The Northward Contrail

Boeing Boeing 707

Found online, in six parts: a wonderful look back at the Boeing 707's first year.  Start here with Part 1 and work your way forward.  Not to be missed in Part 3: a segment about President Eisenhower's historic trip aboard a certain beloved aircraft.

Enjoy!

Perspective

I was looking for something the other day and happened across this (it's in six parts; the link takes you to the first part, and you can find the rest there).  It's a long-form interview, conducted by a famous documentarian, with Capt. Denny Fitch.  If you don't know the name, Fitch was involved in the United 232 accident in 1989.  He happened to be aboard the aircraft and volunteered his help to the flight crew.  It's a deeply moving film, in unexpected ways. 

If you've had a bad day, it's excellent viewing to help you put things in perspective.

Ah, this takes me back

There's a group out in the Midwest that runs an aviation museum.  The latest acquisition is an old TWA L-1011 TriStar.  I've talked on here before about how much I love the TriStar, and what that big old beast of an airplane meant to me back in the day, and how much I loved every flight I took on it.

That's why the movies on this page, showing the efforts as they get the big airplane ready for one last flight, really take me back, especially the sound and sight of those RB-211s lighting up.  I remember looking out the cabin window and seeing the puff of smoke out the exhaust on engine start, and hearing that low whine start to spool up.  (Of course, they didn't smoke nearly as much as what you see in the movie, but there was some smoke on startup.)

The only thing missing, as far as I'm concerned, is a tiny bit of vibration and that very slight whiff of kerosene. 

No downlink

For spaceflight enthusiasts, this is a tough time of year.  The three big accidents in American spaceflight history -- Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia -- all happened either at the end of January or the start of February.  (To add to the eerie nature, Columbia's final crew paid an on-orbit tribute to those astronauts a few days before they themselves joined their fallen comrades.) 

The Apollo fire happened a few years before I was born, so that was already the stuff of yesteryear when I became aware of the space program and got interested in space and aviation.  I remember the run-up to STS-1 fairly well and remained interested until Shuttle flights became more or less routine.  I lost interest and went on to other things.  Then, one cold January day, I was at school and the rumors started to fly around the lunchroom.  We didn't have televisions in all our classrooms (and we could only get piped-in instructional television over the closed circuit system, anyway), so we weren't able to see anything.  In my next class, the teacher said there had been an accident with the Space Shuttle, the one the teacher was going up on.  Then, at the end of the day, the assistant principal confirmed it during the end-of-day announcements. 

My brother picked me up from school and we listened to the news coverage during the drive home, and then spent the rest of the day watching the coverage on television.  We must have seen the replay of the explosion a dozen times or more.  We watched President Reagan give his famous speech, as it happened.  And after the coverage ended, life kind of went on.  There were special reports later in the evening, of course, but it was surreal to have been watching all this coverage of this horrific thing, only to be sitting there hours later watching Moonlighting.  I remember having trouble trying to reconcile that.  

And that's where my life changed, though I didn't know it.  Challenger had the perverse effect of rekindling my interest in spaceflight and aviation.  In some way, every turn my life has taken since was because of that awful thing.  The trajectory of my life -- and it's a wonderful life -- but that trajectory changed because of this terrible occurrence. 

I've never been sure how to feel about that.  I know about how big things have tiny starts, the whole "a butterfly flaps its wings" thing, and I know the world turns and things happen, but it's still weird.  And I wish this trajectory, which has brought me a wonderful life with great joy and discovery, hadn't been instigated by the deaths of seven space travelers.

It's bound to happen someday

Okay, when it comes to certain things in which I'm interested, I can get slightly obsessed.  (Don't parse the grammar in that sentence, please.  I beg you.)  I'll be the first to admit it.  Those who know me also know this.  For instance, my friend with whom I met up in Seattle last year has heard me go on and on about "Queenie," the VC-137B at the Museum of Flight.  It's almost become a running joke.  I just hope that, someday, this doesn't happen during one of our conversations:

John Chancellor didn't want to do it

Some viewing for a slow Friday, as things wind down: David Letterman hosting the "Late Night" fourth anniversary special, originally aired Feb. 1, 1986.  The gimmick?  He's hosting it from a TWA 747 flying from New York to Miami.  Enjoy.

:: Further to a post from the other week, someone has saved us all the trouble.  Behold, the Mission Statement Generator.

:: Finally, I wondered what became of the very first airplane on which I ever flew.  Not to worry.  Look where she lives now.

