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BEAR PILOTS
Bearbuddys in the Sky
Everyone knows bears
like to fly. The BearBuddys have already appeared in their own astronaut
movie where they rescued Goldilocks from space, but put her in jail
for being a fugitive from justice for breaking and entering the bears’ house and eating their porridge. You can see it here BearBuddys
and the Goldilocks Planet. Leander thinks it should be a TV series, but I keep telling him no-one watches TV anymore. Everyone looks at their Iphone. But to become an astronaut, you first have to become a pilot.
Flying planes is fun, but you have to learn a lot of stuff like altitude and coefficient of lift. Did you know that an airplane propeller doesn’t pull the plane into the air, but only makes it go fast enough that the air going over the wings makes it go up. And that’s because of air pressure. The air has to go faster over the top of the wing than the bottom, so the air molecules spread out thinner, so the thicker molecules on the bottom make more pressure, so the plane goes up. And to make the plane turn, the tail doesn’t turn it, but the ailerons (those little pieces of the wing than move) change the shape of the wing so one side gets more pressure than the other so the plane banks. Science Stuff! It you’re on a big plane going to Grandmas’ house for Thanksgiving, and when it comes down, you see the wings get bigger and bigger as these pieces come out of the back. Those are called flaps. What they’re doing is making the wing bigger and curve even more, so the air has to go really fast over the top to make more lift so the plane can go slow enough to land without falling out of the sky.
Leander likes jets, and astronauts mostly fly military jets like F18s but I like old propeller planes like they used to fly back in World War II. Fighter planes like Spitfires and Messerschmitts. They were on opposite sides and fought each other in dogfights. I don’t know why they didn’t call them bearfights, maybe dogs are meaner than bears. There were other planes called Mustangs (like the horses). And in the Navy they had Bearcats. I’ve never met a bearcat, it must be genetic engineering, but they were fighter planes that flew off Aircraft Carriers. They had wings that folded up so they could get all together snug as a bear in a rug below the deck so they could carry more, in the carrier. They don’t fight anymore, but you can see them now in airshows, called warbirds. Or in airplane museums.
Here are some museums with historic airplanes in Yorkshire England, Palm Springs, Riverside and Camarillo California, Munich Germany and Duxford England, also Merced California. close to where the Bearbuddys were born. Here are some pictures of planes. A book about fighter planes in WWII is called Aces, a novel about pilots in the WWII Battle of Britain. The book was written by a friend of ours. He was the one who got us to learn to fly. He worked on it a long time and now everyone gets to read it. There’s also a little movie about it. Or you can read more about the Aces Book here.
Leander wrote a review. But some other people did to, they really really liked it. Mostly. You can find Leander's deep and inciteful review of Aces on our Bear Cave blog.
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