Did anyone notice the plane this guy was flying when he smashed the record for solo flights of phenomenal distances. Whatever. The plane that was painted like virgin airlines. It was on the cover of the L.A. Times. Man breaks solo trans-world record. Rich man. Adventurer, Englishman. It seemed so anachrnoistic in way. Charles Lindbergh. It' so last century. But no,I thought it was fucking awesome.

That plane he was flying was a single engine turbo-fan. And that was a twin-fueselage aircraft. It was a catamaran. There are not that many twin fueselage planes. I love them. My faviorite is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. They were super-fucking cool. Polished aluminum. The P-38 had to be one of the oldest American fighter planes in the second world war. It hailed from the mid '30s. At least the first prototypes would have. By the end of the war when the technology was really refining itself, the single engine fighter ended up being the better overall design. As borne out by the P-51 Mustang. The British were onto that design with the Supermarine Spitfire.

And that's all the more reason to love the P-38. It was a racer. Big thing it was. Not particularly manueverable. But fast, for having two sixteen cylinder engines. And it was armed like mad. The pilot in his center airframe had four 50 cal. machine guns, and a 20mm belt-fed cannon. Exploding rounds. That would be for when the fighting was in close. Very cool the p-38. Extremely bad-ass. In an old school way.
So why am I going on about the P-38? I work in Burbank a lot these days. And that's where it came from. Lockheed was the heart of Burbank. For what that's worth. But the name always meant something to me as a kid. Growing up in California. It sounded cool. Cause it was from L.A. AND of course now I know that Burbank is also Disney and Warner Studios. And Bob Hope. And back in the Fedora days of WW II, Burbank was Lockheed aircraft. Our family friend Leela who lived up in Lake Tahoe told me that her father had worked at Lockheed back in the 30s. He was an aircraft engineer and he worked on the P-38. She said he was really ahead of his time as a person. He was a surfer back then. Him and all the aircraft designers were into hiking and fitness. Outdoor stuff.

I had meant to write about the P-38 in my blog a while ago. The old guy next door, Ruben Ponce, was a technician on P-38s and other allied planes during the second world war. He says he liked the P-38 best of all. He thought it was a good machine. Ponce even has a picture of one in his jampacked, oily-smelly machine shop next door. It was Rube who told me how heavily armed the plane was. He said that if the pilot stayed on the nose-mounted cannon long enough it could stall out the plane's engines. Damn

It's like this whole puzzle I'm putting together. The puzzle is why I'm here. I'm so aware of this city. Griffith park and the Los Angeles River. El Camino real. Toluca lake. Movies. Freeways. Reality TV. Unions. Maybe moving to Mexico...