Aircraft Pilot Quotes

Don't have to see," the pilot grunted. "Olga knows the way." "Funny name for an aircraft," Grace commented. "Is it after your wife?" "My gun." Grace stared at him. "You named your plane after a gun?" "It was a very good gun.

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died.

In time, the Navy would compile statistics showing that for a career Navy pilot, i.e., one who intended to keep flying for twenty years... there was a 23 percent probability that he would die in an aircraft accident. This did not even include combat deaths, since the military did not classify death in combat as accidental.

There's only one job in this world that gives you an office in the sky; and that is pilot.

Grandson: Were you in the war, Grandpa? Grandpa: Yes, I was a fighter pilot. Kid’s mom: Weren’t you stationed in Illinois, Dad? Grandpa: Yes, and I’ll have you know not one enemy aircraft got passed Missouri! Good

The pilot of any plane will agree that when an aircraft is flying with the currents of the atmosphere, the time to get from one place to another can be much shorter. However, when the plane is flying against the flow, it endures a rough ride, and wind resistance can add hours to the flight.

A pilot can be too cautious. He can be too methodical. He reads and memorizes the specifications, knows the boundaries of the performance envelope, and is careful never to nudge up against the performance limits. But Boyd did not believe the performance specs and had no fear of the aircraft.

But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet.

He turned the entire living room into an airport, complete with a four-foot-high LEGO traffic control tower and a fleet of paper planes, plastic army pilots taped safely into their cockpits. From deep beneath the couch, a large utility flashlight illuminates some sort of...landing strip? I crouch down for a better look. Oh. My. God. Stuck to the carpet in parallel, unbroken paths from one wall to the other are two lanes of brand-new maxi pads. Plastic dinosaurs stand guard at every fourth pad–triceratops and T rexes on one side, brontosauruses and pterodactyls on the other–protecting the airport from enemy aircraft and/or heavy flow.

I loved them. True, I was scared to death getting on the damn thing. But once the pilot took off and we were in the air, I was hooked. It was a tremendous adrenaline rush—you’re low and fast. It’s awesome. The momentum of the aircraft keeps you in place; you don’t even feel any wind buffeting. And hell—if you fall, you’ll never feel a thing.

What will be the importance of aircraft in the year 2000? For defense? For commerce? It may seem traitorous from an aircraft designer, but I see a diminished role for the manned military aircraft and more reliance on remotely piloted vehicles and missiles.

There's a joke in the aviation industry that the ideal aircrew in today's modern aircraft would be comprised of a man and a dog. The dog is there to bite the man if he so much as tries to touch the controls, and the pilot's one remaining job is to feed the dog!

No, on the outside view there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.

Aircraft

The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.

...I stand looking at the aircraft, trying in vain to remember all the theoretical lore which i was supposed to have absorbed in school. The effort is discouraging.

Thrust, in aviation terms, usually is a vector of energy applied in the opposite direction of the aircraft’s motion.

During the 1950s, Grandfather Ray’s volunteerism led him to make one of the greatest achievements of his life—his leadership as an air rescue pilot and commander of the Civil Air Patrol.

Aerotechnik Super Vivat Icarus motorgliders had an enormous wingspan and looked like a typical side-by-side pilot/passenger configuration sailplane that had been crossed with a small Cessna single-prop aircraft.

With apologies to the folks in Redmond, I’ll end on another Microsoft joke because it makes the point well (a point that applies everywhere, not just at Microsoft): A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of its electronic navigation and communications equipment. The clouds were so thick that the pilot couldn’t tell where he was. Finally, the pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said WHERE AM I? in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drawing their own large sign: YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER. The pilot smiled, looked at his map, determined the route to Sea-Tac Airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it. “I knew it had to be the Microsoft building,” he said, “because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.

