An as-yet incommunicable experience

[newredshoes]

I had an experience today in which I could never have planned for my reaction. See, we drove down to Fairborn, Ohio to see the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum. (skew_whiff, I could not stop thinking of you: these planes were gorgeous, and I am officially in love with WWI planes in particular now. You need to get there and just glory in it all.) And as we

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[skew_whiff]

Oh god, I'm so jealous. I have got to go there some day. (Though first, I really must pay a visit to either of the RAF museums. Just looking at the website makes me a little bit flustered and excitable. And if I travel to Cosford by train, they will give you a free cup of tea in the museum cafe for taking a greener option! How can I refuse an offer like that

[ivy03]

I went to the USS Intrepid yesterday, and it was constant mix of feeling in awe of the amazing technology, feeling like people were absolutely fucking nuts and possibly suicidal to fly some of these things, and then thinking that war is so fucking awful that people felt like they had to.

The Intrepid was hit by several kamikaze planes in WWII, so they have one of those flashing lights and smoke reenactment kinds of things, which makes you realize how terrifying those attacks were--in a sky filled with planes, they had to destroy every single one. Winging them wasn't enough, you had to blow them out of the air to keep them from hitting you, which would then make your own fueled planes explode as secondary bombs. And elsewhere in the museum there's an interview with someone in the Japanese airforce talking about how kamikaze wasn't an attack, it was a defense of their families and their homeland. And you realize how awful it was on the other side, too. (And I'm appreciative of the fact that in a rah rah! US military museum, they at