Today didn’t start off like a normal day.
Normally, I wake up at 5:15am, slowly make my way out to my job at Sears Holdings where I toil away at any number of exciting social media programs.
Today was different.
I opened my eyes at 0515 in beautiful north central Indiana at the Grissom Air Reserve Base. I was there to embark on the exciting business of refueling a B-52 bomber at 32,000 feet and about 300 miles per hour. I was participating in the 434th’s first ever “Social Media” flight. Obviously this has nothing to do with Sears, in my other life, I blog about the Air Force over at my blog “Notes from the field?”.
As I made my way to the operations building to receive my pre-flight briefing I started thinking about what we were going to be doing today. I was going to be sitting in an airplane - a KC-135 - likely built in the 1950’s carrying thousands of pounds of jet fuel; we were going to intercept another airplane - a B-52, also likely built in the 1950’s. We were then going to do the delicate dance of connecting these 2 airplanes with a 20 foot metal hose so that we can pass fuel from our tanks to theirs. Did I mention that all of this was going to be done screaming through the air high above the heads of unsuspecting rural Americans? This got me thinking about the amazing things we as humans have been able to accomplish.
The first powered flight was on December 17th, 1903 in Kitty Hawk North Carolina – the flight I took today was exactly 106 years, 7 months, 4 days after that. In that short amount of time, we’ve mastered the art and science of flight and advanced it to such a state that the task that I witnessed today has become a daily occurrence, in fact, the 434th flies hundreds of missions just like this every year.
I’m not normally one to be very “inspirational”, in fact all of those motivational quotes people throw around drive me nuts, but I saw it today, we can do anything we put our minds to.
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About the author: Scott Murphy is not a Social Media Guru. He is a blogger (sometimes) a fan of the Air Force (always) and an all around nice guy.
