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40 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2022 If you've read my column before, you know how much a fan I am of aviation, especially when it comes to older airplanes. You can imagine how ecstatic I was when, 11 years ago, my wife gave me the greatest gi of all: a half- hour ride on a fully restored WWII B-17 Fly- ing Fortress. is plane was the real deal, folks. A four-engine heavy bomber stuffed with gun turrets, narrow and cramped crew areas, and the cold hard metal of unforgiving hard- ware that could give you a serious bruise on the forehead if you weren't paying attention. From wingtip to wingtip, the "Liberty Belle" was saturated with a rich ambiance of history that emanated from every one of her nearly 400,000 rivets that held this aircra together. One by one, the four 1,200 horsepower Wright Cyclone engines came to life, and together with the other passengers and crew, we took off on that warm and sunny day from the air- port in Hillsboro, Oregon. ere were a couple of things that happened during the trip that you might find interesting. For example, I really did poke my head out of the open upper hatch in the radio room. Maybe sticking my head out of an airplane in a 120- mph slipstream wasn't the brightest thing I've ever done (I did take my glasses off first), but I got a great picture out of it. At another point in the trip I was in the nose of the plane peering through the Norden bombsite at the city below me. Even though I knew that the dummy bombs were not real, and they were perma- nently attached so they couldn't be dropped, (plus the bomb bay doors were closed, and the bomb release mechanism wasn't even electri- cally connected), I still couldn't make myself flip the bomb salvo switch. I think that it just The Misadventures of High Voltage and Other Power Problems Tim's Takeaways Feature Column by Tim Haag, FIRST PAGE SAGE My ride for the day.