Sometimes it's not that "Plane"

[Brian37]

Ok, my pets get me up just like the postal delivery person, nothing will stop them from their appointed food. 5am every day. So I feed them, make my coffee, and put my tv on my now limited cable, and have found it fun to watch show called "Innovation Nation" that comes on at 6am my time.......I like it mostly for the history. 

Football fans who are eggheads and old enough will remember famed college coach Knute Rockne best known for his Notre Dame days and making the forward pass popular. Well just like the rest of life and the rest of us our luck runs out as it unfortunately did for him on a poorly designed wooden plane which crashed killing him and several others. I didn't know he had died in a plane crash.

Well as a result of that crash the industry changed and became introspective including designs of metal planes. Not that I am a fan of flyng now, but when I was a kid I loved it. The names of certain models growing up fascinated me, seemed too technical to attempt to figure out, at the time, so I simply took them for granted. At one time I stupidly thought "DC" as in DC-10 stood for "Washington DC", ok ok ok, I was stupid back then. <---------I know, "What has changed Brian?"

Turns out "DC" is of course and makes sense now, named after the designer "Douglas" We know the company today as McDonnell Douglas. The "C" stands for civilian. It was mentioned that one particular DC made, in the story on that show was used so much it taxied for 100,000 miles. Of course that spoke to the durability as part of the story. Might seem silly to some, but it was neat for me because I had always wondered what the DC stood for knowing in the back of my mind it didn't mean "Washington DC".

So there it is your moment of zen, learn one for the Gipper(edit,,,,,, <-------Was a player at Notre Dame "George Gipp" later to played in a football movie by actor and future president  Ronald Reagan.

[Brian37]

Mixed my facts up. "Knute" was the coach and the legend was that he gave a pep talk about George who had died from health issues at 25, which is where the phrase comes from "Win one for the Gipper" which started out as "Win this one for the Gipper"

The eggheads in football still may use that phrase in locker rooms today, it basically means honor someone with a win or simply "lets get that win".

[Gawdzilla]

The Spruce Goose had no feathers.

[Brian37]

This post isn't just about planes, it is also about human's false perceptions. My gap filling in assuming "DC" was the city, is the same gap filling that allows a kid to be influenced by the parents in what religion they are raised in. But also on a business level. The assumption that your design works. It far too often takes something like a crash for an industry to take the problem seriously. It is also why it took forever to get led out of gas. Why it took Nader to get cars to be safer. And also why it has taken almost a century to face climate change.

Humans evolved to seek patterns but in doing so we gap fill and that doesn't always turn out good.

[Thumpalumpacus]

A Gooney Bird isn't really a bird.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Whirlybirds don't lay eggs.

Boru