28 Comments

1. Ashen:

Nice post Wretch. I love to fly. My favourite part is take off, when the plane first leaves the ground and you feel the tug of the earth, it’s that split second where I wonder ,are we going to make it? Then, whoosh!! off into the wild blue yonder to touch down on warm sands and cold beers. I was only on one flight where smoking was permitted, this obviously before crybabies started running the world. It was on a non-stop British Airways from Phoenix to London. Smoking at 30,000 feet with a beer in my hand. Ain’t technology great! Stay strong y’all, it’s gonna take a lot of work to stop this madman in the WH, and even more work to undo his kneecap of the American economy.

Jun 24, 2009 - 9:13 am 2. Charles:

Ronald Reagan: Poet and Poetry — a Retrospective, Tribute and Memorial — by Michael R. Burch

“High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was a favorite poem of Reagan’s, according to Peggy Noonan, one of his speechwriters:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Interestingly Magee was also a teenage poet when he wrote “High Flight.” Magee died in his Spitfire on December 11, 1941 at the age of 19, just a few weeks after penning the poem. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1922, the son of missionary parents; his father was Scotch-Irish-American, his mother English. He earned a scholarship to Yale in 1939, but in September 1940 he dropped out of college and into the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was sent to England for combat duty in July 1941, where he flew sorties in defense of England and fighter sweeps over France, rising to the rank of pilot officer. “High Flight” was written on the back of a letter to his parents which stated, “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” After Magee’s death, the sonnet came to the attention of the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, who included it in an exhibition of poems called “Faith and Freedom” in February 1942. The poem subsequently was widely copied and distributed. MacLeish acclaimed Magee as the first poet of the war. “High Flight” came to be knows as “the pilot’s creed.” The first and last lines of the poem constitute the epitaph on Magee’s gravestone:

Oh! I have slipped
The surly bonds of earth
Put out my hand
And touched the face of God.

Reagan was present the night fellow actor Tyrone Power recited “High Flight” from memory at a party after his return from fighting in World War II. Later, the poem was read over Power’s grave by Laurence Olivier. The day of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, in 1986 Reagan concluded a message addressed to the nation with: We shall never forget them nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their mission and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.

Jun 24, 2009 - 10:14 am 3. RWE:

Flying in the Constellation days was basically more exciting. Because it was not only more rare but more dangerous.

The Super Connnie had R-3350 Turbo Compond engines. The exhaust from those engines was so powerful that they ran it out through small tubines and then fed it back into the crankshaft.

Reliability was commensurate with the complexity. A retired USAF General I know described flying to the West coast from DC aboard Super Connies. You would take off in the dark and when you got to New Mexico the sun would come up and you could see how many engines you still had running.

They have a couple of Super Connies at Camarillo Airport in Calif, one USAF model and one TWA.

Awesome machines.

Maintenance nightmares.

Jun 24, 2009 - 10:16 am 4. NullificationNow:

The wonder of your first flight, Trans Texas Airline – DC3 – coat and tie Beaumont to Dallas. I will never forget, best flight – Air France – 747 – golf shirt and slacks Houston to Paris, also best airline food ever. Scariest flight Continental – dc8- LA to Houston somewhere over new Mexico, thunder storm several passengers injured/AeroMexico close second.

Jun 24, 2009 - 10:18 am 5. Lucy:

Scariest flight? The day I had just left DXR and thought the engine in my Piper Cherokee quit. Best flight ever? All of them.

Jun 24, 2009 - 10:58 am 6. anton:

4. NullificationNow:

My first flight was a Piper Cub flying out of a grass field that is a Meijer’s Superstore parking lot now. I smiled so hard the whole time that my face hurt afterward.

Best flight was also on Air France, got bumped off of a Northwestern at Dulles and onto a nearly empty Air France to Paris, gotta agree about the food, plus the wine was non-stop.