The P-39 "Aircobra" had its big, heavy, Allison piston engine mounted behind its single-seat cockpit. The spinning propeller shaft ran between the pilot's legs up to the nose. It was one of the least successful fighter aircraft of WWII.

whether a C-47, pulling a loaded glider in thin air, had the horsepower to climb to roughly ten thousand feet quickly enough to make it through the pass that led out of the valley. In addition, the pilots of both aircraft would have to contend with

X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much inertia that it’s hard to change course—if you turn, your plane rotates, but keeps moving in the original direction. The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.

I know that if I fly for long enough, for wide enough, for far enough, I’ll catch a signal on the radar that tells me there’s another aircraft on my wing. I’ll glance out of the reinforced glass, and it won’t be a friendly pilot that I’ll see, all stubble and brown eyes. It will be me. Me in the cockpit of that plane.

Marine Captain Bankson T. Holcomb, Jr., a Japanese-language officer detached from Pearl Harbor’s codebreaking unit, picked up a transmission by a Japanese patrol pilot (probably the same one that had been picked up by the carrier’s radar). The aircraft had reached the end of its patrol route and the pilot had “nothing to report.

mission and those who drop the bombs. Mistakes made by pilots dropping weapons in the wrong place and by Soldiers mistakenly shooting at friendly aircraft only exacerbate the problem. The trust curve can be increased bloodlessly by habitually associating air units most likely to support troops with troops they are most likely to support.

As the plane nears 2,000 feet, the aircraft’s sensors detect the fast-approaching surface and trigger a new alarm. There’s no time left to build up speed by pushing the plane’s nose forward into a dive. The pilot: “This can’t be happening!” “But what’s happening?” “Ten degrees of pitch…” Exactly 1.4 seconds later, the cockpit voice recorder stops.

All told, Finnish fighter pilots shot down 240 confirmed Red aircraft, against the loss of 26 of their own planes. It was standard practice to send at least one interceptor up to meet every Russian bomber sortie within range. Not infrequently the appearance of a single Fokker caused an entire squadron of SB-2s to jettison its bombs into the snow and turn tail.

You feel like you're the king of creation in an A-10. You're up front and the plane itself--wings, engines, rudders--is way back. You sit at the end of the long snout in a fishbowl wide and bright to the world and the only thing in your head-up display is a little rubbery smudge of nose. It's really just you, slung out there. That's why pilots like Leo Pell loved the ship; you really fly her, you're really airborne, on the wind. It's World War II stuff, Jugs and Bostons lowlevel over the hedgerows of occupied Europe.

As we departed the airfield at Uppottery, the aircraft climbed to the assembly altitude of 1,500 feet and flew in a holding pattern until the entire formation turned on course at 1142 hours to join the stream of planes converging on the coast of France. Descending to an altitude of 1,000 feet, the pilots maintained course until they neared the Normandy course, at which time they descended to 500 feet. The optimum altitude for a drop was 600 feet at a speed of 100 to 120 knots to preclude excessive prop-wash and needless exposure to enemy fire. Twenty minutes out, Lieutenant Sammons hollered back and the crew chief removed the door.

During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. (A fifth team member, the top turret gunner, was not part of the pact.) The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plane hit the ground and exploded. They all died.

Most people think that it is more difficult to fly a helicopter than an airplane. This is a myth. The myth survives because when a student pilot takes his or her first lesson in a small, single engine airplane, at the end of the hour of instruction the student can imagine that some day, way—way off in the future maybe, but someday—he will learn to fly the aircraft all by himself. When student pilots have their first hour of instruction in a small, single engine helicopter, they know that if they live to be one hundred they will never learn to fly it. They also believe this after their second lesson and into the third. The problem is the hover.

