[Leica] Bird

[Brian Reid]

> Very good shot of a "Barksdale Bird".  They are all much older than
> the crews that fly them.

My very first job after finishing graduate school was helping devise a 
way to manufacture retro electronic replacement parts for B-52s. B-52s 
were built using components that were state of the art at the time, but 
haven't been manufactured in many decades. The SAC had a large stash of 
replacement electronic parts in salt caves in Utah, but those were 
projected to be depleted by 2000 or so. There were studies about 
re-engineering the avionics, but they concluded that would be require 
too much testing, so launched a program to recover the ability to 
manufacture old parts. My personal involvement was in the remanufacture 
of a chip first sold in 1969 but available to Boeing for B-52 upgrades 
in 1968, the Intel 1101 SRAM.

We sort of succeeded, but before long the machines involved in the 
manufacturing process were themselves obsolete and unmaintainable, and 
the Air Force decided to do it some other way. I was reminded of a 
science fiction story from my youth in which there was a battle between 
an army with jet airplanes and an army with pikes and poison darts.

Then I was no longer able to buy mercury batteries for my Rollei 35; the 
problem had hit close to home.