Category: Our Great Kids
Harrison Ford is one of the most recognizable faces in the world.
He also sounds like a pretty good guy. Public domain.
Harrison Ford was born on July 13, 1942, in Chicago. As a child, he was a Boy Scout and, later, a sportscaster for his high school sports program. He was a shy kid but eventually overcame that through drama classes in college.
Ford moved to Hollywood and secured a variety of trivial roles in a number of movies and TV shows in the 1960s. Along the way, he taught himself carpentry and supported his wife and two sons by building stuff. The characteristic scar tracking across his chin was explained as a wound from a bullwhip in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In reality, he incurred the injury in a car wreck after losing control while putting on his seatbelt.
Harrison Ford went on to become one of the most successful actors in the history of Hollywood. He has been the president, a fugitive from justice and a space pirate. His most iconic roles have included Indiana Jones, Han Solo and Jack Ryan — making him one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.
I maintain a tiny little sport plane myself, but it isn’t terribly expensive.
Golden Handcuffs
I’ve never actually met anybody like that, but I suspect it is honestly a pretty tough life. You might have more money than the government, but you really can’t go anywhere and expect any peace. That’s likely why so many celebrities end up so broken and pitiful. It seems that to survive in that bizarre, rarefied world, you’d have to make time for some proper hobbies. For Harrison Ford, that’s flying.
Flying is kind of a rich man’s game if done on any serious scale. I maintain a sexy, cool little homebuilt fighter plane of sorts. However, my airplane is both simple and relatively inexpensive. Buying and operating my machine is about the same process as a decent car.
By contrast, Harrison Ford has maintained a 1929 Waco Taperwing biplane, a 1942 Ryan Aeronautical PT-22, a 1955 de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, a 2009 Aviat A-1C-180 Husky, a 2009 Cessna Citation Sovereign 680 jet, and a 2013 Bell 407GX helicopter.
Ford actually started taking flying lessons in the 60s but couldn’t afford to follow through. He finally earned his pilot’s license at age 53. Since then, he’s flown regularly both for recreation as well as work. His DHC-2 Beaver is a former CIA Air America aircraft bearing the stigmata of repaired bullet holes.
A Close Call …
In 2015, Ford took off in his WWII-vintage Ryan PT-22 trainer and had a carburetor failure on climb-out. He deftly put the old plane down on a nearby golf course but was badly injured in the process. The actor suffered a shattered right ankle and pelvis, along with a vertebral fracture and head trauma. He subsequently spent nearly a month in the hospital.
As soon as he recovered, Ford climbed back into an airplane. His wife reportedly refused to fly with him in his old planes after that, but she’d still ride in the jet. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous part of flying is always the drive into the airfield. However, when things go wrong, they typically do seem pretty flashy.
Harrison Ford has flown for fun and work for nearly three decades. Public domain.
Duty Calls
Ford and his family live on a sprawling 800-acre ranch in Wyoming. For a guy like that to find any real peace, he’d need his space. However, that doesn’t mean he’s not a good neighbor.
On July 31, 2000, 20-year-old Sarah George was hiking with friends on the 11,106-foot Table Mountain in rural Wyoming. They expected their outing to take about five hours. However, Sarah soon became dehydrated and fell ill. The toxic combination of heat and altitude got the better of her. Now deep in the wilderness and unable to walk, things seemed grim.
People still die in places like that. The veneer of civilization with which we are all so familiar is actually quite thin. In this case, Sarah needed to get off that mountain. Failure to do so could easily be catastrophic.
After a desperate phone call to the authorities, Sarah’s friends helped carry her to a flat space adequate to admit a helicopter. The aircraft shot a flawless approach and landed long enough to get the young woman aboard. The pilot was wearing a cowboy hat and a t-shirt.
Once aboard, Sarah recognized the pilot as none other than Han Solo himself. She later reported, “I can’t believe I barfed in Harrison Ford’s helicopter.” By all accounts, Ford was a good sport about it all. The following year, he also used his personal helicopter to rescue a 13-year-old Boy Scout who found himself in dire straits near Yellowstone National Park.
Ruminations
I’ll never know what it’s like to be rich and famous, and I’m good with that. The few folks I have met who occupied that rarefied space seemed burdened by it. However, in the case of Harrison Ford, he seems to wear his success well. When folks nearby got in trouble, he just donned his cowboy hat, fired up his helicopter, and flew out to save their lives. Of course, you’d expect nothing else from a proper space pirate with a heart of gold.
The AR-15 rifle is the most popular long gun in America.
It is built around upper and lower receivers cut from
aircraft-grade aluminum.
Aluminum is a ubiquitous material in modern society. Back in 1956 when Gene Stoner and a few others designed that first AR-15 rifle around aluminum receivers, they literally changed the landscape. In the 1980s, everybody in the combat handgun world was churning out high-capacity, aluminum-framed pistols. Nowadays, we discard or recycle aluminum beverage cans by the zillions.
