In the age of the 707

Those were the good ole days. Pilots back then were men that didn’t want to be women or girlymen. Pilots all knew who Jimmy Doolittle was. Pilots drank coffee, whiskey, smoked cigars and didn’t wear digital watches.

They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn’t bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some Gov’t agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.

Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on the cell phone!!!

Being an Airline Captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the Stewardesses (aka.Flight Attendants) were young, attractive, single women that were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution. They didn’t have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harrassment claim. Junior Stewardesses shared a room and talked about men…. with no thoughts of substitution.

Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite, they could speak AND understand English. They didn’t speak gibberish or listen to loud gangsta rap on their IPods. They bathed and didn’t smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn’t travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no mongolhordes asking for a “mu-fuggin” seatbelt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.

If the Captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired.

Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there, after all it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a hardwood floor). Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for those new age guys.

There was very little plastic and no composites on the airplanes or the Stewardesses’ pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye pleasing symetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tatoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows.

Airlines were run by men like C.R. Smith and Juan Trippe who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves…not pseudo financiers and bean counters who flit from one occupation to another for a few bucks, a better parachute or a fancier title while fervently believing that they are a class of beings unto themselves.

And so it was back then….and never will be again.

Enjoy, if you can.

Hyperbod will log your weight online, and make a weight graph.

Please excuse my absense from the podcasting arena. I have not given it up, and I appreciate all those of you who have downloaded and listened to my rantings.

If you are traveling to Oshkosh, and would like to say “Hi”, we will probably be in the pet section of Camp Scholler with our brown Jeep Grand Cherokee, and our new Hi-Lo trailer. Look for the license plate “P’DCAST” on the SUV.

See you there!

Len

And, for comparison purposes, here is the USA’s Lockheed F-22 Raptor:

You can download the mp3 file directly here:

My family drove to Bedford, Massachusetts to borrow my mother’s Class B Motorhome. It was in need of a lot of attention, as the routine maintenance had been neglected, and it had a pretty nasty water leak. We did some work on it in Mom’s driveway, and took off back home, with a quick stop to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house in Pennsylvania.

After returning home and working on the water problem, we sent our daughter off with some friends to Colorado (for some reason, our 15 year old didn’t want to go to the airshow), and departed the house on Tuesday, late afternoon. Tuesday night we spent freelance camping en route in the van, and Wednesday stopped in Beloit, WI to get a LP gas problem fixed and to buy a pair of new RV batteries. We arrived in Oshkosh later that afternoon. We paid our $19 per night to stay in Camp Scholler, and found a spot in the pet area. So, it was me, Inna, Alan and Sima (our Yorkie) staying in the miniature motorhome.

Thursday morning, we rose, used the community showers, and made our way out to Airventure, where we took in the static displays, and listened to separate forums hosted by Chuck Yeager and Bob Hoover. We watched the aerial shows, heard a violin concert in the Theater in the Woods, and returned to the van to a nice meal of beef stew. As with last year, we arrived in Oshkosh at about the same time that the rain did, so the shows were abbreviated.

Traveling with our 5 month old was difficult, but it seems that the EAA has families in mind. We found diaper changing stations in a couple of places, fully stocked with all sizes of disposable diapers, as well as a “Mother/Baby Hanger” where mothers and babies can do what they do, with an outdoor waiting area for the dads.

Friday, we had some more fun watching the dogs from the US Customs and Border Protection agency sniff out drugs and contraband from suitcases on stage. I watched forums on GPS and WAAS, and flying cars, while Inna watched the airshow again. Tragically, this was the afternoon when two P-51 Mustangs collided with each other on landing, killing pilot Gerald S. Beck, 58, of Wahpeton, North Dakota.

Pilotcast Podcast-Palooza

At 5:30, in the GAMA pavillion (#2) I was invited by the Pilotcast guys to join them and representatives of Uncontrolled Airspace, Airspeed Online, Ultraflight Radio, The Finer Points, the CFIcast, and the Student Pilot Flight Podlog in a round-table discussion/hangar flying talk which will be available soon on the Pilotcast site. I may also put the mp3 in the Flying Pilot podcast feed.

After this, Inna and I took a walk around all of the airplane tie-downs to see what we want to buy or build.

Saturday morning, I took a workshop in composite construction, where we took a flat square of foam, filled it in with epoxy mixed with microballoons, covered it with fiberglass cloth, and coated the whole thing with epoxy resin. Afterword, the whole thing was covered with a dacron sheet. It turned out pretty well. I was pretty tired when I attended the briefing for the fabric covering workshop, so I ended up skipping the practical portion, but learned a lot in the presentation.

World War II Bombers

In the Saturday airshow, there was a formation of WWII bombers, a B-17, a B-24, and three B-25s. Also, there was the highly anticipated demonstration of the F-22 Raptor. It astonishes me each time I see it fly straight up, run out of speed, and simply nose over and accelerate again perfectly horizontally. Oh the technology of vectored thrust!

3 Generations of Air Force Fighters

Later, the F22 was joined by a P-38 and F-86 in an Air Force Heritage formation flight.

Saturday night, we saw the 1942 John Wayne movie The Flying Tigers at the fly-in theater. Inna and I both enjoyed it, and Alan seemed to enjoy it as well, at least during the times that he was awake.

Oh, I’m not going to talk about all of the commercial displays. You can read about them in many other places, with new VLJs, (Very Light Jets), LSAs (Light Sport Aircraft), and flying cars. Just visit Airventure.org to see them for yourself. I did pick up the book about Captain Jeppessen, and will talk about him and his little black book on a future podcast.

The podcast is here:

Freedom Flight website.

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