Enjoy the Holidays!

I don't have much in terms of blog postings this week as I'm currently on vacation in the Washington DC area visiting family and of course engaging in as much avgeekery as possible with a visit today to the National Air and Space Museum (my last time here was back in 2007) and if time allows, a repeat visit to Udvar-Hazy at Dulles. I neglected to have something posted for Christmas Day as last year I featured the Apollo 8 lunar mission and their now-famous reading of the opening of the Book of Genesis. This time I wanted to share a video created by long time friend Brian Wiklem of the Jet-X Millenium Series of diecast airliner models. Over the past several years when he was at the helm of Jet-X I had the distinct pleasure of creating some of the box artwork for his model releases. He created this video several years ago and even when it's not Christmas I enjoy watching it. 

The music is Jerry Goldsmith's soundtrack to the Disneyland California Adventure ride "Soarin' Over California". May all of my readers have a wonderful holiday season with their family and friends- I will endeavor to have perhaps one or two posts this week!

On this Christmas Eve, I tried to go through my books to figure out what would be an appropriate bit of aviation trivia for a night like tonight. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, we as a nation, as a society, have seen tremendous and often chaotic changes in the past decade. From a financial crisis, wars abroad, and, from the perspective an someone who has long found enjoyment and fascination in aviation, to have seen what I have long loved used as weapon of terror in 2001, it reminded me in some ways of a similar chaotic period in our history- the late 1960s.

The Christmas Eve broadcast of Apollo 8 from lunar orbit is still the most-watched television broadcast in history and though I have seen it many times, it still gives me goosebumps as I listen to the voices of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders read from the Book of Genesis as the first human beings to travel beyond Earth orbit.



It was a fitting way to end what was one of the most traumatic years in our nation's history- the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots at the DNC Convention in Chicago. To think that at that singular moment, a short set of ancient biblical verses read by three intrepid explorers viewing our blue planet against the harsh backdrop of deep space, would, even for just a moment, give every person who heard it pause to think of themselves not in terms of race, nationality, political affiliation or religion, but as citizens of all of humanity.



I didn't realize that there was an Emmy Award for that broadcast. For me, though, that is only the least of honors that could ever be bestowed on a moment that always ties together my love of aviation with all that is greater than any one of us can ever be.

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy Prosperous New Year to all my readers, my fans, and the collectors of my artwork!