Not Affiliated with Burlington Industries

Greetings from Vermont! Once again, I find myself in the Green Mountain State, this time for some live fire testing of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's gun. If that sounds awesome, it's because it is. I'm staying in Burlington, and I always forget how close to Canada this is. What weird is that when I was eating breakfast this morning, they had on Canadian news. I didn't notice until they gave the website and it ended in ".ca." Before that my only clue was that they were spending a lot of time talking about hockey. I noticed this when I was in Montreal before- out of every 5 topics covered on the news, 4 happened in the US. Maybe there just isn't that much to talk about in Canada. Of course, I notice the same thing in England as well.

At any rate, the testing was at the Ethan Allen firing range, and it has nothing to do with the furniture (it's incorrectly labeled as the Underhill Artilery Range here). Lots of stuff out here is named after Ethan Allen. I think the range is also a National Guard outpost, but it was actually a really pretty, woodsy place in the middle of the mountains. So there on the range they have the actual JSF gatling gun set up, and they were firing off bursts of ammo while taking various measurements. Now, I don't want to use too many technical terms for everyone, but the gun was "really big" and "really freakin' loud." Even when it was just firing a single shot from the other side of the giant bullet-proof doors, you still had to cover your ears, and it seemed to suck all the air out of the room, then blow it back. It was cool. For the last shot of the day they did a 60 round burst, which took less than a second. It almost seemed to just make the air in the room vibrate, for lack of a better term. It's hard to describe, but definitely manly.

The range was 200 meters long, and there was a huge berm at the end to catch all the lead. When the gun fired, huge clouds of dirt would instantly kick up on the hill. The most surreal part of the day was right after a 10 shot burst, one of the technicians said "Oh look- deer!" And sure enough, there were two deer walking across the range. I asked "Aren't they scared off by the guns?" The guy said "Oh no, they're used to it by now." Yikes. Apparently the deer have also figured out that for the most part the bullets are above their heads, but man. I would've thought they had better self-preservation instinct than that.

So the testing was supposed to take 3 days, and I planned to witness two of them. Then on Thursday I was going to fly back to DC, then turn right around and fly to Indy for Carly's graduation. The only problem is that the testing finished today- and what would normally be a great surprise has totally boufed my travel plans. Now I have to fly to DC tomorrow, drive the two hours home, then drive back to the airport on Thursday to fly. Also, now I have to take Thursday off from work as well, instead of that just being my travel day. Oh well!