Worst flight ever was a Mesaba Airlines Detroit-Marquette turboprop. Thunderheads everywhere over Lake Michigan, nobody got hurt but it was the one time I thought I might puke.

Coolest flight ever, the Ford Tri-motor flying to the islands in Lake Erie on Island Airways the last year they were in service.

Dumbest flight-related thing ever; hang-gliding while drunk off of the Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan.

Jun 24, 2009 - 11:09 am 7. Punditarian:

Surprising that no one has mentioned the identity of “Captain Eddie,” briefly seen at the beginning of the film. The co-pilot is shown nodding his head and saying “What a guy . . .”

As well he might. “Captain Eddie” ws the longstanding head of Eastern Airlines, the WW1 ace Edward Vernon Rickenbacker . . .

Jun 24, 2009 - 11:09 am 8. Charles:

Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and “Old Times on the Mississippi”

From the beginning of “Old Times,” Twain9 is in an “Ah, those were the good ol’ days” tone. Twain explains that the number one goal, the “one permanent ambition” (Old Times 1), of the boys in the small riverside town where he grew up was “to be a steamboatman” (1). He says that the reason for this had to do with the popularity of the steamboats in the townspeople’s eyes. Twain’s village was always very quiet and lifeless–until any time a steamboat arrived. When that happened, the entire “dead town [became] alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all [would] go hurrying from many quarters to a common centre, the wharf. Assembled there, the people [would] fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they [were] seeing for the first time” (2).

Having overcome the difficulties that becoming a pilot involved did not result in happiness for Twain, however. The glamour of his position had faded from his mind as he devoted his attention to the river. Ignorance is bliss, and Twain had overcome his ignorance about being a steamboatman:

Now when I had mastered the language of [the Mississippi] and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! (27)

At this point, Twain’s reminiscences about “the good ol’ days” have become something much more substantial. “Old Times” is, with its development from ideal to reality, very much about innocence and experience, not in any sexual sense, but in the sense of a person becoming mature in the way he sees the world. For example, in the third installment of “Old Times,” Twain describes a stirringly beautiful scene of the Mississippi, from the perspective he had had when he first started travelling on it. He creates a wonderful photograph with words. Next, Twain describes the same scene through the eyes of a pilot because, he says: “a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them” (27). Every feature of the river, to Twain the pilot, is a sign of some problem to be dealt with. Most of the beauty on the river’s face actually masks danger. Finally, Twain concludes that “all the value any feature of [the river] had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat” (28).

Jun 24, 2009 - 11:15 am 9. RWE:

Closest I ever got to flying in an aircraft like a Connie was a trip in a USAF C-118 (DC-6) from Tinker AFB to Wright Patt AFB in 1975.

Best description of an emergency landing I ever heard:

“I thought the landing went quite well up until the point where the fire started.”

Jun 24, 2009 - 11:53 am 10. Ron Hardin:

Flying finally gets to be about what you first expected after a few hundred hours, and you begin to interpret what the airplane is saying less dumbly.

Jun 24, 2009 - 11:57 am 11. Paul Milenkovic:

OK, excuse my ignorance, but is that Mr. Godfrey in the left-hand seat? Did he have an ATP certificate and was this on a commercial run, or did they let him fly the plane on whatever rating he had without passengers to “promote the airline”? If Mr. Godfrey flew a DC-3, he must have had at least a multi-engine if not an instrument rating, but to even fly a Constellation, I would think you would need a type rating, unless this counted as a training flight.

And this bit about shutting down engines in flight to demo that the plane was controllable with only an outboard engine running, hoo boy, they let Mr. Godfrey at the controls for that one? The Constellation may have been designed to do that, but I imagine he had to stand on one of the rudder pedals in that flight configuration. One is perhaps only one leg muscle cramp from turning into an unrecoverable flat spin.

