Tong Family

!http://www.flyingheritage.com/Images/photoCaseStudy.jpg! They also had the “Flying Heritage Collection”:http://www.flyingheritage.com/ up there with vintage P-51 Mustang and I’m proud to say I spotted the P-47D Thunderbolt and couldn’t tell, but the site shows that it was a P-40C Tomahawk of Flyting Tigers fame. They have an amazing number of aircraft they are “rebuilding”:http://www.flyingheritage.com/TemplateTopImages.aspx?contentId=36. By the way, you can actually go out and see them by appointment only. They are at I-5 Exit 206, so a little north of Seattle and they have regular “flying days”:http://www.flyingheritage.com/TemplateTopImages.aspx?contentId=39 out of Arlington airport which should be a real treat. P-51D and the Spitfire for instance on September 23rd. Wow!

!http://www.milius.navy.mil/assets/images/db_images/db_HomeComing_11.jpg! We also got a chance to get out in Elliott Bay and see some of the ships thate were part of Fleet Week. Unfortunately, we didn’t get ot go out an tour, but they were quite a site outside of Elliott Bay Marina. My study of Jane’s Fighting Ships as youth, got me to identify DDG-69 right as an “Arleigh Burke” class destroyer. It was originally designed mainly as an anti-air destroyer to complement the bigger and more expensive Aegis-class cruiser (“Ticonderoga”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/cg-47-design.htm class) which has two sets of VLS cells while the Arleigh Burke has just one. This is one of the original Flight I called the Milius. Also there was the DDG-93 the USS “Chung Hoon”:http://www.chung-hoon.navy.mil/. The big change was in Flight II which added a helicopter so it could be more multi-purpose (originally the “Spruance”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruance_class_destroyer class was anti-submarine, but with the contraction of the fellet, they have retired almost everything else, so the Arleigh Burke is now multi-purpose. The Chung Hoon is actually a Flight IIA destroyer with two helicopter areas. The Chung Hoon by the way is brand new, its maiden voyage was January 5, 2006. For true Navy geeks, you can read all about the follow-on called the “DDG-1000/DD(X)”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/dd-x.htm whcih will be truly “strange”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/dd-x.htm looking.