There are times you don't want life to imitate art -- especially when you're the passenger on a C-5 Galaxy, and the art is the climax of my "Best Defense" storyline, from Iron Man #78.
Readers of that issue may remember Iron Man's mid-air rescue of a C-5 Galaxy military transport, bringing it down it in one piece in the reflecting pool on the Mall in Washington, D.C. That scene seemed nearly unimaginable -- until yesterday, when a C-5 landed in three pieces in nearby Dover -- and everyone lived!
Check out the AP story here, where former pilots credit the design for the survival of the occupants. I came to agree with them as I dug into the design specs for the C-5 quite a bit in working out that arc -- the "Operation Babylift" disaster, mentioned in #77, was a real-life event worked into the background of the story. I knew the plane could take a lot of punishment -- just not quite this much!
At any rate, I'm glad everyone aboard yesterday's flight made it -- and props (no pun intended) to Lockheed. That's amazing...