Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. Farming Airman.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. Farming Airman.:

Friday Farming. Farming Airman.

United States Air Force photograph, Airman 1st Class Jonathan Whitely photographer)

Today In Wyoming's History: January 20, 1920. Bert Cole back in the air.

Today In Wyoming's History: January 20: 1920  Bert Cole, who was the pilot in the incident that resulted in the loss of the life of Maude Toomey on the January 14, was already back in the air, piloting for a stunt.

I'm frankly a little shocked. That seems awfully soon.

Some Gave All: Maud Toomey Memorial, Evansville Wyoming

Some Gave All: Maud Toomey Memorial, Evansville Wyoming:

Maud Toomey Memorial, Evansville Wyoming

Maude Toomey was a 33 year old high school Latin teacher, and an oil company bookkeeper, in Casper when she took a ride as a passenger in a plane owned and piloted by Casperite Bert Cole on January 14, 1920.  Something went tragically wrong during the flight and Cole's plane crashed near what is now the Evansville water treatment plant, which is not far from what was Natrona County's first airport.

A cement cross was placed in the ground at the spot where the plant crashed.  Oddly, no inscription was placed on it, leading to a small element of doubt about its purpose later on when it was rediscovered during the construction of the water treatment plant.  Since that time, an inscription has been placed at its base and the location is now an Evansville park.

Evansville has sort of a unique history in that regard as two of its somber memorials are located in areas where children now play, which is perhaps a more appropriate placement than many might suppose, honoring the dead in a way that they might have appreciated.

These photographs were taken near the centennial of the accident, which contributed to very long shadows, even though they were taken near 1:00 p.m.

Shifting to GPS Guided Landings In Wyoming.

A recent headline in the Tribune read:

Local pilots decry federal changes to flight routes

The article went on to note:

A cost-saving shift by the Federal Aeronautics Commission to GPS-guided landings at airports around the Mountain West has elicited the concern of a number of airplane pilots based in Casper, who fear the proposed elimination of more than a dozen analog routes could cause significant problems for air transportation around the state.

Eh, what's that mean?  Well, I wasn't too sure either.  The paper then went on to state:

Long guided by a network of extremely high-frequency, short-range ground-based systems known as VORs, pilots in the Rocky Mountains will soon go the way of the rest of the country and come to rely heavily on the same GPS-guided navigation systems promoted by the FAA since the technology’s introduction in the early ‘90s. 

It’s a significant step for pilots in the region, who have long relied on the older, more inexpensive systems already in place for navigating the mountainous terrain, and one long pursued by a bureaucracy seeking ways to make air travel as streamlined, efficient and responsive as possible. 

“It’s been a quantum leap forward,” said Joe MacGuire, a local airline pilot and a Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives.

Well, I'm still not really following, but I sort of grasp it.  But why wouldn't this be a good change?

Well, I'm not really sure, but apparently it has to do with weather and costs.  Having said that, I think that aircraft have all been shifting over to GPS by Federal mandate for some time.

The paper went on to include this comment:

This change, Casper-based corporate pilot and 45-year flight veteran Dallas Chopping said, could also be a potentially dangerous one: though the number of VOR approaches proposed for elimination by the FAA – at just over two dozen statewide – seems small, they could present a significant liability for pilots in a rare event when the GPS systems fail or are disrupted, potentially creating risks for commercial pilots, emergency responders and even the National Guard, who often provide a critical role in search-and-rescue operations around the state.

Hmmm. . . . I'm not a pilot, but I'm skeptical. That's the argument anyway.

And its mobilized, apparently at least one community group.

Already, the Casper Chamber of Commerce is mobilizing its membership to respond out of concerns the changes could impact commercial air traffic. In a message to its membership on Wednesday, the Chamber urged its members to weigh in on the potential decommissioning prior to the Jan. 15 deadline set by the FAA, highlighting a number of examples where the decommissioning of the route could impact the local economy.
* * *
“The FAA will argue that it is a cost savings,” she added. “However, for Casper, there is no advantage to losing the approach!”

Well, the 15th is today.  We'll see if the FAA was convinced.

Lex Anteinternet: January 14, 1920. Untimely passings.

Lex Anteinternet: January 14, 1920. Untimely passings.:

January 14, 1920. Untimely passings.

January 14

1920  The first fatal air accident to occur near Casper occurred, taking the life of pilot Bert Cole and passenger Maud Toomey.   Ms. Toomey is also the first female air fatality in Wyoming.  The very early airport in use at this time was located where the town of Evansville now sits, and a memorial to Ms. Toomey, who was a schoolteacher, is located in Evansville.  Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.

On this day, Natrona County suffered its first air fatality.

The location of this tragic accident is in Evansville, Wyoming, where the county's first air field was located.  There's a cross marking the location somewhere in Evansville, but I've never been able to find it.

Lex Anteinternet: And now Iranian protests against its government

Lex Anteinternet: And now Iranian protests against its government:

And now Iranian protests against its government

The Iranian people's level of trust for their own government is low and has been waning for a long time.

Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran.  And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.

The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage.  President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.

It failed.

Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life.  It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War.  The US was shown to be impotent.

Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane.  The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down.  Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion.  In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.  

Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly.  It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.

And now they've shot down their own airliner.

A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988.  Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it.  Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly.  The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time.  The Iranian government is going to change.

The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly.  Now that seems to have already eroded.  Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist.  Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed.  The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident.  And Iranians are back to protesting their government.  The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.

Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.

Lex Anteinternet: Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

Lex Anteinternet: Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.:

Causalities of Tension and Incompetence.

Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran this week, after its retaliatory missile strikes on US facilities in Iraq.  The plane was carrying Iranians mostly bound for Canada, which has a large Iranian immigrant population.

To make this plane, Iran's military shot down a civilian aircraft over their own capitol city.

This is because the Iranian military isn't great.

Iran has universal male conscription at 18 years of age.  Interestingly, prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it also conscripted women, but stopped at that time.  This means it has a large conscript military.

And while it has obtained arms, as the greed and stupidity of nations exceeds their best interests all too often, their military is basically a 1970s vintage force.

We don't know what happened to lead to this tragedy, but my guess is that a tired and scared group of Iranian conscripts had been harangued by officers and seniors about expecting an American attack to the point they were worn out and scared.  So they fired on what they thought was an American military aircraft and 176 completely innocent people, most of whom were their fellow countrymen. We don't know what happened to the men who fired the missile, but we can be assured that it is or was bad.

Nothing will happen to the men ultimately responsible for the tragedy, which is the Iranian Islamist leadership that has governed the country for forty one years and kept in on a violent path of regional Shiite dominance. That government will ultimately go down in an Iranian revolution of some sort, and much of their theocratic views forever with it.

Where this leaves the Iranian American Conflict is not known, but what has turned out to be the case is that an extremely risky course of action the US embarked on due to an order of President Trump and under the apparent urging of Mike Pompeo has been surprisingly effective so far.  Nearly everyone agrees that Gen. Soleimani was a terrorist whose demise should not be lamented.  That he was a uniformed officer of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and the method by which it occurred really ramped up the risks, but Iran's response was ineffective, perhaps intentionally so, or perhaps simply because it was.  And Iran managed to put the period on the entire event by following up an ineffective missile strike by shooting down a Ukrainian airliner.  The U.S., in the meantime, has essentially declared the matter over.

Either as an example of truly masterful strategy, or by accident, the U.S. has effectively moved the bar on state sponsored terrorism and, due to the past week, managed to make state employed uniformed terrorist a routine target in wars on terrorism and to have exposed Iran's conventional forces as less than impressive.  Iran may have in fact suffered a set back as a sponsor of terrorism and given its history, that's a large part of its diplomatic approach to the world. Without it, it's not much.

At least not much until it acquires a nuclear weapon, which it is now working on.  Indeed, exposed as conventionally incompetent and now with a reduced military portfolio because of the changed nature of the game, it may be stepping back because it knows this has become a must for it.

Or so it probably believes. The irony of it is that nuclear weapons for small nations are, frankly, completely worthless.

Lex Anteinternet: January 6, 1920. Peace Secured. Protestants Unite? Suffrage Advances (Posted due to the Curtiss Aircraft Company reference).

Lex Anteinternet: January 6, 1920. Peace Secured. Protestants Unit...:

This item is posted from one of our companion blogs due to the newspaper reference regarding the Curtiss Aircraft Company.  If anyone has more details, I'd be curious on them.

January 6, 1920. Peace Secured. Protestants Unite? Suffrage Advances.

The headline news for this day, January 6, 1920, was that a treaty was to be signed between the victorious Allies and the Germans.  Or, more properly, a protocol to the Versailles Treaty

More properly, this was an amendment to the Versailles Treaty altering and amending some of its terms.  Germany's reluctance to enter into a protocol had lead the Allies and Germany back to the brink of war several months earlier, an event now wholly forgotten, but in the end the amendment had been worked out.

The U.S. Senate had not ratified the original text and would still not be ratifying the treaty in its entirety.

The Casper paper was also reporting that a new Wyoming corporation had been formed to build or take over the manufacturing of the Curtis Aircraft line.  I've never heard of this before and Wikipedia sheds no light on what was going on with this story.  Does anyone know the details?

Also making headlines was an effort to unite the nation's Protestant churches into a single organization. The headlines are apparently a bit misleading as they would suggest that the individual denominations were set to be united, which was not the proposal.

Also misleading, today, is the use of the term "United Church of Christ". That denomination would not come about until 1957.

On the same day, Kentucky and Rhode Island passed the 19th Amendment.

Suffrage supporters watching the Governor of Kentucky sign his state's passage of the 19th Amendment.

And Walt experienced something that I routinely do a century later.

Lex Anteinternet: Last night, I had a dream in which

Last night, I had a dream in which

a Chinook helicopter, which was very beat up, was landing.

That's all I recall about it.

Odd how that works.