Academic

FROM CHUCK SIMMINS: Some Haiti Relief Fundraising Numbers. UPDATE: Stan ?Wild Kingdom? Brock an?

By Glenn Reynolds

FROM CHUCK SIMMINS: Some Haiti Relief Fundraising Numbers.

UPDATE: Stan “Wild Kingdom” Brock and Remote Area Medical are taking a DC-3 (yes, that’s right) full of supplies to a stricken outlying area of Haiti.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thoughts on the DC-3 from reader John Kahn:

I work for a regional aircraft manufacturer as a pilot and tech support engineering specialist. Interesting thing about the DC-3. As we all know, in engineering and especially in aviation, development of a product is more or less by committee and involves thousands of trade offs and compromises. Usually the compromises have some kind of imbalance that limit a product’s effectiveness and service life. However, like a monkey throwing down alphabet blocks where on some rare occasion they spell a word, sometimes, the compromises just happen to come together in a state of balance resulting in a machine that, for its intended use, is something close to perfection. This is the DC 3.

Imagine, a complex transportation machine designed almost 80 freaking years ago (the DC 2 upon which the 3 is based first flew in ‘33), that a businessman can purchase today, not as a tourist attraction, but as a business tool that can still be put to work to make money hauling freight in North America (and in the case of an operator in northern Canada, run a daily scheduled passenger service!).

I can’t think of any other transportation device, and very few machines of any kind, that can still function as a profit making business tool nearly 80 years after they were designed. This incredible aircraft gets my vote as the greatest transportation conveyance of modern times.

Good point.

MORE: On Facebook, Xeni Jardin comments: “Man, we should ship Gnl Russell Honoré to Haiti on one of them cargo loads, stat. View from my sofa looks like NoLa clusterfuckery x1000.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 15, 2010 (boomark / email).