Jun 24, 2009 - 12:00 pm 12. R Wilhelm:

most memorable: flying in a T-6 Texan and learning how to do aerobatics, especially the “Split-S”. The worst (but most exciting): thinking I was going to have to jump out of a B-25 Mitchell somewhere near the Grand Canyon because of an engine failure.

Jun 24, 2009 - 12:06 pm 13. programmer:

I asked a huey pilot friend of mine to teach me enough so I could fly one if I had to (This was early Viet Nam days). It was a hoot, but after the first (and only lesson), I resolved to carry a machete every where with me so I could walk and hack my way out, if I had to. My hat is off to the many chopper pilots who made it look easy.

Jun 24, 2009 - 12:16 pm 14. Roderick Reilly:

My second flight was on a Connie (first was a DC-3). Flew TWA across the Atlantic.

Jun 24, 2009 - 12:38 pm 15. Brock:

I look forward to the day when an orbital launch to L5 is as commonplace and boring as the commuter from New York to DC. Fuels costs to orbit are only a couple hundred bucks per person; it’s the NASA ground crews and “use once, throw away” rockets that make it pricey.

Jun 24, 2009 - 12:52 pm 16. pharmaguy:

#6 Anton: That would not happen to be old National Field along Ford Road in Western Wayne County now, would it?

I choose aisle seats when I can for ease, but it doesnt take much to look out of a window at 35,000 feet, or even 2,500 feet, and think what any king or queen would have paid for such a view anytime in the past before Wilber and Orville. Take a look, when you’re feeling especially jaded, and see the beauty of this lovely planet we have been given.

Jun 24, 2009 - 1:06 pm 17. Whitney:

7. Punditarian:

Thanks for pointing out that that was Eddie Rickenbacker. That passed right by me. I read his book and admired his many feats, but had never heard his voice. An amazing man. As a kid I flew on Eastern Airlines with my Dad and one of my brothers shortly before it went belly up (long after Eddie was running it). Sometimes I blame us on its financial undoing. We flew on the unlimited mileage fare. Buy a ticket to a destination and add as many stops along the way as you want for the same price. My dad flew us to SLC with stops in Miami, Montego Bay Jamaica, Merida Mexico and New Orleans all for the same price as going straight from Milwaukee to SLC.

Jun 24, 2009 - 1:11 pm 18. Herb:

Godfrey Owned a DC3 according to the second part. I remember him on the radio when I was a kid.

Rickenbacker was an incredible individual. Got a MOH in WWI, In WWII while on a mission for FDR, the B17 ditched. He spent 24 days on a raft in the Pacific. Finished the mission after rescue.

Then he ran Eastern

Jun 24, 2009 - 2:10 pm 19. toad:

IIRC, Godfrey was rated for multi-engine, and flew a DC-3 a lot.

Ah those engines, mechanical supercharging, blow down turbo charging, Pressure Discharge Carbs, dry sump oil systems, and what seemed like hundreds of especially shapened sheet metal airflow guides around the cylinders. Quick disconnect fittings for fuel, hydraulics, and electrics were a necessity for these engines.
They were excellent at squeezing the mileage out of the fuel. For a brief span of time piston engines also had the altitude edge over jet engines.

Jun 24, 2009 - 2:32 pm 20. Konyok:

Scariest flight: Denver to Durango, Colorado.

A bit more than halfway through the flight over the Rockies the smell of something burning filled the cabin of the 24 seat Embraer. “Hydraulic fluid?” I thought to myself. The stewardess disappeared into the cockpit, leaving us passengers with our own thoughts for one, two, three … five minutes, an eternity. The lady in front of me, flying for the very first time in her 60 plus years, became hysterical, triggering a general panic. Finally, the stewardess emerged with an explanation: a huge forest fire, 150,000 acres of the San Juan mountains ablaze. Within seconds we could see the fire below us, and catch glimpses of bright red helicopters below us dropping buckets of retardants. As we approached Durango, we were forced to circle around in severe turbulence and the fringe of a thunderstorm for nearly an hour to accomodate the higher priority slurry bomber traffic. The smoke plume was a mushroom cloud …
I kissed the ground when I alighted.

