It’s time to return some sanity to the way ships are named. Why? Because the silliness is upon us once again:

111th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. CON. RES. 83
Expressing the sense of Congress that a nuclear-powered aircraft
carrier of the Navy, either the aircraft carrier designated as CVN-79
or the aircraft carrier designated as CVN-80, should be named the
U.S.S. Barry M. Goldwater.

Bill information and status here

It began with CVN-70 ( Nimitz – ok, Ike, yes; but Vinson???) and reached the height of historical blindness with the Truman (honestly, naming a carrier for a president who tried his hardest to kill naval aviation and oversaw the death of the United States (CVA-58) in favor of the B-36). Why not Enterprise (CVN-65 isn’t long for this world)? Coral Sea? Yorktown? Hornet? Midway?  (Note – this is not/not a slam on the great crews of those ships – its the process of naming that we have a bone to pick with…)

Enough with the politicians – these ships are going to last to the middle of the century and outlive many of us reading these words. Why not go back to naming the carriers after famous battles and reclaim some of our heritage and linkage with notable CVs from the past? And, BTW, what better way to celebrate naval aviation’s upcoming centenary?

Leave it to a Chief to put it succintly:

“One man’s hero is another man’s goat. Carriers should be named for
things we all have in common, not the party in power’s favorite
politician. I vote we go back to the traditional carrier names as a
reminder of the great ships and men who held the line when the chips
were down and the odds were against us. Those names are a tribute to
America’s greatness. Politicians? Not so much.”

And yes, I’m familiar with Rickover’s quote – how about standing firm this time anyway?

(h/t: SB)

UPDATE: A petition to SECNAV and Congress is in the works – stay tuned…

Petition available here.

(cross posted at steeljawscribe.com)

My mother, who is 88 and served in the Pacific Theater, says it was a wonderful event. She was one of the few women WWII vets present, not surprising as female commissioned Army officers were as scarce as hen’s teeth even during the War and very few of them are still with us.

More details on the gathering, links to photos of the vets and info about the upcoming documentary on my personal blog, here.

BZ, Commander.

More details here.

As I wrote about earlier, in October, 1907, Alexander Graham Bell invited three men (one British subject, one Canadian and one American) to his estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, to begin working on a dream that would take flight 18 months later.  Joined by an official observer from the United States, US Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the  five men formed the Aerial Experiment Association .

Five aircraft were created, including the June Bug (which introduced a tricycle landing gear system to the world -I assume of the type that Lex has been going on about lately) but the piece de resistance was the Silver Dart which was their first controlled-power aircraft.  And which flew for the first time on February 23, 1909. 

The replica of that first flight is set to occur today in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.  A day earlier than planned as apparently they are concerned about weather conditions (we be execting another storm day around here tomorrow) and a repeat performance of  what occurred fifty years ago when the pilot who lifted off from frozen Bras d’Or Lake in a similar replica belly-flopped back down to the ice soon after. 

A couple of days before the 23rd in 1959, they flew it on the ice and it was all right,” Mr. Jermyn told The Chronicle Herald Saturday.

“But on the 23rd, it was a very windy day and the pilot took it out and nobody thought he would fly it, but he did. He turned it into the wind and off he went, and he just got hit by a gust of wind. He got it up and over, but it stalled and it fluttered down and smashed the wing tip.”

Organizers expect about 20,000 visitors to watch the re-creation of the flight in a replica attempted to be a true as possible to the original Silver Dart. The aircraft is about nine metres long and three metres high with a 15-metre wingspan and weighs about 545 kilograms.  As in the original, motorbike parts play a key role in the plane’s motor and fasteners.

If the weather cooperates, they will also try to carry out the official flight again on Monday (we be calling for another storm day around here), along with a flypast by the Hawk One, a refurbished RCAF F-86 Sabre 5 and performances by the Snowbirds and SkyHawks.

Retired Canadian astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason will be in the pilot’s seat and Roberta Bondar is expected to be on hand, along with descendants of the original inventors and the modern-day crew.

On a wing and prayer.  One hundred years later.

Updated (At Virgil’s request): Apparently perfect conditions for five, count them, five flights on Sunday. Well, perfect, if you don’t count the nose wheel collapse on the first try.