The reason my optometrist just bought a new boat

I spent the last several days working on this in Illustrator:

If you know about any certain aeronautical/historical fascinations of mine, you know exactly what this lettering is for. I still have several tweaks to make to it, but the worst of it is now done.

Many folks have tried to reproduce this lettering.  Some efforts have been better than others.  The problem is that you can't just download a computer font and call it done; nope, this lettering is its own beast, and I have looked for years to try and find a font that would take me at least half the way.  None worked.  I was forced to fall back on the way decal art used to be done before the advent of computers: find the best source materials you can, and then draw oversize artwork on paper using a pencil, a straight edge and a curves template.  From there, I scanned it into the computer, imported the oversized letter images into Illustrator, and started drawing away.

As you can imagine, all this close-in work staring at computer screens, and all this fine detail work, means my optometrist is becoming very wealthy.

Why we fight

Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day, and as part of a Frank Capra marathon Turner Classic Movies was showing several of the Why We Fight films.  As some of you know, the War Department asked Capra to make the Why We Fight series as a crash course for new recruits during World War II.  It was figured new inductees didn't have the detailed knowledge behind why the United States was at war, so Why We Fight was meant to inform and motivate.

I've often talked about the Why We Fight films in some of my classes, but I'd never really sat down to watch any of them, so I watched War Comes to America.  I have to confess, I wasn't prepared for how powerful they were.  Capra's style of filmmaking -- the triumph of the decent, honest, upstanding little guy against all odds -- is well-known, and applied to the story of good vs. evil on a global scale, it's powerful.

Capra's films are often derided as "Capra-corn" because they have this quaint, almost naive faith in decency and in things working out in the end.  Life, of course, is seldom like that.  (I've found my own life is far from Capra-esque.  It's more like something Preston Sturges would have made.)  All that said, I can still get choked up by a good piece of Capra's work, and that's what worked on me as I watched last night.  Capra's idealized retelling of American history really got to me, and there's a reason.

I was a bookish kid who spent so much of my childhood reading biographies of historical figures.  To me, history was full of great heroes.  The libraries of my schools had these 200-page biographies of great Americans, written for schoolchildren, and I'd constantly have one of those checked out.  They were the stories of great leaders who rose from ordinary childhoods.  I could sympathize with the stories I read.  Henry Ford, the endless tinkerer whose father called his first automobile a fool contraption.  Young, weak, asthmatic Theodore Roosevelt being bullied by older and stronger kids, only to grow up and become President.  I read these books, and they were the stories of people who seemed no more special than I was, going on to do great things, fighting great battles and make history. 

I almost envisioned history as this sort of Camelot, full of these great figures who rose from simple beginnings and overcame the obstacles of life to become noble warriors who fought great battles.  As I grew older, I graduated from the junior biographies to books like Walter Lord's Day of Infamy and A Night to Remember, narrative history as a series of vignettes, and was captivated by those almost innocent images, almost straight from a Johnny Horton song.

Of course, I grew older and wiser, and I found things out.  Every great historical figure has a dark side.  I held American presidents high on a pedestal, only to learn as I grew older just what goes into attaining and maintaining office, and to learn that every President and every public figure had lesser qualities.  There's the line attributed to Pappy Boyington: "Show me a hero, and I'll show you a bum."  Having grown from an enthusiast to a trained historian, I know exactly what he's talking about.

Still, I see certain things in history, or from history, and I choke up a little.  I can watch Howard Hawks' Sergeant York, for instance, and though in some ways it's a very corny movie, oh, how it drills right to that part of my heart: the day is saved by a quiet hero who does the right thing when the moment comes to act, because it's the right thing to do.  It's the same chill that went up my spine when I visited Queenie a few months back: The cynical, grown-up me knows all the dirty political stuff that likely took place on board (and about her planned role as spy aircraft), but the more innocent part of me absolutely reveres that aircraft because I read stories of her in books when I was younger, and I know about all the history she made, and it absolutely humbled me to be aboard. 

The cynical, grown-up me knows the stories are a little corny.  But the seven-year-old me, nose in a book, doesn't need it explained to her.

Bits and bytes

Since I've been dealing with really big things on the blog the last few days, some smaller items have gone unnoticed.  Here's some quick items:

:: Cormac McCarthy's putting his Olivetti portable up for auction.  What did he replace it with?  Another typewriter, just like it.  I can't help but love any writer who crafts words the old-fashioned way.  (On update: The typewriter sold for $254,500.)