One of the neat things about aluminum is the way it sort of heals itself. Pure aluminum is highly reactive when exposed to air. However, the resulting aluminum oxide is exceptionally stable. This results in a natural microscopic protective coating on exposed surfaces. In applications like window frames, mechanical trauma from repetitive use results in tiny scratches that instantly oxidize, ensuring a robust material that resists environmental degradation.
Aluminum is relatively soft and easy to both extrude and machine. There are dozens of recognized aluminum alloys. Most AR parts are formed from 6061, which includes trace amounts of silicon, magnesium, copper and chromium. The 7075 alloy includes zinc in place of the silicon.
The 1980s was the decade of the “Wonder Nines.”
These high-capacity 9mm pistols were built
around aluminum frames.
Digging Deeper
Aluminum is indeed fascinating stuff. It has an atomic number of 13 and is roughly one-third of the density of steel. Aluminum is the 12th most common element in the universe and the third-most common element in the Earth’s crust right behind silicon and oxygen. It accounts for 1.59% of the Earth’s mass. The stuff is everywhere.
Despite the fact that aluminum was so common in nature, back in the late 1800s it was actually considered a precious metal. Gram for gram, aluminum once cost more than both gold and silver. Napoleon III reserved his aluminum flatware to impress visiting dignitaries. Lesser visitors got the silver.
In 1884, the Washington Monument was capped with a six-pound piece of aluminum. The total national output of aluminum that same year in the United States was only 112 pounds. Aluminum was revered similarly to platinum. How was it that such an abundant material might have been considered so rare and valuable a short century or so ago? That all depends on how you refine it.
While there are scads of elemental aluminum in the earth’s crust, prior to the late 1800s, it was terribly difficult to access. Most elemental aluminum is found in the form of a natural ore called bauxite. By 19th-century standards, extracting usable aluminum from this ore was nigh impossible.
Nowadays, lots of guns are built out of aluminum. This custom takedown AR short-barreled rifle and this FN SCAR-15P carbine are counted among them.
Find a Need and Fill It
In 1886, a 17-year-old college student named Charles Hall was sitting in a chemistry class when his professor told him about the aluminum quandary. Hall’s professor actually said that if someone could devise a cost-effective method for extracting aluminum from bauxite, he would become the richest man in the world. Intrigued, the teenager went home determined to find a better way.
For the next five years, Charles Hall toiled in a workshop he had erected inside his family’s woodshed. Eventually, his perseverance paid off and he discovered a unique process that would produce aluminum from bauxite using electricity. At age 22, Charles Hall was indeed about to change the world.
Bizarrely, at exactly the same time in France, another 22-year-old, this one named Paul Heroult, discovered the identical technique. The resulting electrolytic extraction of aluminum from bauxite has become known as the Hall-Heroult Process.
AR-15 receivers are lightweight, ubiquitous and strong.
Changing the World
Because both men discovered the process at the same time, neither established a monopoly. However, there was more than enough sweetness to go around. The young Charles Hall founded Alcoa, short for Aluminum Company of America. In 2023, Alcoa’s total revenue was $10.55 billion.
Extracting usable aluminum is still a terribly energy-dependent undertaking. As a result, most aluminum smelters are located in places where electric power is cheap. Production of one kilo of aluminum requires the equivalent of seven kilos of oil energy. That compares to 1.5 kilos for steel and 2 kilos for plastic. Today, 5% of the electric power produced in the United States goes toward smelting aluminum.
A report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) shows that states with stricter control lead other states in adolescent firearm deaths.
NSSF based their findings on a June 2025 study published in the Journal for American Medical Association Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatrics).
The title of the study is, “Firearm Laws and Pediatric Mortality in the US,” and its authors categorized states into three groups, “Strict,” “Permissive” and “Most Permissive.” The authors then claimed, “…permissive firearm laws contributed to thousands of excess firearm deaths among children living in states with permissive policies; future work should focus on determining which types of laws conferred the most harm and which offered the most protection.”
Establishment media outlets like the New York Times, ABC News, and CNN ran with the authors’ claim, leaving NSSF to note that the outlets never asked why the “study’s authors manipulate the data by using estimated, predicted and crude-rate adjusted figures instead of analyzing the real incidents.” NSSF responded by noting that a simple look at raw Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data tells a completely different story.
According to the NSSF:
Rebuilding the data set using the same time, population and mechanism parameters established by the authors using CDC’s data tells a different story entirely.
The eight states the authors rated as “Strict” and having the most restrictive gun control laws – California, New York, Maryland, Rhode Island, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey – on average saw more unadjusted adolescent firearm mortality than the 11 “Permissive” and 30 “Most Permissive” states.
“The firearm industry isn’t deterred or distracted by biased studies that push political narratives,” NSSF added. “For decades, the firearm industry has brought forward effective and proven firearm safety initiatives to keep firearms beyond the reach of those who should never have them. That includes unsupervised children.”
(File this one under the “No Shit Sherlock file” Grumpy)