Saturday 22 September 2018

Ford and the Fear of Flight

It's basically come out in the past twenty-four hours that this gal Ford, that has made accusations on Kavanaugh.....has the fear of flying.  So she's asked the Senate folks to give several days to drive across the United States.

I sat and pondered over this.

If you draw the map, it's roughly 2,800 miles and around 41 hours of driving.  So then you add in bathroom breaks, breakfast, gas-stops, and two-hour naps along the way.  This moves up to around sixty hours of driving.  If you did a true eight-hour hotel-stop?  You have to figure two of these, and you start to get up to 72 to 80 hours.

I worked with one single guy in the Air Force (out of thousands) that had a serious problem with flights.  His first flight....going down to San Antonio....simply didn't go well because of a storm in progress.  After that, he tried awful hard to just avoid flying....period.  When he got his first assignment overseas (to the Philippines)....he convinced some AF doctor to give him some heavy sedatives, and he basically slept the eight to ten hour flight.  He repeated the sequence again later in life when he got orders to Germany. 

If you went this California via Greyhound to DC route?  Well....it's roughly three entire days on the bus, with potentially twenty-five nutcases or drug-addicts sitting by you on this journey.  At any point, Professor Ford could be in fear of some assault onboard the bus.

All this activity, and the session being private with no public testimony?  Well....yeah.   The circus episode would basically be limited to a couple of senators and the professor. 

Forty One Years

A week ago (yesterday), it would have been 41 years since I got on the bus at Lackland (Air Force boot-camp) and left.    It came into my mind this week. 

Boot-camp during that period was six weeks.  Between the heat, humidity, and physical activities (normally only in morning hours), it was a miserable experience.  I think if anyone would have laid this out, I would have delayed going in for two months (fall weather).

I would have the last breakfast, and around 8 AM....the bus would pull up and I'd get onboard to spend a number of hours riding up to Sheppard AFB, Tx.  They would dump us out in some parking lot and we'd get a room-key, some linen, and a meal-card. 

This barracks was one of their mega-structures that was just about impossible to figure out anything but the floor area.  I probably spent twenty minutes walking in a full circle to find this room. 

I stepped into a plain simple room that I would share for a number of weeks with someone, and felt wonderful AC air chilling out the room.  I would open my small bag that had all my civilian clothing from the first arrival at bootcamp and discover that the sweat and smell made it just about impossible to wear.  So getting laundry powder and doing a wash was priority number one. 

This was a Friday.....so I had the entire weekend, and roughly forty dollars in my pocket.  It was a long weekend and other than a inprocessing time schedule for Monday, there was no real agenda. 

The negative with Sheppard?  As hot as it was in southern Texas.....it was just as hot there in northern Texas.  Fall really didn't arrive till the middle of October.  The base was a curious blend.....there was some modern structures there but they had buildings which had been put up in the 1940s and were still being used today.