Those aircraft loaders have lots of "parts contained". I have watched those, too.

The shear I got, when the bidding ended and no one else bid, I realized I had to go after the thing. I wish I had taken a camera along but it was a pretty stressful day.

I can imagine. Where they send the baddies... all trained to kill with their bare hands. Not much fun for the guards. Probably have no sense of humor at all...
Just getting on base at Hill Field to pick up my generators was fun. My old F250 flatbed with the big toolbox on back made them nervous. Had to run the dogs over it while they checked out my truck and ID paperwork inside. Not like the days they'd just wave you on if you could state some reasonable reason for going on base. But driving off base surprised me. Free flow right past guard post. I'm certain I was videod, but nobody paid any attention to the two big OD green generators on the back of an obvious civilian truck.

You must have bid on your unit awhile ago, cause Gov Surplus bumped their minimum bid to $150 some time back... plus the extra 10% "standard fee" they tack on.
Doc

E716: We must have posted at pretty clos to the same time... "Yah, me too" was in response to not being rich, not about spending time in Levenworth!
Doc

I helped send two to Leavenworth. It takes a lot of soul searching to put someone up there for life. One was stupid, the other scum. The stupid one was that way too many times. I sleep good at night knowing someone is keeping an eye on them.How they got into the service is a mystery. That was a couple of the low spots in my career, the rest were the letters that
started:"Dear Mr/Mrs Smith, I regret to inform you that your son/ daughter was killed in the line of duty..." Thank God I only had to write three. I had the gift of being able to compose and write well and being an assistant to the First Sergeant I got the honors.It's only been the last couple of years that I can listen to TAPS on the TV and not have to leave the room. But if they would have my beat up old hide back I would go in an instant........I loved taking care of my troops!
T

I know many people wouldn't think of me as a patriot because I was 4-F and didn't serve in the military. But I spent almost ten years in Silicon Valley working for defense contractors. Almost six of which working at a company that made black boxes for fighter aircraft that saved pilots lives. It was "our" boxes that directly saved the lives of those two pilots that the Lybians shot at in the eighties in the med and made it possible for them to splash the Lybians in return. Talk about high moral in a company! While there I introduced circuit techniques that improved reliability that I've been told spread out to become industry wide practice in the EW world. I've been directly involved in whistle blowing against a company selling high technology to an eastern country and personally resisted a direct request from a South American diplomat to purchase restricted technology that quite easily could have made me very rich if I'd gone for it.
I've always supported our troops themselves, whether or not I supported a particular policy that sent them into harms way. I have done a few things in my life that I'm now ashamed of, but NOT going to Viet Nam isn't one of them.
Doc

Thank you Doc! I have flown on many aircraft, no fighters though. I have had those black boxes in my hands many times. My experience was that:
1.They are expensive, don't screw them up
2.The screws that hold them in always strip out on the back side, refer to no.1 above
3. The safety wire holes for the cannon plug connectors always pulled out where you couldn't drill a new one without removing the box. Refer to 1&2 above.
We knew that errors could only be repaired off station at a depot level and it came out of our budget.
I always wondered about the people that built all that stuff and how talented they were. I was darned sure that that stuff wasn't going to leave our hands because of a 30 cent piece of hardware!
Thank you for your contribution.
I think we have hijacked the thread and digressed from the topic,Doc!
T