Up and at ‘Em Men, the FOD Is Waiting

Life at Miramar Naval Air Station isn’t all that “Top Gun” stuff. Hardly. Every morning at daybreak, for instance, the squadrons line up along their flight lines for their daily FOD search.

FOD. That’s for Foreign Object Damage, which means garbage. A loose chip of concrete. A screw. Someone’s cigarette lighter. A comb. Or a piece of plastic or metal something or another.

FOD causes all sorts of grief to jet turbines, you see, and no one wants a multimillion-dollar plane downed because its engine is decommissioned by a Zippo lighter that got sucked up into the air intake. So, every morning the squadrons do their FOD walk.

The daily, 30-minute FOD walk is nothing, though, compared to the monthly, base-wide FOD walk-down. That’s when everyone who’s available walks shoulder to shoulder across every square foot of runway and apron and flight lines looking for FO’s.

A couple thousand men and women make the FOD walk, looking from the air like so many little ants walking in formation.

“It’s actually not a bad assignment,” said Lt. Ed Mapes, a Miramar public affairs officer. “Since you’ve got everyone out there doing it, it’s one of the few assignments that is non-discriminatory. The airmen are walking next to the skippers. The airmen like that.”

Money Grows on Trees

Some people invest in good old savings bonds. Some folks in the fast lane invested in J. David. And in between there are any number of ways to make a buck.

For John Huemoeller, Ty Wilkinson and Laurence Dunn, it’s a money tree on an island off Panama, where they hope to get rich growing papaya and importing them to the East Coast. Papaya, says Huemoeller, is nothing short of a fashion designer fruit that fetches up to $4 apiece for a quick Wall Street snack.

Huemoeller, 31, is a San Diego securities broker; Dunn, 27, is a San Diego accountant, and Wilkinson, 33, is president of a Fallbrook outfit that manages more than 90 citrus and avocado ranches. Together, they have formed Tropical Island Farms, a limited partnership.

In a few weeks, they say, they’re going to lease 1,000 or so acres on 12,000-acre San Jose Island, where papaya, mango, pineapple, banana and other tropical fruits grow naturally.

Most of the papayas entering the United States these days come from Hawaii, and most of it stays on this side of the Mississippi. Huemoeller & Friends figure the Panama Canal will give them quick and affordable access to the East Coast market which, he says, is wide open to papaya.

“Fifteen years ago no one Back East knew what guacamole is, and today they do. We see the same opportunities with papaya,” Huemoeller said.

In a few weeks, their company--Laurence Dunn came on board more recently as financial manager--will plant the first papaya seeds in a greenhouse on the island, and nine months later the first fruit will be harvested, according to Huemoeller’s schedule. The plant produces fruit year-round for about four years.

He figures that in five years, the company will be growing 10 million pounds of papaya annually, or about 15% of today’s market.

“When you look around for ways to make money legally these days, this is about as innovative as you can get,” said Huemoeller. So far the group has lined up about $2.4 million in investments.

How hard is it pitching papayas? “It’s not that bad, after you get past the first 30 seconds of having them laugh at you,” he said.

Fix Is In, and It’s Legal

Escondido Police Chief Jim Connole wants it made perfectly clear: there are some circumstances when his office will fix parking tickets with hardly a question asked.

That’s because it’s possible to park perfectly legally in one of a handful of downtown municipal parking lots and get ticketed through no fault of your own.

The free parking lots have two-hour time limits and, to make sure downtown employees don’t park there and monopolize the free spaces, the parking enforcement officers jot down license plate numbers of the cars. (They chalk the tires, too, but golly, someone might get the idea of wiping the chalk off. Tsk, tsk.)

It’s possible, Connole said, for a legitimate shopper to park in a particular lot, leave and return later in the day to the same lot--and for the parking enforcement officer to mistakenly assume the car never left and has overstayed its two-hour limit. A ticket is written.

“If that happens, the traffic sergeant will void the ticket,” Connole said. The decision is reviewed by a captain and then by Connole personally.