Category Archives: Scribbles

We’re pretty eclectic here at the scribbler and this should prove it. It used to be pretty well understood that wars created things that, later, found wide peacetime uses. I wonder if many people realize that anymore. For instance, you can thank the B-29 Superfortress (the plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan) that you don’t have to wear an oxygen mask when flying off on vacation above 10,000 feet (where the air is a lot less bumpy). The B-29 was the world’s first pressurized aircraft. My father trained to fly them in late 1944, at Walker Army Air Field in Victoria, Kansas, though he was reassigned elsewhere and never went to war in one. The training was dangerous enough. Among his war stories were tales of some members of some crews dying when the then-experimental pressurization failed explosively.