[Leica] Bird

[cartersxrd at gmail.com (CartersXRd)]

wouldn?t want that one taking a dump on your windshield

ric



> On Jun 18, 2021, at 12:34 PM, Brian Reid <reid at mejac.carlsbad.ca.us> 
> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
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