Today has been about airplanes and flight.
There have been many different connections to this topic.
I drove from Columbus to Cincinnati going circuitously through Dayton.
Most people who have been to the city would go very circuitously 
to
avoid Dayton. I’ve been at
the Dayton airport many times, but never actually made it into the city. Let me explain. In
the early 1980s I worked for Emery Worldwide, the airfreight company.
The corporate headquarters were in Wilton CT and the major sorting
facility was (and remains) in Dayton. About
once a quarter I went to Dayton for a meeting of one sort or another, in total
at least a dozen times. Meetings
were held at the sorting facility. We
would fly in, stay at the Airport Inn (now the Dayton Airport Hotel), go to the
sorting facility and then fly out. When
I drove around the area today I was reminded just how huge a facility it is; it
has its’ own tower and in size and scope dwarfs the commercial airport. The facility comes alive at night as planes arrive in from
different corners of the country, the cargo is off-loaded from the planes,
sorted, put onto another plane and planes depart. For a five or six hour window in the dead of the night the
place is one huge Chinese fire drill; planes land continuously and the sorting
process is a true logistics puzzle. Fascinating,
but truly nuts. During the day the
entire facility is pretty dead; again driving around reminded me of the contrast
– there was an enormous parking lot with only a few cars in it.
At night I’m certain every spot is filled.
So, my intent today was to see Dayton. Having
seen it I could have skipped the whole experience.
Enough said on that topic.
However, Dayton does have an aviation fixation.
It was the home of the Wright Brothers and there are numerous historical
sites relating to them. Curtiss Wright Air 
Force
Base is located in Dayton. The
Dayton Air Show is world-renowned. It is also the site of the Air Force Museum,
where I spent the majority of the day. The
museum is vast (several large hangars plus a huge outdoor area) and the
collection exhaustive (3000+ planes).
The planes go from the earliest props to recent fighter planes – I
figure the museum houses enough military hardware to explain the national debt. It manages to make the Air and Space 
Museum
in Washington DC look puny. Although
I’m not an aviation buff I enjoyed wandering around.
My fellow museum attendees were an interesting mix of school children
and, you should pardon the expression, old geezers strolling down memory lane.
The “geezers” were groups of three and four men, with the occasional
wife tagging along, smile frozen on her face and eyes glazed over.
The men appeared to be transported back to the their youth and happily
ooh’d and aah’d and regaled each other with “remember when….” stories.
This evening I am in Cincinnati with Susan, an old friend
from my days at Emery. We haven’t
seen each other since Susan, her husband Bill and their kids moved out here ten
years ago. 
Tonight will be a night
of catching up on a lot of time and events.
Return
to May 2001 Calender
