Sunday, April 27, 2008

Welcome!

Welcome to Mojave Skies! I'm intending this to be sort of a successor to my earlier blog, "Alan's Mojave Weblog", which enjoyed more readership that I ever expected it would, but became simply untenable for a number of reasons.

For all those who miss having access to the old Mojave Weblog, for history and archive sake, fear not...parts of it were archived at Archive.org's Wayback machine, and if you click this link: http://web.archive.org/web/20061205042906/http://mojaveweblog.com/ you should get to it.

The next couple of years promise to be exciting at Mojave, with the expected first flight of Burt Rutan's White Knight Two, now named Eve, as well as the continued flight testing of Proteus and it's Northrop-Grumman Global Hawk MP-RTIP radar system, the somewhat mysterious rebirth of ARES and the XCor Rocket Racer. The third-oldest hangar at Mojave, Hgr 161, right, which houses Flight Research Inc., (and which appears at the end of the Jodie Foster flick Flightplan) is due to be torn down soon to make way for bigger digs.

A note to those whom I've offended in the past: being someone who's rather OCD about recording what tomorrow will view as history, I shoot a lot of photos, and since some of those history-making programs I've shot involve the curious attempt to operate a "secret" flight test program in broad daylight at a public airport, well, a few folks who'd rather have their secrets kept have gotten rather irritated at me. You may not believe me, but I really try to be a good neighbor, and there really is a lot that my lens captures that doesn't get shared with the world. (All you have to do is look through my 30,000+ image library to quickly realize this.) It is sufficient to me that the next generation won't have this special moments forgotten. If I post something that you'd rather I didn't, don't get pissed off, just come talk to me, explain the situation, and you'll find that I'm really quite understanding. But I will also expect you to understand that this is still the good ol' US of A, and freedom of the press is still one of the cherished rights. Since some of the flight test programs going on have military overtones, I would expect you to be doubly understanding: those programs exist to defend our rights as Americans, and it's rather ludicrous to try to defend such rights by denying such rights.

Blue skies!

Alan

5 comments:

Jim Howard said...

Welcome back! You've been sorely missed!

Unknown said...

So happy to see you back.
Wikipedia just didn't do it for me.

Thanks!

I still periodically see a CNN or AP story with a image credited to you.

What a wonderful resource you provided. Loved to see the metal crunchers eating airplanes.

JM

Dan Dawson said...

I just came across your new site today, and I can say I'm very glad to see it back!

I always enjoyed your old site and had created an RSS feed of it so I could subscribe and keep up to date with it, I'm so glad to see you've gone with a traditional blog format with it now, I'm sure your readership will grow quickly to even beyond what your old site had as people learn that you're back online!

Dan Dawson
http://ddphoto.cc
http://flickr.ddphoto.cc

Anonymous said...

Good to see your back!

I have been waiting for this day a long time :) For several years, the mojaveweblog was my way to get information from that great airport, far far away (I live in Belgium). This was long before everyone knew Mojave as a "spaceport". I have always been interested in the USA airplane graveyards, and Mojave was always my favourite for reasons I don't know myself. All in all, good to know that we, aviation nuts, now have a man inside again :)

Kante Luis said...

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