Jun 24, 2009 - 3:19 pm 21. RWE:

My scariest flights all had me at the controls. And they get scarier the more I think back on them.

Getting lost because I did not bother to look at a chart or at the compass or by following the wrong road, trying to fly formation on two other airplanes in thick haze and depending on them for navigation to boot, trying to climb over vaulting cumulus, flying when the engine was acting up, taking off when I could see a thunderstorm close by.

Whathell was I thinkin?

Compared to all that, the other stuff – flying near thunderstorms and losing engines while riding in airliners are big yawns.

But then there was the day I was driving to the airport and a woman ran a red light and hit me – that tops all the aviation dangers.

Jun 24, 2009 - 4:43 pm 22. Dave:

My least pleasant flight?

C-118 (DC-6) in-country MEDEVAC from Chu Lai
to Nha Trang with either two or three intermediate stops.

Litters on board were too short for me, so I was partially hanging off on both ends, with
numerous open wounds on both legs.

Junior Flight Nurse was the cutest and most voluptuous dark-haired Cajun woman I have ever seen. Her air force garments were
s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d to the max. I could barely work up any interest.

However, she, the Senior Flight Nurse and a couple of MedTechs were busy keeping a couple of other guys alive until Nha Trang. I decided to refrain from complaining and Count My Blessings instead.

The fact that such service was available more than made up for the discomfort.

Jun 24, 2009 - 5:20 pm 23. Marcus Aurelius:

My worst flight was Al-Italia from Rome to Dubai, it wasn’t the flight it was the staff, they’ld sooner spit on you than help. Thought the flight out from DXB to Rome and then ORD was fine and so too from ORD to Rome. My uncle supposes the staff were PO’ed they had to go to the Middle East. I suppose flying in that puddle jumper from Milwaukee to Detroilet would qualify as I vaguely remember flying through a rockin’ n rolling thunderstorm — but I was mostly asleep for it.

Best flights are those involving bump-upage. Dubai to Manila & Manila to Japan. The MNL to Japan flight especially, we sit down and the stewardess asks if I wold like something to drink OJ, this juice, or some bubbly. I smile and ask for the bubbly and finish it rather quickly and she asks if I would like another — what a dumb question! They served us breakfast before takeoff too, it had been a long time since I had an American style breakfast and it was much appreciated. However from Japan to Detroilet we were back in peon class and had to deal with an immigration situation (once they got to us our case was dealt with fairly expeditiously but we missed our onward flight – just caught the next one).

If the winds are right we get buzzed by takeoffs and approaches to the nearby regional airport. I still amaze at it all, the whole dance of people to build, maintain, fuel, load, sell tickets, arrive at the airport, staff the plane, etc.

Jun 24, 2009 - 7:37 pm 24. Roy Lofquist:

My only flight in a Super Connie. Pakistani Airlines from Lahore to Peshawar. Sat near the back. Guy up near the middle had a goat that defecated in the center aisle. Takeoff. Just short of V1 on come the brakes. Back to the hotel. Three hours later tried again – same thing. Next morning the takeoff was fine. Actually landed OK.

Most harrowing experience. A3D. Refuel in Khartoum. Forty thousand pounds of JP-4 and 115 degrees. Commander Pruitt hops us over the fence at the end of the runway, bounce off the desert and lumbered up. Tower guy comes on the radio and says “did you hit our fence?”. Pilot was fingering the JATO button all the way to Nairobi.

Jun 24, 2009 - 7:49 pm 25. Jim Davis:

#11–the guy in the right seat is Dick Merrill. Merrill was the consumate airline pilot and a good friend of Arthur Godfrey.

