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Virginia is in Newport Beach for a few days visiting with Tina, who is there on a business?? conference. So, home alone, I found something exciting to do...
Andreas Koertel's parents are in Boise, visiting from Augsburg, Germany. This morning, we drove to McCall for breakfast and a visit with an old friend of mine, Bill Waldman Bill and Wendie are a rare couple: Bill is an aerial firefighter, or Tanker Pilot, and is (we think) the most experienced in the world. He was recently featured on a National Geographic special. Bill and I worked years ago at the Nevada Test Site, where we were engineers on the ill-fated nuclear rocket program. I went on with engineering, but Bill caught the excitement of flying and became first a crop duster, and then a fire fighting Tanker Pilot. Visit their web site at: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ridge/3436/
As usual, we all enjoyed Bill's stories about his work and we were treated to a first class tour of "25". "25" is a converted P-3 Orion, the navy version of the Lockheed Electra; at one time
the Electra was one of the fastest passenger aircraft in the world. "25" now is a fire fighting machine, piloted by probably the best (and oldest ha, ha) in the business.
Here are a
collection of pix from our visit, just click on the thumbnail for a larger picture. If you are not into airplanes, you may find this a bit boring...but not for Bill, Andreas and me!
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