Unfortunately, not so much on Monday, which was the actual anniversary.  What can I say, welcome to winter in Nova Scotia.

At any rate, I am still waiting to see Lex do this:

“The Silver Dart flew steadily at about 65 kilometres per hour for about 400 metres, no more than nine metres above the frozen lake.

McCurdy then turned in a wide, shimmering arc across the blue sky and returned to where he had taken off, making a perfect landing after almost a kilometre in the air.”

Former astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason goes aloft Sunday in a replica
of the Silver Dart after taking off from the ice of the Bras d’Or Lake
in Baddeck. Today is the 100th anniversary of J.A.D. McCurdy’s historic
flight in the Silver Dart,which was the first powered flight in Canada.
McCurdy and Alexander Graham Bell helped design the original plane.
(VAUGHAN MERCHANT / CP)

And to the surprise of many, I still have them!

My wife and I will be dining-out with 250 of our close personal friends this Saturday. A dozen or so Batttle of Midway Vets will serve as Guests-of-Honor.

I hope you all get out to do the same.

BATTLE OF MIDWAY The Incredible Victory
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot 6/4/87
June 4, 1942. The date is as far away from us today as it was, then, from the Spanish-American War. Most Americans alive today were not even born then. Yet the battle for control of the tiny Pacific island of Midway fought that day – less than six months from America’s apparently crushing defeat at Pearl Harbor – was the turning point for the war in the Pacific, a victory won against all odds, almost against reason.

Hindsight tells us that Japan, in attacking Pearl Harbor, bit off more than it could chew. (Throughout the war, the United States allocated only 10 percent of its military resources to the Pacific theater.) But knowing what did happen, makes it hard, sometimes, to realize what might have happened. In particular, it makes it hard to remember how unlikely it was that the turning point in the Pacific should take place only six months after Pearl Harbor.

No one has ever improved upon this description of the significance and nearly miraculous nature of the Battle of Midway by Walter Lord in the foreword of Incredible Victory: “By any ordinary standard they were hopelessly outclassed. “They had no battleships, the enemy eleven. They had eight cruisers, the enemy twenty-three. They had three carriers (one of them crippled); the enemy had eight. Their shore defenses included guns from the turn of the century.

“They knew little of war. None of the Navy pilots on one of their carriers had ever been in combat. Nor had any of the Army fliers. Of the Marines, 17 of 21 new pilots were just out of flight school – some with less than four hours’ flight time since then. Their enemy was brilliant, experienced and all-conquering. “They were tired, dead tired. The patrol plane crews, for instance, had been flying 15 hours a day, servicing their own planes, getting perhaps three hours’ sleep at night.

They had equipment problems. Some of their dive bombers couldn’t dive – the fabric came off the wings. Their torpedoes were slow and unreliable; the torpedo planes even worse. Yet they were up against the finest fighting plane in the world. “They took crushing losses – 15 out of 15 in one torpedo squadron … 21 out of 27 in a group of fighters … many, many more. “They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war. More than that, they added a new name – Midway – to that small list that inspires men by shining example. Like Marathon, the Armada, the Marne, a few others, Midway showed that every once in a while ‘what must be’ need not be at all. Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit – a magic blend of skill, faith and valor – that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.”

That incredible victory (the first naval action in history fought by airpower, with the fleets never coming within gunnery range) was won by men in their 20s and 30s, now aging veterans, who deserve to be remembered. Their battle was an epic – rarely equaled and never surpassed in history – of bravery against odds. It is a memory to cherish.

And this one was an aviator.

“…everybody’s going to make it.” – Thomas K. Jones, 1982

Counterveil vs. Countervalue…

Decapitating strikes…

Winning a protracted nuclear war…

Nuclear calculus…

These, and other topics were points of not just mere discussion, but deep, serious study and analysis in the early 1980′s by, among others, a small cohort of graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School. Leading the charge was a civilian professor, a recent PhD and acolyte of one of the advocates for this “new” way of thinking about nuclear warfighting. A young LT, fresh from his first sea tour was part of this cohort, not so much by an inclination towards that line of thought as by the nature of his particular studies… (more)