VIEWPOINTS

Jet Pilot's Wife gets fast-paced Experience
Carolyn Knothe | Staff Reporter

For most people it’s no big deal to go visit your significant other’s job. If he or she is a waiter, you can go eat in their restaurant, sit at one of their tables and heckle them to death. If he or she works in a grocery store, you can make them do price checks or find weird grocery items for you. Or of course, if you’re feeling nice, you can bring him or her flowers or lunch and tell them how wonderful they are.
My husband is a pilot, an Air Force T-38 pilot to be exact. He flies those jets that are always zipping around above MSU (they actually use the white coliseum dome as a reference point in their landing pattern, which is why you see them all the time). Needless to say, the Air Force takes a dim view of anyone but a rated pilot getting into the cockpit of its million-plus-dollar jets. So as a lowly wife, I’ve never been able to visit my husband at his job.
  I don’t know what it feels like to be strapped into the T-38, sitting on top of 4000 pounds of gas and two turbojet engines. I don’t know what he feels in the air, or what he’s talking about when he says how awesome it is to feel the afterburners kick in or why it’s so hard to land and read the pattern procedure and dial in the vector all at the same time. As a journalist (at least I like to think I’m working my way towards that title), I want to know things, understand them, and maybe even experience them vicariously through words. And believe me, it’s hard to get a mathematically-oriented fighter pilot to use descriptive adjectives. So I contented myself with watching my husband flying simulator rides. 
Until about two weeks ago, that is.
No, I didn’t get to fly around in the air, but I did get to taxi down the runway pretty fast.
It was the “T-38 Talon Spouse Orientation Sortie,” or less politically correct, “Wife Taxi Day.” Finally, the long-suffering wives of fighter pilots would get to experience a little bit of what our husbands do every day.
First, we got to try out the simulators. And these were not just any simulators; these simulators had a 230-degree, flat-screen image wrapped around an exact replica of the cockpit, complete with blinking lights, throttles, gear handles, and a stick that started shaking if the “aircraft” went into a stall (unfortunately I experienced this situation several times, all of them frighteningly low to the ground. I found out the hard way that you can’t pull up if you don’t have enough speed to keep the airplane flying.)
The simulator was so real that I felt myself getting sick as I piloted the plane towards the runway. The brownish-green computer-generated landscape dipped up and down, and out of my peripheral vision I could see the blue horizon jerkily changing places with the ground. That was enough to get my stomach rolling. I will boast a bit here: I did not crash on my first landing and I executed a loop perfectly, albeit with a little bit of airsickness.
The second-best part of the whole deal, besides the ride, of course, might have been the flight suits. It was like wearing pajamas the entire day, except they look much more official and do wonders for the body. We also got fitted for gloves and helmets and oxygen masks. Think Tom Cruise in “Top Gun.” Except, I looked much cooler.
These things weren’t just for show; they’re part of the rules. They are fire resistant so anyone who gets into a jet must wear them. And at long last, I was getting into a jet.
My ride consisted of strapping myself into a supersonic afterburning fighter jet and shooting down the runway at 135 mph. This speed was attained in about 800 feet. After my husband did the math for me, we figured it was the equivalent of a car going from zero to sixty in 3.5 seconds. Pretty darn amazing.
I have never felt acceleration that can compare to what I felt when the afterburners lit up. An afterburner is a very simple addition to a jet.  It consists of nothing more than a hollow tube attached to the back end of the engine. A large amount of fuel (about one gallon per second in the T-38) is sprayed into the tube where the hot exhaust gases immediately ignite it.  The result is about 40 percent more thrust at the price of enormous amounts of gas.  Normally, they are deafening, but I couldn’t hear them because the canopy was down, I had earplugs in, and a helmet on.
 It felt like a giant hand pushed me back into the seat. There was no transmission to shift and slow it down. I kept thinking the force couldn’t get any stronger, but it did. How anyone can harness that much power is amazing, but people like my husband do it every day, sometimes twice.
And then it was over. But it was an experience I won’t forget and am lucky to have had. And now I know what my husband does.



