so in mil-speak, that's a 58, Lynn ?

had the pleasure of an invite with my battery commander at Bliss in 1976- he had to take an annual to keep gettin' his xtrabux (he was at the time the CO of the HHC for our Chaparral/Vulcan battalion... go figure....

We slipped the wispy bonds of earth at Biggs, went up over East McGregor Range, an did a little "relatively" low-levelling over the desert and into the foothills of the Lincoln National Forest... absolutely breathtaking, and compared only to the same over the roller-coaster of the Mang Yang.

I had a borrowed 8mm camera (stone age) and I guess I gotta go see now if that film's still good, and maybe putting on VHS.

We circled the peak of the big skiing resort north of Tularosa- sort of a sugarloaf thing, Sierra Blance - yeah....

Southbound, the truly most memorable part was when "Gus" the CO-(hey... we were both 1st Avn Bde Vets, and I was a PFC or SP4, don't recall-) asked me on the intercom if I saw the northbound freight train in the distance.. I rogered, and he said "we're gonna beat the train to that grade crossing (it seemed from our altitude of I'd guess about 8000) to have been about halfway between us and the locomotive..

I said "OK".. or something like that, not really thinking we could do it- the crossing was probably a mile out on the ground, and the train was progably hitting 40 or 50 mph (purely surmise on my part....)

well.. the bottom suddenly dropped out of my world, and I remember thinking this is (my first and last autorotation....

I have no idea what kind of previous airspeed we'd had, or the descent rate was, but NEVER have I had a better ride on even the wildest roller coaster. (except for the Mang Yang)
when he pulled pitch back in, we were maybe a couple of hundred feet, and he poured on the coal. Won the race by a healthy margin - wotta HOOT.

Choppers RULE... but then, who'm I tellin' ?

Lump