The Cellar - This Day in History

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I thought that the shock wave at about the 7 sec mark was frightening enough, but that accompanying the explosion at about the 55 sec point was terrifying.

Two fatalities is two too many but I'm surprised that there weren't more given that there were also 372 souls injured.

On this day, Apollo 10 was launched from Cape Kennedy.

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Fifty years ago and a quarter of a million miles away, three astronauts carried out the dress rehearsal for one of the greatest events in human history.
On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 lifted off from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. Its mission: to return to the Moon and make the final flight tests that would pave the way for the Apollo 11 lunar landing two months later.

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Though Apollo 8 had already orbited the Moon and Apollo 9 had tested the Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit, there were still many questions that had to be answered and tests to be conducted.
Until Apollo 10, the Apollo spacecraft, crew, mission support facilities, procedures, and communications systems had never been fully tested under actual lunar mission conditions.
Until this was done, the success of Apollo 11 was very much in doubt.

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Incidentally, the Apollo 10 Command Module was displayed at the Science Museum in London.
To the best of my knowledge it remains there today.

The powers that be at NASA gave them just enough fuel to test the lander down to 50k feet from the surface but if they landed they couldn't take off again.
The Astronauts were kind of a headstrong bunch, and there will be no upstaging the A team with their carefully choreographed landing two months later.http://cellar.org/2012/nono.gif

100 years ago today the first plane crosses the Atlantic.

I read about this a few weeks ago and don't think I had any idea.
On this day and a few days following in 1921, Tulsa Oklahoma experienced one of the horrendous manmade catastrophes in United States history.
It was called a race riot, but it was much more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

Read at least the summary.

Yeah read about that a couple years ago and was at first how is this possible, how could this happen?
Then sickened to realize how quickly it could, and can happen.
It wasn't like the victims were low lifes, vagrants, or shanty town dwellers easily victimized. Scary.

There's plenty of coverage of D Day and the commemorative events elsewhere so I won't over egg the pudding, but the first news of Operation Overlord might be worth a listen.

John Snagge's delivery seems quite low key.

BTW, I'm informed by a usually reliable source that it was originally going to be called B Day, but the French objected for some reason.

The lack of hype is refreshing.

On this day, aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown departed St John's, Newfoundland on the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight.

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It was not an easy flight. The overloaded aircraft had difficulty taking off the rough field and only barely missed the tops of the trees.
At 17:20 the wind-driven electrical generator failed, depriving them of radio contact, their intercom and heating.
An exhaust pipe burst shortly afterwards, causing a frightening noise which made conversation impossible without the failed intercom.

At 5.00 p.m., they had to fly through thick fog.This was serious because it prevented Brown from being able to navigate using his sextant.
Blind flying in fog or cloud should only be undertaken with gyroscopic instruments, which they did not have.
Alcock twice lost control of the aircraft and nearly hit the sea after a spiral dive.
He also had to deal with a broken trim control that made the plane become very nose-heavy as fuel was consumed.

At 12:15 a.m., Brown got a glimpse of the stars and could use his sextant, and found that they were on course.
Their electric heating suits had failed, making them very cold in the open cockpit.
Then at 3:00am they flew into a large snowstorm. They were drenched by rain, their instruments iced up, and the plane was in danger of icing and becoming unflyable.
The carburettors also iced up; it has been said that Brown had to climb out onto the wings to clear the engines, although he made no mention of that.

They made landfall in County Galway, crash-landing at 8:40 a.m. on 15 June 1919, not far from their intended landing place, after less than sixteen hours' flying time.

The aircraft was damaged upon arrival because of an attempt to land on what appeared from the air to be a suitable green field, but which turned out to be Derrygilmlagh Bog, near Clifden in County Galway in Ireland, although neither of the airmen was hurt. Brown said that if the weather had been good they could have pressed on to London.

Despite the privations and difficulties of the flight, it's a fair bet that the in flight catering was of a rather higher standard than you will find today.

They probably even had a decent cup of tea at the half way mark, something I have never managed to achieve. :)

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I was just reading about that.

Hasn't been fifteen minutes.

How would they make a decent cuppa with no heat? Maybe that's why he climbed out on the wing, engine heat to make tea.

June 25

1876 - Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer utters his famous last words: "Where did all those fucking Indians come from?!"

1947 – The Diary of a Young Girl is published. The Young Girl being Anne Frank.

1948 - The Berlin Airlift begins.

1978 - The Gay Pride flag is flown for the first time.

And that's the way it was.[/Uncle Walter]

June 29, 2007

Apple Inc. releases its first mobile phone, the iPhone.