The Lockheed C-5 Galaxy is a large military transport aircraft. It was designed to provide strategic heavy airlift over intercontinental distances and to carry outsize and oversize cargo. It can carry 6 full size motor buses at a time with room to spare.
The C-5 Galaxy has been operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) since 1969 and is one of the largest military aircraft in the world.
Of course, not everyone involved in flying really big airplanes gets to enjoy the all the glamour and excitement of going to strange new places.
During a recent visit to the Air Transport Museum located on the grounds of the Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, I was reading the labels for C-5 Galaxy - what it could carry and the role it played in various miliary hotspots around the world when I heard the squeeking voice of a young boy about the age of 6 years old say...
"Dad! Who was the poor sucker that they forced to count all them ping pong balls?!"
And then I wondered if they made that "poor sucker" count all 25,844,746 ping pong balls all over again to double check their count...
19 comments:
As far as the counting thing...uh, that's my OCD hang up. Of course, I'd have to count them 3 or 4 times...ugh.
Whoever it was, it was probably someone who liked alone time, since nobody would want to stick around while someone counted that many items of any sort.
LOL!! That's funny! I'm sure it was done mathematically, not manually. Then again, it was a military operation...
LOL. Kids say the darndest things. That is one seriously big plane!
I went inside one at an air show..It was like a warehouse with wings! Later, we went to the beach, and it did a fly over- blocked the sun on half the beach!
Russians got a bigger plane than that, if you can believe it..
Can you imagine walking in the room singing "Jenny 8675309...."
Oooo wouldn't want to see that happen.
I loved the pic of the C-5 Galaxy. I'm pretty sure I've walked thru one at an air show at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport one summer. That's one big honking airplane. :)
(that's a lot of ping pong balls too)
Wow! Always a learning lesson over here! Thanks for sharing. Thanks too for my postcards! They arrived today and you should get your cards soon. I sent two individually . Have a happy Memorial weekend. Anne
LOL; I would probably be wondering the same thing too if I saw that display :)
betty
who even thought up the idea to put them in there in the first place?
My first thought was why ping pong balls? Why not basketballs or balloons or leaves or pillows or college students or clowns? Must have been some lobbyist ping pong ball manufacturer involved in this one--ROFL! ;)
LOL too funny and holy cow that is a big airplane!
I would think SOMEONE had to count, right? They can't just throw around such important statistics and NOT be completely accurate.
Do you think whoever it was had to resort to the four vertical, one diagonal line method? Or the ... hey let's get a ton of people together and ask them each to guess how many ping pong balls are on the cargo plane, then take the average and go with the mean (method)? According to some RadioLab show I listened to, this method is almost dead on ... most of the time. I was totally fascinated by that show.
"Out of the mouths of babes..."
My ex son in law worked on C-5s. I got to see them up fairly close. I didn't notice any ping pong balls, tho. heh heh.
Very happy to know they were pingpong balls. At first glance they looked like a pyramid of bug eggs.
I'm with Parsley. I woulda ended up counting it 3 or 4 times just to make sure I got it right. Peeps hated being paired with me during inventory time because I always triple counted before calling out the number. Heh. Save my butt more than once tho as the girl paired with me one year had my back. Said no way in HELL I miscounted with as often as I went thru the pieces to make sure the numbers were solid. If there was an error, it was the spot checkers that came after us. Sure enough, when management check, my counts were spot on.
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