National Aviation Day

Today is National Aviation Day in the United States. It is held on Orville Wright's birthday, one of the two Dayton, Ohio area bicycle mechanics who invented a type of flying that came to be taught on Governors Island in the harbor of New York City, launched from a catapult, for the US military.

I hear they're looking to replace the steam-driven catapult on US air-craft carriers with some sort of mag-lev device. Did you hear they found the one air-craft carrier the Nazi's built? Polish underwater geological survey, found it in deep water. The Russians claim, it was theirs after the war, used it for target practice and sunk it. Quite a ship it seems in photos and fast, it would have been, except for a fickle leader, and quite a threat. I wonder if it had any plane launchers on it?

Speaking of flight, I was once to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum near Dayton, Ohio, working nearby in Kettering, over some problems of a research park to be made on a former Shaker "farm" named after their original site in Watervliet, NY, "conscientious objectors" in the 18th century until even now, a few still exist in Maine. Today there is an arms research center and arsenal there, there since the 19th century.

It is amazing to think, on one of the US Apollo missions to the Moon, a small piece of wood from the original Wright Flyer that was launched and flown at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was left there on the Moon.