The Pulsing Heart of SAC

My buddy Chris turned me on to this story last week and I'm just now getting around to sharing it with all of you. It's the story of how the USAF and Strategic Air Command, first of all implemented what they felt would be "fail safe" procedures to prevent any accidental or misguided releases of our country's atomic arsenal and then produced this film to explain the procedures to the public. The film is a trip into Strategic Air Command's Command Post. Get a fresh cup of coffee, sit back and prepare to be entertained by a half hour of the USAF's finest people and hardware show off their skills and capabilities.

Except that this film, produced in 1963 and 1964 never saw the light of day! It was apparently produced to reassure the public that the movie "Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

couldn't possibly happen because of all the safeguards put into place.

I loved watching this film especially for the views of B-52s performing an elephant walk down the taxiway and the views of the young enlisted guys wearing their service dress uniforms while performing the most routine of daily tasks. It really is a fine bit of USAF history and it's worth watching just to be reminded how serious (paranoid?)the US was about defending the population from nuclear armageddon.

This is pretty interesting-

New law authorizes military hand salute while in civilian clothing.

The new provision improves upon a little known change in federal law last year that authorized veterans to render the military-style hand salute during the raising, lowering or passing of the flag, but it did not address salutes during the national anthem. Last year's provision also applied to servicemembers while not in uniform.

You should probably expect that I'll be doing this at every opportunity.

You have to read this!

Whacking: The redistribution or impairment of biological functions intended to eliminate intercellular cooperation within a sentient organism.

To find out the background and the entire story, go here.

Move the drinks away from your keyboard and monitor before reading this.

Its Tuesday, right?

Time for a Ticked Off Tuesday post!

So yesterday I finally received the Cost Share Agreement document that I have been waiting 3 weeks for. This document is a signed agreement by 5 European countries to pay their portion of a 36,000 dollar bill for the completion of some Technical Order updates. There is already a Delivery Order for Lockheed Martin to do the work, but they underbid and the countries needed to pony up the shortfall. No problem, right?

Now this document that I received is filled up with long lines of groups of numbers that spell out the exact account and billing line that is to be used by each country. And one country changed just one line- meaning my task just jumped from simply delivering the document to the Contracting Officer to creating a new Purchase Request to be applied to the existing Delivery Order. Damm! But creating Purchase Requests has recently become much easier due to implementation of the Comprehensive Cost and Requirements System which allows me to fill in the form by looking at the actual form, so this shouldn't be too much trouble. This is a huge improvement over the old Automated Business Services System which uses fields in a database form to populate the correct portions of the form, which you can't see until the process is nearly done. The new system is great; fast, visual and logical and a real improvement over ABSS.

But the EPAF country funding people and systems aren't included in the new system! I have to struggle through the old, clunky system, after figuring out whatever my password might have been the last time I used the program. And after I verify that the one country that changed their billing code couldn't be persuaded to adjust back to the original codes. What a pain!

Three Airmen from Hill AFB killed in Baghdad

This is very sad news tonight, 3 airman from Hill AFB were killed Sunday in Baghdad, killed by a vehicle loaded with explosives. The Explosive Ordinance Disposal Team members were:

Tech Sergeant Timothy R. Weiner, 35, of Tamarack, Florida., Senior Airman Elizabeth A. Loncki, 23, of New Castle, Delaware, and Senior Airman Daniel B. Miller Juniorr., 24, of Galesburg, Illinois.

There have been so many of our military members killed in Iraq, each one hurts my heart. These 3, killed in action, were the first from my home base, here at Hill and their loss makes my heart very sad.

Night flying behind the Zion Curtain

KSL took the time to warn local area residents that the 388th Fighter Wing flies at night here in Utah, and particularly during the winter, since it gets night time so early.

The reason this might be of interest is the mention in the story of the night vision goggle capability. The task I was hired here 7 years ago this week to do was make the internal and external lighting of the aircraft compatible with the night vision goggles. The AF was busy screwing the new lights, (internal and external) onto the aircraft at the rate of 30 jets per month. But the replacement, spare parts weren't available on the shelves for the maintainers to use to keep the jets flying.

My job was do the provisioning to make all those new parts available through the normal supply channels. Its been a challenge ever since!