I bought the air freshener for four euro because it was a kind of artefact translated into many languages, and also because it was clearly an interpretation of a woman ( breasts belly apron eyelashes) and I had becomes confused by the signs for servicios in public places. I could not figure out why one sign was male and the other female. The most common stick figure sign was not particularly male or female. Did I need this aerosol to make things clearer to me? What kind of clarity was I after? I had conquered Juan who was Zeus the thunderer as far as I was concerned, but the signs were all mixed up because his job in the injury hut was to tend the wounded with his tube of ointment. He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover. Are we all lurking in each other's sign? Do I and the woman on the air freshener belong to the same sign? Another aeroplane was flying above the market, it's metal body heavy in the sky. A male pilot I had met in the Coffee House had told me that an aircraft was always referred to as 'she'. His task was to keep her in balance, to make her a extension of his hands, to make her responsive to the lightest of touch. She was sensitive and needed to be handled delicately. A week later, after we had slept together, I discovered that he was also responsive to the lightest of touch. It wasn't clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.

Rob thinks that a bullet has punctured the aircraft’s hydraulic system. PJs have a name for the red-colored hydraulic fluid: helicopter blood, and it is crucial to the aircraft’s flight-control systems. Without hydraulic fluid the pilots cannot control the helicopter. The reason for Rob’s alarm is that hot, red fluid seems to be spraying onto his arm and leg from somewhere behind him. He reaches up to locate the source and feels his face hanging down from his skull. He is stunned to realize that what he thought was hydraulic fluid spraying under pressure is really his own blood. His face is splayed open from his eye to his ear. The bullet exited from the back of his neck only a quarter of an inch from his spine. He feels the back of his neck and his fingers find the bloody exit hole.

To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again? Would I ever have the courage? Did any woman? Or did we exist only as others saw us?

it was probably more dangerous to remain aboard the fuel- and explosive-laden jeep carrier than to take off and glide-bomb a Japanese capital ship. As Leonard Moser, a plane captain on the Fanshaw Bay, was changing a carburetor on a VC-68 aircraft, half a dozen pilots hovered nearby, coveting a chance to climb into that cockpit and get their tails off the ship. The aviation machinist’s mate finished the job, then climbed up into the cockpit. “What are you doing?” one of the pilots asked. “I’m going to check this damn engine out,” Moser said, “and then go find a hole to hide in.” The pilot said that he would do his own engine check this time, thank you very much. Moser stepped aside. “He got in, started it up, and took off with a cold motor. My helper didn’t even have all of the cowling on. That pilot was glad to leave.

Later, as I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the satellite had in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it. When an aircraft flies into a mountain in bad weather, at five hundred miles per hour, there is little left to tell the story of what went wrong: this crash would have taken place at a speed seventy times that. When I used to work on investigations of aircraft mishaps as a Navy test pilot, I would sometimes reflect that a crew might never have known that anything had gone wrong. Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought. The energy involved in a collision between two large objects at 35,000 miles per hour would be similar to that of a nuclear bomb. I think of that time I almost flew an F-14 into the water and would have disappeared without a trace. I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.

Captain Sergei Volodin was an Air Force helicopter pilot who often flew a specially equipped Mi-8 transport helicopter around Ukraine. The aircraft was fitted with a dosimeter that Captain Volodin had used in the past to test radiation levels around Chernobyl out of his own personal curiosity. Prior to the 26th it had never even flickered. On the night of the accident, he and his crew were on standby for the Emergency Rescue shift covering the wider Kiev area, making his the first aircraft to arrive on the scene. As he flew around Pripyat, an Army Major in the rear measured radiation from a personal dosimeter. Neither wore any protective clothing. Volodin’s equipment went haywire as he cycled through its measurement ranges: 10, 100, 250, 500 roentgens. All were off the scale. “Above 500, the equipment - and human beings - aren’t supposed to work,” he remembers. Just as he was seeing his own readings, the Major burst into the cockpit screaming, “You murderer! You’ve killed us all!” The air was emitting 1,500 roentgens-per-hour. “We’d taken such a high dose,” the pilot says, “he thought we were already dead.”161

On one sunny day in August, journalist Virginia Cowles found herself watching a major air battle while lying on the grass atop Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover. "The setting was majestic," she wrote, "In front of you stretched the blue water of the Channel and in the distance you could distinguish the hazy outline of the coast of France." Houses lay below. Boats and trawlers drifted in the harbor agleam with sun. The water sparkled. Above hung twenty or more immense gray barrage balloons, like airborne manatees. Meanwhile, high above, pilots fought to the death. "You lay in the tall grass with the wing blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats," she wrote. "All around you anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts." Flaming planes arched toward the ground, "leaving as their testament a long black smudge against the sky." She heard engines and machine guns. "You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky," she wrote. "You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.

