Posted on 07/31/2013 5:19:23 AM PDT by Pan_Yan
This isn't a painting. It's not from a movie. It's not a strange astronomical event. This is real — what you can see when certain helicopters in Afghanistan touch down on sandy ground, raising dust, causing mysterious arcs of light to loop and dance through the air.
This doesn't always happen. "The halos usually disappear as the rotors change pitch," wrote war photographer Michael Yon. "On some nights, on this very same landing zone, no halos form." How come?
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Yep, have been to Marfa
Go out tonight in the dark and run your lawnmower in a sandy spot. Look through the chute opening, carefully.
But lawnmowers aren’t nearly as cool as helicopters.
We are old people.
Quartz has long been known to have electrostatic properties. What is sand? Powdered quartz. This is is a really cool effect that I’ve not seen before. I’ll need to look for vids.
I’m oldER than dirt. I’ll be 60 in January.
got’cha’ by 5 .. I AM the dirt
When I was a child dirt had not been developed yet. We only had dust.
Fuselage. Sling load crews also use a grounding rod to dissipate accumulated static electricity prior to hooking the external load. You DO NOT want to be the grounding source as the sling load crew. The charge will knock your d*ck in the dirt.
Tell me about it!
I once had a cocky HST (Helo Support team) Sgt who declined the static wand (broomstick with about 10ft steel cable taped to it.) I offered him. We were lifting a practice 11,000# concrete block.
“I’ll just slap the hook. That’s all it takes.” he said while standing on top of the block.
Static knocked him off that block.
Another time we were lifting a crashed Cobra out of the swamps near Camp Lejeune. Due to the height of the trees, we had a 70 foot pendant. 30,000# in a high hover, cold January day. One of the Cobra squadron pilots was doing the hookup, standing knee deep in swamp water. He tried to grab the hook.
The static jolt caused his biceps to contract so violently that he whacked his chest hard enough to leave a huge bruise.
ouch
LOL. Yep, you won’t make that mistake twice.
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