden, but in most cases it would be in poor taste to do so. I don’t know of the last time a stunt that caused an death was still showed in the film.
I can’t recall any movie or TV show I’ve seen him in, although he’s had a long career, so it’s very likely I’ve seen him in something. Interestingly, (I’m looking at the wikipedia page on him) the song Midnight Train to Georgia was inspired by him and Farrah Fawcett.
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Who knows, I might. It’ll be a fun story, to be sure.
Pretty sure that wasn’t the one. It was American, I’m pretty sure.
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The way I posted that YouTube link kinda confused the issue. I do know about the Mythbusters where they did that, and there was a British car show that did something similar (Fifth Gear, if I remember right); this was something else. They weren’t flipping a car, they put a stuntman on airstairs behind a jet with high-mount engines and sent him flying.
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Commercial aircraft typically have a combination gauge on their ‘glass cockpit’ display as well, and it makes sense to put the most information possible in a single location--it’s easier for the pilot to see at a glance what he needs to see instead of scanning all over for different instruments. AFAIK, most if not all commercial jets still have a traditional backup artificial horizon in case something goes wrong with the principle display.
Tradition!
That’s actually really cool. I’d never thought about what kind of interface you might have for flying a drone; the only ones I’ve seen up close are the small toy ones. Now that I’ve seen that, I bet some model aircraft have pretty good interfaces now . . . back when my bother was in the hobby, it was the more traditional two-stick remote with switches for servos.
5638660 I'm arriving on Wednesday, so maybe before?
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You can trust her!
As far as I know, it’s generally worse than normal track. The biggest drawbacks would be the frequent rail joints--remember that previous video I posted where the train was hauling rail in quarter-mile (1/2km) lengths? Every rail joint is a failure point. Not to mention that you want to stagger them so the train doesn’t hit joints on both rails simultaneously, which you can’t do with track panels. The advantage is it’s fast, and if you’ve got to do some quick rebuilding on a critical line after a derailment or whatever, that’s a solution which will let the trains go through until you can fix it right.
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They kinda are, aren’t they?
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Mistake
Huzzah! And you’re welcome!
Thanks! One of these days that story will finally be ready, although it’s hard to say when. . . .
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Before could totally work. I don’t know my plans yet, there’s a lot up in the air at the moment.
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He starred as Heath Barkley in Big Valley in Fall Guy,Colonel Steve Austin in 6 Million Dollar Man, & I believe had some guest shots on The Bionic Woman, plus was in a number of movies in the 80s & 90s. For 30 years or so was a very prominent star
Oh & he mentions Farrah in the opening song on Fall Guy because he was married to her at the time.
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The two stick remote is still used, just that a display is then also added to the kit either above the sticks or on your head.
FAA doesn't really like that though, saying it "distracts the pilot" and "reduces their situational awareness"
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That makes sense. Honestly never seen one of those setups, but with the relatively cheap prices of tech these days, it seems like a logical thing to have.
I think that’s one of those things that goes both ways. Too much information can of course be distracting, but not enough information can cause its own problems. Heck, you could argue that the attitude indicator on a Cessna distracts the pilot, why doesn’t he just look out the windows? Assuming you’re flying in a legal area with all the appropriate clearances (I have no idea what all those are, TBH), I don’t see it being a hinderance. But I bet I could start looking around on the interwebs and go down a rabbit hole
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Righto; thanks.
Hah, thanks... and hopefully I'll soon be re-caught-up with this story, then I can work on all the other ones... after some blog posts from you also in queue, that is, though at least they're the last of my current blog post backlog, which I've just been spending some hours getting through.
:)
Oh I recognize the art style of that first picture!
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Meanwhile I’m still in my everpresent ‘getting to comments’ backlog . . . as you can guess by the delay between your comment and my reply
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That’s an artist I don’t know, or don’t think I know, but at the same time it feels really familiar to me.
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It’s Brainiac. I’ve commissioned her a couple times.
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Gotcha. She sure has a lot of art, I just checked on Derpi
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Yeah she really likes to do digital art commissions.
An interesting thing about the biplain is that it only gets 20% more lift than a monoplane of the same wingspan because the wings interfere with each other.. It also has much more drag from the struts and cables. The purpose of the 2 wings, is that with the struts and cables, it is stronger than a single wing. When we figured out how to make a single wing strong enough not to break, we abandoned the biplane.
RIP Gordon Lightfoot
Also, insert Pushing Tin jet blast scenes here.
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He was a treasure. I think just about every kid who grew up in Michigan knows the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Did you know that after he died, the Maritime Sailor's Cathedral rang their bell 30 times? 29 for the men on the Fitzgerald, and one more for Gordon Lightfoot.
Jet blast is fun, yo!