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LOL, thanks for indulging me. Just brought back a lot of memories! I am in one of those moods tonight...

I have always been into aviation. The first book I ever read for pleasure when I was six, was “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”...and I was hooked.

I lived in Subic Bay when I was older, and at Cubi Point, whenever I was down a the beach, I would walk around on the tarmac above the beach, sticking my head into the wheel wells and exhausts. Every once in a while I spoke with a pilot, and one guy let me sit in the plane with his helmet, then grinning at me said “Watch when I take off!” then took off and did some aerobatics in his F-8 Crusader when he took off.

I love thinking about that now, there is no way I would be able to get near the planes like that now as a kid, but back then...nobody gave it a second thought.

Heh, I got picked up by a jeep and taken to the control tower building for walking across the active runway. I crossed it like I would cross a highway...I just paused, looked left, looked right and walked across. A jeep with a black checkered flag came out, two guys got out and grabbed me by each arm and took me into the building where some officer chewed me out. They asked who my dad was, and I gave a fake name and number because my dad was the XO, and he wouldn’t like getting a call.

I used to go down to the docks and try to get a sailor to take me on a tour of his ship...there were long hours of hanging around, but I got a few tours that way. I was just a junkie...:)

But one of the most memorable times was when my buddy and I went out to Oskosh, WI for the fly-in, and it was the 25th anniversary of the moon landings in 1994, and they had all the surviving Apollo astronauts there, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman, the whole nine yards. The Gemini crews had some funny stories. one of the guys (Jim Lovell) was talking about how Borman used to completely suffocate him in the capsule with his “gas problem”...:)

Oddly enough, the most memorable part of the evening wasn’t actually the astronauts per se. This event was taking place in a large, covered outdoor amphitheater with open sides that was probably 100-200 yards away from the darkened twilight of the runway IIRC. Pretty close. As the astronauts were talking on stage, behind us (in the direction the astronauts were facing) there was an enormous roar. While one of the astronauts was in mid-sentence, the entire crowd ignored him and craned around to look. The Concorde took off, all four engines in full afterburner with four large cones of sharp blue flame stabbing the air behind it. It was deafening.

The thing that made it most memorable was not the Concorde, but the reaction of this famous astronaut in the middle of his reminiscing and story telling. He said over the microphone before he was drowned out “Go ahead and look! We are all looking up here on the stage too!”

It was wonderful. You can imagine that someone in his place on stage might get offended, but that was the last thing on his mind. He was like us, and even with all his years of flying and activity as an astronaut, he and his fellow astronauts still got a thrill out of that loud, hot spectacle of a giant plane taking off belching flame. I think every person in that crowd felt a degree of kinship, a common love of aviation with each other as peers with those men on the stage.