Wichita

After a couple hang-ups, work sent me out to Wichita to visit customers. The area has a surprising amount of aerospace companies, including Cessna, Spirit, their suppliers, McConnel Air Force Base... I visited one or two of those and explored Wichita for a day or two.

the Keeper of the Plains

The Arkansas river flows through downtown Wichita, and the parks along the banks are lovely. In between a pair of beautiful footbridges, where the Little Arkansas river joins the big one, a statue of a plains warrior with headdress and fringed buckskins looks over downtown. The square behind the statue has a tribute to the people who lived there before... it makes me wonder, when I see these memorial squares. The first nations presence isn't exactly strong here, and the plains don't exist. We seem to be cherishing a remembrance without acknowledging that our choices as a society brought about its end.

 I found another series of sculptures in Wichita that were less historical, more sheer art. They were statues of animals, in an almost Franz Mark expressionist shape. But made from chromed bumpers, so they reflected everything around them and had no real colour themselves, except maybe the blue that they reflected from the cloudless sky.

The second of these sculptures I stumbled into at Wichita State University, where I had an invitation to stop by and see what they're doing with inspection and advanced engineering. It's a really cool setup! Hexagon and Dassault Systemes are right there on-site, and Airbus is finishing up a building next door. The engineering labs have an in-house advisory office for help setting up companies for those projects that can be spun off into businesses, and all of the cool toys (3d printers, scanners, machine shops...) are used for both to do R&D for companies and for education. Students get to be involved in testing out systems to see if they are commercially viable, and develop new systems along the way!