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| Melanesia Map Captured from the video |
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| Example Bush Plane |
Today at lunch Marc tells a story. About a month ago, a friend of his was flying a bush plane and attempted to land on an island in the Columbia River. Came in for a smooth landing on strip of sand and one of the landing gear legs broke off. The airplane turned and went into the water. The pilot got out okay, but the airplane is under water and the river current is trying to drag it away. It's not very deep there so he is able to grab hold of the tail and keep it from going anywhere. Not a tenable situation.
Fortunately, the crew of a passing tugboat saw him crash and came over to help. The tug positioned itself to block the flow of the river and gave the pilot a rope with which he was able to secure the aircraft. The tug has business elsewhere, so it leaves, but he calls a buddy tug who doesn't have any pressing business and he comes over to help out.
That evening Marc and a couple other guys took a duck boat out to the island. On the way there they were passed by a Columbia County police boat. They expected nothing but grief from the police, but surprisingly the police turned out to very helpful. Probably helped that our crew were not drunk and not behaving like assholes.
They pulled the plane out of the water and set about drying out the engine and getting ready to take off the wings. They came back the next two days with a work platform borrowed from a local marina and ferried the various parts of the airplane back to dry land.
What caused the problem? Did a wheel fall in a hole or hit a big rock? Near as we can tell, no. Apparently the landing gear leg just snapped off. A stress fracture, maybe? Very weird.
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| Azores Lighthouses |
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| Rabo de Peixe, Azores |
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| Ilhéu de Vila Franca do Campo Appears at the 1:20 mark in episode 3 Former site of Red Bull Cliff Diving |
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| War with the Newts by Karel Capek |
Chapter 8
Andrias Scheuchzeri
ENDLESS is human curiosity. It was not sufficient that J. W. Hupkins (Yale), the greatest authority alive at the time having anything to do with reptiles, declared that those mysterious creatures were unscientific humbug and sheer fantasy in the scientific journals and in the news-papers accounts began to increase of the discovery of so far unknown animals resembling huge salamanders in the most diverse parts of the Pacific Ocean. Relatively reliable statements claimed their discovery on the Solomon Islands, on Schouten Islands, on Kapingamarangi, Butaritari, and Tapeteuea, as well as on the whole group of smaller the islands: Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukunono, and Fukaofu, then as far as Hiau, Ua Huka, Uap, and Pukapuka. There were legends quoted of the devils of Captain van Toch (mainly in the Melanesian zone) and of the Tritons of Miss Li (more in Polynesia) then the newspapers inferred that it was a matter of various kinds of submarine and antediluvian monsters mainly because the summer season had begun, and there was nothing to write about. Sub-marine monsters are usually well received by the reading public. In the United States especially Tritons became the fashion: in New York a showy revue ran for three hun-dred nights featuring Poseidon with three hundred most beautiful Triton girls, Nereids, and Sirens in Miami and on the beaches of California youth bathed in the costumes . . .
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| War with the Newts Chapter 8 Islands |
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| Tiny Island - The Scotland |
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| Eilean Donan Castle |
The island's original castle was built in the thirteenth century; it became a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the Clan MacRae. In response to the Mackenzies' involvement in the Jacobite rebellions against the newly United Kingdom, Royal Naval ships destroyed the castle in 1719. The present-day castle is Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap's 20th-century reconstruction of the old castle.
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| Eilean Donan Castle, top |
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| Bannerman's Island Arsenal on the Hudson |
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| Bannerman Castle |
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| Château de Costaérès |
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| St Michael's Mount, England, left Château de Costaérès, bottom left Mont-Saint-Michel, France, bottom center |
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| Mont-Saint-Michel, France |
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| St Michael's Mount, England |
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| St Michael's Mount, England, left & Mont-Saint-Michel, France, bottom center |
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| Silver statue of Saint Michael the Archangel slaying a dragon in abbey Mont Saint Michel |
As a master mariner with over 20 years exp at Sea, this is something I would never want to exp. in my life. There was some medical issue with some crew and the fight onboard led to damage to the engine/electrical controls while the vessel was on a SW course of Mauritius towards Atlantic Ocean. Resultant was thst all engine power was lost and vessel drifted towards the island and aground. 94 Miles off aftsr her salvage she sunk to 4400m to the bed of Indian Ocean. The Salvage Video is exceptional, the hard work that goes into this is remarkable esp removal of fuel oil fm Engine room and working machinery and bunker tanks. Kudos to the salvors.
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| Meta Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headset |
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| Pago Pago |
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| Pago Pago Post Office |
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| Pago Pago |
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| Heard Island and McDonald Islands |
Then I came across this meme on Midwest Chick's Place:
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| Heard Island |
They are:
- 2,500 miles southwest of Australia
- 2,600 miles southeast of South Africa
- 1,010 miles north of Antarctica
The islands, which are uninhabited, can be reached only by sea, and typically require a two-week voyage from Australia to visit.
