It's funny but the motorcycle I rode to work today I have owned longer than many of the engineers I work with have been alive. I will have owned it thirty years in October (I bought it new) and the data plate says it was manufactured in July 1984. 295,000 miles and still dead reliable (ok, not the original engine, the original lasted 210,000 miles). I'd load it up and ride it across the country tomorrow confident it would take me anywhere I want to go.
I look at these new engineers and think that I was flying aircraft in the Navy and riding motorcycles across the US, Europe and Australia before these men and women were even born. And I think I still have a at least three more good decades left in me (hope and cross my fingers).
What's also funny to me is that the aircraft I flew have long since been retired and replaced by newer models (one aircraft I flew is on display on the deck of the USS Midway, my log shows seven flights and 14 hours in that BUNO), and the only ships still in commission today that were in commission when I served are the USS Nimitz and a couple of her early sisters along with a handful of Ticonderoga class cruisers. All the rest are long gone, replaced by newer and much better ships and most of the Nimitz and Ticonderoga class ships were completed after I left the Navy. I remember when they were brand new ships and now the Navy is discussing their retirement. Ships who's decks I walked or whos flight decks I landed on are long ago scrapped or in a very few cases like the New Jersey and USCGC Taney turned into memorials. I remember them as living breathing combat ships.