Foreign Student finds Family with Profs
Ya-Rei Chan | Photo Editor

Every Sunday morning, two of my best friends, and my roommate and I, have breakfast in a nice American family style restaurant. It’s my time to share what I did during the week and what problems I had at school. It may sound funny because, most of the time, people go to church instead.
Because of the daylight savings time change last Sunday, I was early to the restaurant. Therefore, I was waiting my friends to show up.
 My best friends are a couple. They are not my age; they don’t know about fashion; they are not Asian; and they even don’t like to watch movies. We have almost nothing in common, but they are still the best friends I’ve had in my life.
I remember my first year in America, they were trying to talk to me but I could not answer because I didn’t understand English. Also, that was the first time I had Christmas in my life. They knocked at my door and made ho ho ho sounds like Santa Claus. When I went to open the door, there was no one outside but a bag full of gifts.
While I was waiting for them to appear, I remembered when they taught me how to drive. I was at the wheel, and when the traffic light turned green, I forgot to change the gear from R to D. Well, you know what happened. Our car was going backwards when the other cars were driving straight ahead. It was a scary moment, I guess. Oh! By the way it was their car.
I also remembered when the wife made a whole table of Korean dishes for Thanksgiving. She is the best chief in the world. She can cook all kinds of food from different countries all the way from China to Spain to Mexico.
My friends finally appeared. It is so easy to recognize them. The wife has golden hair and always wear a huge t-shirt, while the husband has gray and messy hair and always wears a shirt that looks one size too small. They are my Tommy and Elsie, according to their son who gave them the nickname.  Actually their formal names are Dr. Galbraith, the chair of the English department and his wife Elsa Galbraith.
I enjoy spending time with them. Sometimes we play Pictionary, and one time my roommate even forgot to go to work. Sometimes we go to Wichita Mountains for a picnic. Sometimes I talk to them about what happened when I was little. My babysitter said I was the easiest baby she had to take care of, because I only ate and slept. The kind Dr. Galbraith answered that, “Oh! You have not changed.”
They are really interesting people to know. For example, Elsa used to be a professor of biology. She loves animals. She fed wild raccoons in her garage, until those raccoons moved to her house in-between the walls. Her son told me once that Dr. Galbraith found a hole on the wall in the restroom. He looked though it and saw a raccoon looking at him, too.
Dr. Galbraith loves trains. He used to paint the old train in the train museum in Wichita Falls, and he also put a model train and train track in his office. He thinks it is interesting to see those trains moving. At one point, he made his office over into a little train museum.
     I am very lucky to have these kind of friends here in the US. They give me great advice all the time. They are also like my live encyclopedias and seem to know about everything. I have learned so much things from them, not only knowledge but also helping people.
I went twice to a nursing home with Elsa to visit an older lady. The woman was a good friend of Elsa’s, but was too old to remember her name. Elsa went to visit her all the time until she died. Elsa was her friend and just like family to her.
The Galbraiths are very special friends to me. They are just like my family, here.   

Staff Editorial
Reporting Abuse can Reduce Crime

Each week in this city, approximately 40 women and five to ten men report they have been victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, or have suffered childhood molestation. During the past year, the campus police blotter logged only two reported incidents of sexual assault.
With a population of more than 100,000 people in the city, and more than 6,000 students on campus, how many other crimes like these go unreported?
In last weeks The Wichitan, Police Chief Michael Hagy said that some people don’t report crimes based on how they feel.
If you speak to women on campus and in the area, their lives tell a different story.
According to a zip code search on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s website, there are at least 172 registered sexual offenders in Wichita County alone.
In an article titled, “Report: More than half of violent crimes go unreported in 2000,” published in the March 9, 2003 edition of USA TODAY, U.S. Justice Department statistics stated that only 49 percent of crimes were reported to police in the year 2000.
Victims most often cited "personal matters" as their reason for not reporting a crime, particularly victims of rape and simple assault. Though only 5 percent of victims feared reprisals from their attackers, when it came to sexual assault victims, the number that feared repercussions from their assailants jumped to 12 percent.
In the article, Susan Herman, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crimes, said many people are frightened that the offender might return if they go to the police. "It's very likely that you will have put yourself in danger by reporting to police," Herman said. "The offenders often know who the victims are and know where they live."
Of the people who did report violent crimes, most said they did so to prevent future violence, stop the offender, or protect others. About 8 percent said they called the police because they wanted the offender punished, a number that rose to 12 percent for victims of sexual assaults.
These results are based on interviews of more than 872,000 people age 12 or older who were victims of crime between 1992 and 2000.
The sad fact is that many people, both men and women, are abused daily. In an article published in the April 25, 2002 issue of the campus newspaper for Valdosta State University in Georgia, crime prevention officer, Cpl. Dennis Nealon said a rapist will rape 20 times before he is caught, a number that could be reduced if victims report the crimes.
Victims should not be silent. What happened to them can easily happen to another unless they do something to stop it. As British statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the advent of evil is for good people to do nothing."