Outlasting stress and strain

Stress is the force exerted on the jet wing. Strain is bending to the elasticity limit; if it bends beyond that, it breaks.

My dad was the test engineer who discovered, with a torque rod, that the outside two wing cylinders would break on the F-104. But his superior thought faulty testing side load was to blame. So Lockheed skipped the redesign.

When the prototype flew, the same cylinders were compressed. The redesign, so late in the game, was much costlier.

We all have our breaking points, when too much stress is straining our hearts more than we can bear. Just like different materials and different designs have different load capacities, so too all of us have different limits. There’s no point in making fun of me if my capacity to enduring stress is lesser than yours.

I want to spring back into the original shape. I don’t want to be distorted by the strain of bitterness, disillusion, betrayal. God increase my elasticity!

Tinkering is like prayer

When he was kid, my dad turned on his model airplane engine in the garage to let it run a while and unwittingly splattered oil all over the walls. His dad, my grandfather, bawled him out.

The maiden flight was a failure. My dad was discouraged but kept tinkering. Eventually, he graduated from Berkeley and worked at Lockheed’s super secret skunkworks in Rye Canyon. He worked on the now-outmoded stealth fighter, which crashed in test flight and very nearly killed the pilot.

Eventually, the engineers got it right, and the strike plane was used against Iraq, its radar-evading technology confounded enemies. Tinkering won the day.

Tinkering reminds me of prayer, which people view as a waste of time. True, we Americans are very busy. But time spent with God is never wasted.

Prayer is like research and development, cutting edge change, because you are consulting the all powerful God.

How Magic Mountain helped develop the Stealth Fighter

Very few people know this. Engineers at Lockheed’s secret projects Rye Canyon facility shot a radar at Magic Mountain’s Sky Tower, a rotating hexagonal compartment that ascends and descends for a panoramic view. The surprise? The tower was invisible to the radar.

And that is how engineers designed the Stealth Fighter with small flat triangular panels, all reflecting off into the atmosphere in different directions. If it had a rounded surface, the radar would pick it up.

You’ll be surprised what get when you shoot off into the heavens. When Lockheed engineers shot radar across the valley to the Valencia recreation park, they got something that could be incorporated into sophisticated military technology. When you shoot a prayer up to Heaven, God may give you more than you bargain for.