Category Archives: History

George McGovern

Was he a McGovernite?

It is amazing how far to the left the party has drifted over the decades since. I don’t think my father, who died a third of a century ago would recognize it. I actually had a McGovern sticker patching up a tear in the rear window of my MGA in 1972, but I was a callow youth, slightly too young to vote. If I hadn’t been, it would have been the other vote that I regretted (the first one was for Carter in 1976 — I wised up by 1980).

China’s Aircraft Carrier

They’re about to find out just how hard it is to run one. It has this amazing statistic that I’d never seen before:

Between 1949, when the U.S. Navy began deploying jets on a large scale, and 1988, when the combined Navy/Marine Corps aircraft accident rate achieved U.S. Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 aircraft and more than 8,500 aircrew.

Emphasis mine. That’s accidents, not combat. And what they mean by getting the rate to Air Force levels, is reducing it to that rate. In other words, those are the casualties of learning how to fly combat-proficient aircraft from carriers, and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.

Here’s a related link: the U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.

And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.

[Via email from Jim Bennett]