(from Wikipedia)
Henry Tyndall “Dick” Merrill (1 February 1894 – 31 October 1982) was an early aviation pioneer. Among his feats he was the highest paid air mail pilot, flew the first round-trip transatlantic flight in 1936, was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal pilot during the 1952 presidential elections, set several speed records, and would go on to be Eastern Air Lines’ most experienced pilot with over 36,000 hours until his retirement in 1961. In total, Merrill flew over 45,000 hours as pilot in command, covering over eight million miles.

At a time when record-breaking pilots were treated as celebrities, pioneer aviators like Dick Merrill gained a unique status. His most famous flight was a 1936 round-trip transatlantic flight that has gone down in the annals of flight as the “Ping Pong Flight.” The following year, Merrill also completed the first commercial trans-Atlantic flight.

Godfrey may have been in the left seat, but it was definitely DIck Merrill’s airplane.

Jun 24, 2009 - 8:11 pm 26. Ned:

Wretchard,
Fantastic post! My first memorable flight at age ten was Sioux Falls, SD to Denver on a DC6B. I’m sure I drove the school teacher next to me nuts by continuously asking her if it was time to change my watch back. On another note, we’ve had B-24’s and B-17’s buzzing over on fathers day weekend. The only thing better was the year that the Blue Angels performed over Eliott Bay and we could count the rivets from our deck.
The sound of freedom.
Ned

Jun 24, 2009 - 10:57 pm 27. Jay:

I flew with a bud out of San Jose, CA in 1960 when I started grad school at Stanford. My bud had an instructors rating. Once we were airborn and flying over the coastal range he did several no G up and over maneuvers. The first time I became totally disoriented. The other two times I held onto the map pocket and so of enjoyed it. But the Cessna’s fuel tanks were not designed for zero G and we vented fuel. He shut of the radios, opened the windows and we flew in circles for a while. I turned green and so he landed in a small field in the East Bay. We had a cup of coffee and then flew back to San Jose. The runways there are the same as in 1960. We approached from the south but the radio did not work after it was turned on. It was getting dark and I could not see the runway but he could. He flashed the landing lights and the tower signaled a green flash and so we were cleared to land. I believe that the tower operator at Idelwild was operating such a light signaling device.
My scariest flight was on an Eastern DC9 with my wife from Pittsburgh to Roanoke, VA. We were vectored through a thunderstorm. They do not do that anymore. We had St Elmos green radiation on the wings and for a while we were not flying but were tossed around. When the pilot turned on the no smoking light and the landing light I almost panicked. But we made it.
The other hairy flight was on the final to Austin on a AA 727 from Chicago. There were several AF pilots on the flight. Then Bergstrom was an AF base. A thunder storm south of Austin suddenly moved north and when we were about 1000 feet in the final the 73 started yawing. It was still clear but the winds picked up. When we landed the AF pilots clapped. That got my attention. I waited until most of the passengers disembarked and I asked the captain what speed he used in the final few minutes. He was over the max for normal approaches. He was a bit shook up and told me that he had to do it to avoid wind shear. No wonder the AF pilots clapped.
When I went outside the terminal to wait for my daughter to pick me up I could hardly stand up because of the wind. The rain was the typical central Texas deluge.

Jun 25, 2009 - 7:54 am 28. Pat Patterson:

I was four years old the first time I flew and it was on a Constellation. Of course at that time I didn’t really know the difference just that I was flying and going on a trip with my mom. I still have the plane shaped pin the stewardess gave me and the brochure describing the routes Western Airlines flew in 1952.

But I especially remember that we hit a very bad pocket of air near San Francisco and a man using the toilet was banged up considerably. The head stewardess was a nurse who cleaned and stitiched a gash and I think reset his broken arm. The last I’m not too sure about just that he made a lot of noise then calmed down after getting a sedative and a splint.

Years later when I began flying regularly it was a shock to find out that even in the 50’s there were only a few stewardesses that were still nurses and by the 60’s there were none as a condition of employment. I had assumed that the nursing requirement was still followed.

Jun 25, 2009 - 5:08 pm

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