Oliver's Time in Virginia

Hello Victor and Mrs. Hudson's 3rd grade class!

My name is Michael Vincent and I live in Yorktown, Virginia with my wife and 2 dogs. Oliver arrived in Virginia last week and although I wasn't able to do things with him until about a week later, we still visited a bunch of places! I marked the places we visited as blue symbols on the map below:

The first day I decided to take Oliver to NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA where I work as a project manager for the System-Wide Safety project. My project performs research to improve the safety of all different types of aircraft including airliners and drones. I posed with him in front of the big NASA logo in front of the campus (we call this logo the "meatball" because its round like a meatball).

Langley Research Center was NASA's first location - it was founded over 100 years ago in 1917! While you may know that NASA launches rockets, satellites and astronauts into space, NASA also does research to improve the design of airplanes and even research to understand our planet's atmosphere and oceans. Oliver visited our hangar and got to see our newest airplane we will use for research - a huge Boeing 777! Normally an airplane this big would carry about 300 people across the world, but we plan to use it to study the atmosphere (we could even "sniff" the air to measure it with computers if we needed to)

Boeing 777 in the NASA hangar with a couple of our other airplanes in the back

Oliver got a short tour of NASA Langley which included a couple of wind tunnels. Wind tunnels are used to study how aircraft and spacecraft move through the air. They work by blowing air through a tunnel where a miniature version of an airplane or spacecraft is mounted. As the air goes over the models engineers can study how the air behaves. The engineers can change the speed of the air in the tunnel and can even change parts on the airplane models to see which one is better.

This is the outside of our low speed wind tunnel. It can move air from about the speed of your car going down the road (40 miles per hour) to the speed of a racecar (140 miles per hour)

Those big white spheres are part of our high speed wind tunnel. It can move air more than 10 times the speed of sound! That's as fast as Maverick went in the movie Top Gun!

Oliver also got to meet one of my coworkers in his office and even saw a model of a new airplane that NASA is building. This airplane will fly later this year and will fly faster than the speed of sound!

This is my coworker - Kyle

This is a tiny version of the airplane that is being built in California

On Saturday I took Oliver to the farmers market in Yorktown. Yorktown is where the last battle of the American Revolutionary War took place and our first president George Washington and the continental army defeated the British army. There were a lot of people in Yorktown this week not only because of the farmers market but there were even historic re-enactors teaching people about history!

This is Yorktown and the York River where that famous battle took place

Re-enactors wearing British uniforms teaching people about Yorktown's history

This is the drum and fife club that plays the same music that encouraged soldiers before battle

Then I got coffee at a shop that is inside one of the original buildings of Yorktown - it is over 200 years old! I even saw a corgi there! After that I went home and introduced Oliver to Oscar - a tropical plant that was planted 35 years ago by one of my coworkers at NASA. I adopted Oscar when my coworker retired.