Study Hard....

I took and passed Aerodynamics II today, but that's not what was most interesting about today.

All of a sudden, when I was least expecting it (which is usualy how it happens), I had what I guess you could call it a "reality check."
It started last week when my roommate told me about a mysterious warehouse on base where it was rumored that they were temporarily storing about a hundred comfy leather swivel chairs that were no longer being used. Apparently you could go there, talk to one of the guys, take a chair and they'd be happy to have it off their hands. This rumor was proven true when Chris drove home with one such chair... it was in great condition and looked fairly new, I wanted one.
So today I followed him to the warehouse, a typical large, low building hidden on one of the backroads of the Naval Air Station. I parked my car and I looked up. Immediately I saw something that was both familiar yet horribly mangled.

It was both a Blue and Gold F/A-18 Hornet and not at the same time. It laid there with its paint fading in the sun not unlike a beached whale, it's landing gear were gone, it's nose was in pieces in front of the wreck, the wings were all damaged and all the panels on its back were missing.
We started to walk into the building and hidden behind a Huey fuselage (another wreck) on the way in was another F/A-18. It was a gray plane, one from the fleet, and not only did it not have wings attached to it but everything, from the crushed nose to tail was completely burned. There were holes in the skin of the plane everywhere, you could see in and look at the compressor blades of the crushed engine. Strips of carbon fiber hung from the tail and blew in the breeze. The pilot's joystick was all that was left of the front of the plane and the handgrip was melted.
We went inside and I picked out a nice black leather chair and loaded it into Chris' car. He took off and I went back on the field where the Blue Angel lay. I walked around it, put my hand on the aluminum honeycomb, stuck my head in the broken exhaust pipe and looked at the pieces of the cockpit dumped on a pallet in front of the plane.

I then heard a voice call out, "Can I help you, Sir?" It was an enlisted worker from inside the building. I went up and told him how I was picking up a chair, saw the wrecks and was looking around.

"If you think that one's bad, you should see the one we got inside," he told me.
I had a gut feeling about it and asked him if it was the Blue Angel that crashed in a forest during an air show back in the spring, killing its pilot, he nodded. He took me back in the hanger to a pile of black debris that was actually pretty close to the chairs, just I hadn't noticed it. It was many times worse than the other two... at least those still looked like planes. This was a pile of aluminum, carbon and steel in no particular order, all laid together on large pallets with blue tinges where the burn marks weren't. I could see a landing wheel on top of an engine next to carbon from the vertical stabilizer. There was a wing under one pile and there were still pine needles and dirt in the compressor of one of the engines.

Finally the man took me over to a twisted piece of blue and gold aluminum, but this one was under a white sheet. He lifted it up and underneath I could see it was a piece of skin from near the cockpit, the piece with the pilot's name written on it, in yellow script.

I can't wait until I'm flying, but this stuff is pretty real... they tell us in class that something like 80% of "mishaps" are pilot error... Whether or not that's true, I want to die in a bed...
yeah, study hard...