Midway Museum

Every year I do a weeklong meditation retreat starting in Encinitas on the coast, then in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park, then in the hills above Escondido.  The first day in San Diego is free, so I went to see the Midway, the longest-serving carrier in the US Navy. Built in 1943, too large to fit in the Panama Canal, biggest ship in the world until 1955, decomissioned in 1991. The flight deck has 29 restored aircraft. You can see about 1/3 the length of the flight deck here. With the help of big rubber bands, planes went from 9 to 120 in six seconds.

E-2 Hawkeye 50s-vintage recon plane. I'd never heard of folding wings, but a number of the planes had them. John Reeves tells me it's pretty common on a carrier. The E-2 could monitor ship positions and communications within a 100-mile radius. The computers of the time generated so much heat that meltdowns were common--at one time, the entire fleet was grounded. (That would never happen today, right people-at-TechWorld?)

E-2 cockpit

This Seahawk helicopter was used to pick up the Apollo capsule. The guy who did it compared it to seeing a 22-story building falling--that was the dimension of the capsule and its chute. Now that you know that, there's no reason to buy an audio tour. The rest of it was trivial.

So that's where Gene Roddenberry got the idea for the colored jumpers.  This is 1/3 of the job descriptions and colors on display. (Roddenberry drove his writers crazy by insisting that there never be any conflict among the crew, which in any other show would have been the main source of drama. Roddenberry's idea was to show a future free from the military and social traumas of the 60s. So everybody had to get along. Today, there's a bust of Roddenberry in the producer's office. When they do something he wouldn't approve of, someone takes off their tie and blindfolds the statue.)

Pre-mission briefing room. Looks kinda like today's airplane interiors.

From the Pukin' Dogs (far left) to Hell's Kittens (far right).

Blackboard days

Outer Limits-worthy IFF console

The Midway housed an admiral as well as it's captain. If you're admiral--this is what you get, two decks down and far from any stairs. Finally dawned on me that the advantage of this room is--it's at the center of gravity of the ship.

Comms room. When I was 8, I would have killed for a room like this.

The routing header is in Allied Command Protocol (ACP)-127. The header info was manually typed. The State Department used this system for diplomatic cables in the 80s. At most posts, the machine-readable headers were hand-typed and full of errors. But computers read them to do the routing and distribution. I developed a parsing language and parser for text that is loosely structured, with landmarks that you can't rely on. I think today they've migrated everything to Exchange, but for decades, my parser was cranking away in the machine room on the first floor of Main State.

Telegraph key. According to the posters, you could recognize a sender by the distinctive spacing of clicks. One lady confessed to dreaming in (Morse) code.

Flight simulators take you through a dogfight. It said not to get on if you're prone to motion sickness, so I didn't.

The USS Ronald Regan nuclear carrer was docked across San Diego harbor from the Midway Museum.