:: An early bit of Christmas cheer for anyone who loves Presidential aircraft.  (Okay, it's from a press release that's a few months old, but I just found it the other day, so it's new to me.)  From the Air Force Museum's website:

The Boeing VC-137C SAM 26000, also known as Air Force One when a president is on board, will be taken off display on Dec. 5 to be painted back to its original presidential paint scheme. Painting is expected to take several months and the aircraft is currently slated to return to the Presidential Gallery on Feb. 13, 2010, in time for Presidents Day. 

This is such glorious news.  I was never really a fan of the revised SAM scheme as it looked on the VC-137s (the full Presidential scheme was always my favorite, particularly on the VC-137Bs), and it seemed undignified for the proud SAM 26000 and SAM 27000 to carry that scheme.  Here's hoping the Air Force Museum does a beautiful job restoring good ol' 26000 to her full splendor, as was done with the gorgeous restoration of SAM 27000 out in the Simi Valley.  (Man, do I need to get out there someday.)

(While they're repainting things, though, could they please take the livery they're removing from SAM 26000 and apply it to the C-32s and C-40s?  I am absolutely no fan of the hideous current livery.  One book I have includes an artist's rendering of a C-32 in the previous SAM livery, and it would have been gorgeous.  The first time I saw the C-32 livery, I wanted to scream.)

This was bound to happen someday

The other night, I was reading the reports out of Shanghai about the MD-11 freighter crash.  Not only did I want to check out the details (which were few and far between in Stateside media), but I also wanted to see if, by some chance, it was an airplane I personally remembered.

(This sounds weird to the uninitiated.  But any airplane fanatic reading this will know about the practice of keeping a log.  Somewhere, be it in a notebook or a computer text file or somehow, you keep a listing of all the types on which you've flown.  Sometimes you record the registration of each one of them, too.  At times, you tally the different types, the different sub-types and the different sub-types within sub-types.  I also keep a list of the aircraft I've been aboard while they were on static display, which accounts for the three Federal Express DC-10/MD-11 variants on my list...along with an E-3 AWACS, a KC-135, a C-130, a C-124 and a few other interesting types.)

That MD-11 wasn't one of "my" airplanes.  But, while looking around for something else, I discovered that one of "my" airplanes met an awful fate a few months ago.

Ever since Era Aviation retired its Twin Otters a few years ago, I wondered what became of the ones I remembered from my trip to Homer in 2005.  I looked up their registrations, and found they'd been exported to Canada after Era disposed of them.  One of them, I couldn't find anything on in a search.  But in a Google search for the other, I saw the words "accident report."  Uh-oh.  Sure enough, the former N886EA crashed into the side of a mountain while hauling freight in Indonesia.  All three aboard were killed. 

I've grown accustomed to the airplanes I knew going off to their fates, and the images of TriStars baking out in the desert, or of a 727 with tail feathers shorn, don't bring the same reaction they once did.  My reaction is more one of grim reality.  And, if you fly enough or work around airplanes, it's inevitable that at least one aircraft on which you've flown or worked will be involved in an accident.  (And, if you're a pilot, it's also a sad likelihood that at least one of your flying buddies will die in a crash.) It just happens. 

Anyone who's been in aviation a while, or who flies frequently, probably has a story.  A friend of mine was particularly chilled when the Air France Concorde went down in 2000; about a year before, he'd been able to take a flight aboard that very aircraft.  And hubby, who's been in aviation a good while, has reminiscences too.  One that tore my heart out was the story of a Convair he used to work on many years ago.  Even though it had been a long time since he'd worked there, and even though the airplane had changed hands, he still spoke of that Convair with such fondness.  The best ship in the fleet, he'd say, always dependable.  One day a few years back, that wonderful, reliable, beloved workhorse finally ran out of luck over the Caribbean, taking one of the pilots with it.  It's not uncommon, and I figured that, sooner or later, the law of averages would catch up with one of "my" airplanes.

Still, it's a weird feeling.  I remember that flight aboard 886 so well: the very short takeoff roll from Homer, the guy a row in front of me reading his Hunter Thompson book, watching the Chelton display on the instrument panel as we bumped back to Anchorage, the dive-bombing short final we shot on the way back in.  It was a memorable conclusion to a wonderful day, and I remember 886 as a wonderful airplane.  Now it belongs to the ages.

To think of that kind of thing happening to something you remember with fondness, and knowing that same airplane is where three people met their fates...well, it's a bit eerie.