In a comment to a story I posted yesterday, about the use of US Navy radar technology in weather forecasting, fellow blogger Dad29 had this to say:
Story time.
When GE was developing PAR, the work was being done in Syracuse. (This goes back quite a number of years.)
The R&D was being done in and atop a building near I-90. Engineers would turn the PAR on using various levels of ‘power’ and observe the results.
Well. One day, a semi-load bound from GE/Nela Park to Kodak‘s NY State facility happened to be on I-90, lined up with the PAR beams when it was switched ‘on’ at full-power.
The semi was filled with flashcubes.
Tremendous FLASH and ‘boom’ occurs. Semi-driver looks in his mirrors and there is (literally) no trailer left–just a few black-rubber scorch-marks on the pavement 1/4 mile behind him.
Poor soul spent DAYS writing the same report.
About 6 months later, GE figured it out…
Thanks for a great story, Dad29! I wonder whether the insurers ever paid out for that loss? (I added hyperlinks to some of your abbreviations for the benefit of non-US readers, who might not understand them.)
The funniest part for me was, when she read this, Miss D. asked blankly, “What’s a flashcube?” Turns out she was born too late to have used them, or even seen them! Makes me feel old . . .
Peter
Dad was a radar engineer. One day, at a radar site, an official photographer showed up with a quantity of gear, including a big box of flashbulbs. Dad told him not to take those inside the chain link fence while the radar was running. He said the guy's burns healed ok.
Remember MagiCubes? They didn't require an external power source like FlashCubes. They fired mechanically with a little finger that would poke up next to the mounting socket. I found out all four bulbs would fire if you threw one against a hard surface. Fun times.
I was born in the early 70's and I clearly remember them. We used them until at least the mid eighties. Of course, my mom and dad had little to no money, so everything we owned was used or second-hand.
Now I feel old, darn it.
And I had no idea that radar could do that. Makes perfect sense, but I still had no idea.
Back in the stone-age '60's when I was going to AF tech school in Biloxi MS the base was the test site for a new radar – the FPS-35 The power room was in a hanger and the "wire" for the power line runs was 3/8" copper pipe. Supposedly the first time it was powered up it blew out all the florescent lights in buildings up to about a half-mile away. And this was in the days of vacuum tubes…
We were told that five of those systems could have controlled the air traffic over the entire continental US.
Praise the Lord and pass the Geritol. Our SATCOM dish in Germany put out enough power that over the years it warped the cement and barbed wire fence that was built a bit too tall and caught the edge of the ray path to the satellite.
The use of the acryonym PAR threw me for a kind of loop as I was expecting this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_approach_radar
Which in the aviation world is very important RADAR. But the Phased stuff is important too.
I worked on the old S-3 Viking back in my Navy days and it had a nice powerful RADAR in it for finding beer cans in the ocean at 50 miles. We had a tech that once taped a frozen sandwich to the inside of the radome and then ran the RADAR full power (in a 0 degree sector scan or what we called searhlight mode) for a few minutes not knowing how long it would take to thaw and warm up the sandwich. He stopped when you could see the smoke billowing out of the nose cone.
We flew that aircraft with a fiberglass patch on the nose for the next three years. It stood from the rest because of that patch. We never did try and heat foods up again after that!
BT: Jimmy T sends.
I think the little whoopsie with the trailer full would have been fun to watch… from orbit! Gee whiz!
Jim
Miss D didn't know what a flash cube is? Did you rob the cradle? I guess you took a lesson from Martin Luther and became Lutheran. We miss you on the API list 🙁