Ryan's Blog

I’m not about to disclose any major plot points from the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, but if you don’t want to know anything about the movie before you see it, don’t read any further.

Seriously. This is as far as you should go.

When I went to see The Dark Knight—fantastic film, by the way—there was one part that stood out for me. Early in the movie Bruce Wayne and Alfred are planning an operation where Batman needs to board a flying plane from the ground. Alfred suggests a program that the CIA has been working on called Skyhook. After an action sequence, Batman uses this Skyhook apparatus, and given all the other far-fetched technology in the movie, you might think that Skyhook is imaginary too. It’s not. In fact, it’s old school.

My grandfather was a navigator aboard this MC-130E during the Vietnam War.

I know this through something of a coincidence. A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandfather in Massachusetts for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and he showed me some pictures from his days in the Air Force. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather served as a navigator aboard the MC-130, a modified version of the cargo plane. One of the pictures he showed me depicted the plane with a strange, Y-shaped protrusion from the front nose. When I asked about it, he explained the Fulton Recovery System, which sounded to me like something from a movie. Using this system, which is also called Skyhook, a person on the ground wears a harness which is connected by a nylon cable to a giant balloon hanging the in sky. The MC-130E flies into the cable, the V-shaped fork catches it, and the person on the ground shoots into the sky. The plane’s crew then opens the rear cargo bay door and retrieve the person dangling in the distance using a winch.

Although the maneuver sounds dangerous, it was actually quite safe. Robert Fulton invented the system in the 1950’s and in the dozens of years it was in use there were only 1 recorded fatality.

Time Magazine actually has an article in their archives from December 1964 describing the Fulton system.

This frame from The Dark Knight shows an aircraft about to pickup Batman with the same V-shaped fork as the MC-130E. © 2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Batmobile, Batman’s armor, and his other gadgets may be from a time in the future, but his Skyhook liftoff is over 40 years old.

Posted by Ryan at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing is like exercise: if you don’t do it regularly, your ability atrophies and it becomes painful to get started again. The upshot is that, once you get into shape, writing can be enjoyable. Sure, it may still be a struggle to get the words right—or to run that last mile—but the payoff beats the pain. Or at least that’s how I remember it because, in addition to being out of practice with writing right now, I am also in terrible shape.

This is my first step towards fixing that, or at least the writing portion. I’m making a commitment to write something for my site at least once a week for the foreseeable future. My goal is to make it more than just an account of what I’m doing; I’d like it to be about things that I think are interesting and that I’m thinking about. There’s no point in posting boring material just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

Fortunately I expect there to be a surfeit of interesting things to write about. In addition to some ideas that I have brewing, I’m moving to Berkeley, Calif. in a couple weeks to start grad school. The School of Information is UC Berkeley’s newest school, and I’ll be studying there for the next couple of years.

A new version of this site is also in the works. I have been tweaking a design for the last several months, one that eliminates my superfluous landing page and incorporates things I post at Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious.

So stay tuned. Hopefully as it gets easier for me to write, it will also be more enjoyable for you to visit and read.

Posted by Ryan at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)