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| The US Special Forces Extreme Techniques to Perform Halo Jumps |
Why am I thinking about Starship Troopers? Because the Air Force is building a new missile base on Johnston Island:
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| A mockup of the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program. © Air Force art. |
But the Starship is designed to carry people. It's going to be a little tougher on people than an airliner, but soldiers are pretty tough, so it shouldn't be a problem for them.
Landing in remote regions occupied by enemy forces might be a problem though, so we might want to drop our troops in, like paratroopers. We don't have a technique for doing that from orbit, at least not yet, but Starship can manage reentry, and at some point it's velocity will be low enough that troops could safely exit the vehicle, so we would have Starship paratroops, i.e. Starship Troopers.
It's going to be a few years before we get to this point, but it's undoubtedly coming.
Johnston Atoll is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:
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| Johnston Atoll |
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| Johnston Island inside Johnston Atoll |
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| Johnston Island |
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| De Havilland Canada Twin Otter |
Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:
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| Two populated islands in the Malé Atoll Male / Velana International Airport |
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| Maldives Seaplane Docks |
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| Maldives Seaplane Terminal |
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| The Maldives & Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean |
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Atolls of The Maldives
Roughly 500 miles top to bottom |
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Malé Atoll
The placemark is on the airport |
A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking.
Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.
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| Armalite AR-7 Survival Rifle |
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| Armalite AR-7 Survival Rifle, disassembled |
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| Periscope, Kerim Bey & James Bond |
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| 1960 Ford Ranch Wagon |
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| My approximation of Bond's escape route from Istanbul to Venice |
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| Simplon Orient Express |
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| Islands off the coast of Istria near Futana Possible location of boat chase |
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| Webley Flare Pistol |
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| Rosa Klebb's shoe dagger |
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| Beechcraft Super King Air 200 (N875SP) Flying over Falalop, Ulithi |
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| Kamov Ka-32A11BC C-N 9712 |
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| Small Twin Turboprop Airliner on Akun Island |
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| Akutan Airport on Akun Island |
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| The Trident Seafoods plant on the remote island of Akutan is one of the largest fish and crab processing facilities in North America |
Workers arrive in Anchorage from the four corners of the globe on modern jetliners, but getting to Akutan requires first taking a 16 passenger prop plane 700 odd miles to Akun and then a short helicopter flight to the town on Akutan.
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| Maritime Helicopters Bell 412 HP The Bell 412 HP can carry 12 passengers |
One couple have been doing this for umpteen years. Originally from Africa they now live in Austin Texas.
CoastView has a page about Akutan Airport wherein I found this lovely little bit:
Akun Island is relatively flat and uninhabited, except for airport workers and a few people controlling a herd of feral cattle. The island historically had three small villages or seasonal camps. The Alutiiq Unangan name was recorded in 1768 by Captain Lieutenant P.K. Krenitzin of the Imperial Russian Navy. According to the linguist R.H. Geoghegan, the name Akun means “that, over there”. Neighboring Akutan Island is mountainous and the topography is dominated by Mount Akutan, a stratovolcano with an elevation of 4,275 feet (1,303 m) that last erupted in 1992. The name Akutan may be from the Alutiiq word “hakuta” which, according to R.H. Geoghegan, means “I made a mistake”.
Naturally I have to look up this R.H. Geoghegan where I find this:
Despite the rigorous climate and rough gold mining environment, the informal Alaskan lifestyle and the opportunity to study firsthand Aleut and other native languages of the region appealed to Geoghegan. Except for the year 1905, which he spent in Seattle (where the Seattle Esperanto Society was founded primarily under his influence and that of his friend, William G. Adams), and 1914, when he traveled through the western United States and Japan, Geoghegan remained a resident of Alaska until his death on 27 October 1943. Because of his physical handicaps, Geoghegan was of a retiring nature and remained single until 1916. In that year, infatuated with Ella Joseph-de-Saccrist, he married her, but only secretly, under the advice of friends, because of racial prejudices that existed at that time: Ella, who came from Martinique, was known as a black. She died in 1936. (This explains why in many biographies one reads that he never married.)
Geoghegan lived simply, often in primitive log cabins, at various addresses in the city of Fairbanks. He always remained faithful to Esperanto, to whose Lingva Komitato (Language Committee) he was elected immediately upon its formation in 1905. For him, however, Esperanto was mainly a written language. The first person with whom he actually spoke it was Wilhelm Heinrich Trompeter, who visited him in Eastsound in the 1890s. His valuable book collection, including many original letters from Zamenhof and other pioneers, as well as other rare artifacts about little known—mainly oriental—languages, were destroyed when the family home in Eastsound burned down in 1906. Probably Geoghegan's most noteworthy linguistic contribution was the compilation of a dictionary and grammar for the Aleut language of the Alaskan islands, on which he labored from the time of his arrival in Valdez, Alaska, en 1903. It was finally published only after his death, in 1944, and remains even today the principal English language work on the subject.
