If Chevrolet doesn’t track the driver and truck down, and use it in a commercial, they are missing the bus BIG TIME!!!
The red truck will be seen on the left side of the frame.
Omg… just going thru my video. This is a story about a red truck and a tornado…. I CANNOT believe they drove away like that. #txwx #tornado pic.twitter.com/8h0nD88xFv
— Brian Emfinger (@brianemfinger) March 22, 2022
And somebody is going to have a helluva story for the rest of their lives!!!
And speaking of things that do ‘strange’ things in the wind, how about a BUFF going down the runway sideways thanks to its swivel gear?
(Also known as cheating)…
h/t Stretch for the BUFF video
Put the swivel wheels of the BUFF on the truck.
Go on; I DARE ya!
My first car was a 1963 Chevrolet Biscayne, with a 230 ci straight six and 3 on the tree; special option on this economy family car was: an AM radio.
Still, there were a couple of times I really could have used those swivel wheels.
My first car was the same, but a Bel Air model – 4 doors. Learned to slide around corners (drifting in today’s parlance, at least to some extent) on dirt roads around DFW. Rebuilt the engine my junior year of college, then had a drunk woman total it while it was sitting outside my apartment in Dallas about a month after I got it back on the road.
I drive a Silverado. Since I live in Kansas it’s nice to know they’re tornado proof.
I lived in Missouri for 45 years, but never got THAT close to a tornado while driving. Had to hide under some overpasses, though. Closest approach was a night-time twister that took the roof off of the detached garage at my grandmother’s house while we slept.
Saw that many times from the launch truck at Carswell a few decades ago. Quite weird especially when keeping the vertical stab in view. We used to test it on grease plates until they outlawed the process.
A couple questions:
Why don’t they do that on commercial airliners?
Why didn’t those parachutes have a smiley face and say Have A Good Day?
1. Because it’s expensive and a maintenance nightmare.
2. Because Military Purchasing agents are a humorless, gutless, soulless group of people.
It’s been over 40 years but I seem to remember lightly laden B52’s take off with what appeared to be a nose down attitude. I spent 6 years on a B52 base and when they were doing local training flights wouldn’t carry bombs or full loads of fuel. Their bomb carrying capacity @ 70,000 lbs and fuel @300,000 lbs made for some serious lift. Got my dad a tour of a B52 and he was almost speechless. Years later I got a tour of a B17, I was speechless.
Both the driver and the person close enough to film it should immediately buy lottery tickets.
That truck video is mind blowing. If it hadn’t been on video no one would believe him.
There was time when the ability of the BUFFs to”cheat” on crosswind landings and takeoffs) was highly classified. Back then, that video would’ve been classified and buried in the same warehouse as the lost ark.
All- Thanks and yes, the old Chevys were pretty stout!
Re the BUFF, yes, that used to be classified and they do take off nose down when they are light!!!
And, FWIW, I’m pretty sure that’s Fairchild AFB.
Used to watch the BUFFs do touch-and-go, and until I got older couldn’t figure out why the nose was down during takeoffs. Also a hoot to be watching on-axis during a loaded takeoff and watch the wings actually flap after liftoff!
“flap after liftoff”
That’s even more exciting than watching an aircraft carrier’s flight deck flex three different ways in heavy seas.
Chuck Taylor, during a break, told some of the class about his close brush with a tornado while driving cross country. Driving at night, following a car about a hundred feet ahead, it suddenly got very dark and noisy. When the night returned to normal, the lead car was gone. He said it was later found about a 1/4 mile away from the highway, in a field, with the occupant dead.
I think he said the sudden pressure differential in that situation destroys the lungs, but memory is fuzzy on it.
At least the Chevy driver didn’t have to call for a tow to flip it back on the wheels. Hmm, a self-righting pickup! That would be a useful option 🙂
One of the weather guys I worked with at Boeing (he lives up this way in Greeley) used to be a storm chaser. He quit doing because he said “Those Guys Are NUTZ!”.
The BUFF is an incredible aircraft. First time I toured one I was amazed at how big the bomb bays are.
“Drive a Chevy! Be too stupid to stay away from a tornado! See your dealer today!”
The B-52 made me think of the guy in the beer commercial: “I don’t always crab into the wind after touchdown, but when I do, it’s in a B-52”.
The pilot is so far in front of the front gear, he is almost over the edge of the runway for the front and rear gear to staddle the center line.
Will- He or she was lucky, no question!!!
drjim- Yep, big, noisy, and uncomfortable as hell…
Robert- LOL
Ed- Correct. Depending on the crab, either the pilot or copilot has the ‘visual’ reference for the centerline.
To this day I cannot buy a GMC product because of Barack Obama.
Pontiac. Oldsmobile. Saturn.
What an asshole.
The B52?
We used to design aircraft that had a lifespan of ? years.
What the HELL happened?
Engineering competence comes from experience, and in some cases can be reduced to ‘tools in a book’, and learned again with relatively little experience.
The civil engineers sometimes think they know how to design a building to last decades. It would be much rarer for an aerospace engineer to know that they are competent at that time scale.
Thing about the designs for the first 20-30 years of the cold war? Aircraft designers had a lot of experience during WWII. Bunch of designs produced in numbers, and sent into combat.
B-52 is partly survivorship bias. It wasn’t originally designed for that lifespan, and a lot of contemporary aircraft didn’t have fundamentals as good, or simply were not selected to be kept in service. See early cold war jet fighters.
Also, see F-117 versus B-2. They used parallel design approaches, but the B-2 was pretty good, and the F-117 was a bit less worth sustaining.
I’ve very willing to believe that current engineering cohorts in question are worse equipped. For a definition of equipped that includes experience, and the costs involved in bureaucratic requirements. HR, environmental impact, and all the stuff involved in government contracting are bureuacratic requirements.
They found both truck and driver. He’s 16. https://www.kxan.com/news/local/bastrop-county/we-found-the-red-pickup-truck-that-flipped-over-in-elgin-tornado/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co
From the NWS Tulsa office stormspotter training. Definitions – Stormspotter: a person trained by the NWS to provide eyes-on truth to what they’re seeing on the radar. Usually licensed HAM radio operators talking to another HAM in the weather office (volunteer since HAMs can’t be paid).
Store CHASER: idiot they let out of the insane asylum. Typically paid by a local TV station, handed a video camera and told “it’s that way, get us some good video!”
Jay, you are “spot” on. I used to be a HAM spotter back in Texas until the movie “Twister” came out. It was the worst thing that could have happened. Now there are a bunch of incompetent idiots clogging up the roads and endangering each other. Now I just sit at my house and look out the windows. It is much safer.
Cool BUFF vid.
Ever read Flight of the Old Dog? Fun book about a buff that got the Skunk Works treatment and then went on a suicide run against a Russian laser site? Good stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Old_Dog
All- Thanks for the comments, and yes, read that Heath! AND apparently a local dealer gave the kid a brand new pickup for that one!