At a crucial point of the Battle of Britain, when German warplanes were bombing London daily, every available British aircraft was in the sky to stop the planes from reaching the city. As Churchill sat in a car with his military secretary he said, “Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.” Churchill sat quietly for five minutes. He then turned to his secretary and asked him to write down a thought that would become one of the most famous quotes of World War II: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”6 Only four words in that sentence are more than one syllable and, in six words, Churchill told the entire story of British courage and what it meant to the rest of the world: so much, so many, so few. Those six words summarize stories that fill entire books. “So much” stands for freedom, democracy, and liberty—much of which would have been eliminated if Hitler had not been stopped. “So many” represents the entire population of the British empire at the time and those who lived in the countries Hitler invaded. “So few” is a reference to a small number of English pilots, many of whom were killed in the skies as they defended their homeland.

All airplanes must carry two black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to all on-board electronic systems. The other is a cockpit voice recorder, enabling investigators to get into the minds of the pilots in the moments leading up to an accident. Instead of concealing failure, or skirting around it, aviation has a system where failure is data rich. In the event of an accident, investigators, who are independent of the airlines, the pilots’ union, and the regulators, are given full rein to explore the wreckage and to interrogate all other evidence. Mistakes are not stigmatized, but regarded as learning opportunities. The interested parties are given every reason to cooperate, since the evidence compiled by the accident investigation branch is inadmissible in court proceedings. This increases the likelihood of full disclosure. In the aftermath of the investigation the report is made available to everyone. Airlines have a legal responsibility to implement the recommendations. Every pilot in the world has free access to the data. This practice enables everyone—rather than just a single crew, or a single airline, or a single nation—to learn from the mistake. This turbocharges the power of learning. As Eleanor Roosevelt put it: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” And it is not just accidents that drive learning; so, too, do “small” errors. When pilots experience a near miss with another aircraft, or have been flying at the wrong altitude, they file a report. Providing that it is submitted within ten days, pilots enjoy immunity. Many planes are also fitted with data systems that automatically send reports when parameters have been exceeded. Once again, these reports are de-identified by the time they proceed through the report sequence.*

Our regiment was all women…We flew to the front in May 1942… The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor. Later on, toward the end of the war, we were issued parachutes, and a machine gun was installed in the pilot’s cabin, but before there had been no weapon, except for four bomb racks under the wings—that’s all. Nowadays they’d call us kamikazes, and maybe we were kamikazes. Yes! We were! But victory was valued more than our lives. “Before I retired, I became ill from the very thought of how I could possibly not work. Why then had I completed a second degree in my fifties? I became a historian. I had been a geologist all my life. But a good geologist is always in the field, and I no longer had the strength for it. A doctor came, took a cardiogram, and asked, “When did you have a heart attack?” “What heart attack?” “Your heart is scarred all over.” I must have acquired those scars during the war. You approach a target, and you’re shaking all over. Your whole body is shaking, because below it’s all gunfire: fighter planes are shooting, antiaircraft guns are shooting…Several girls had to leave the regiment; they couldn’t stand it. We flew mostly during the night. For a while they tried sending us on day missions, but gave it up at once. A rifle shot could bring down a Po-2… We did up to twelve flights a night. (...) You come back and you can’t even get out of the cabin; they used to pull us out. We couldn’t carry the chart case; we dragged it on the ground. And the work our girl armorers did! They had to attach four bombs to the aircraft by hand—that meant eight hundred pounds. They did it all night: one plane takes off, another lands. The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women…We didn’t have those women’s things…Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children.

IT WAS ALMOST December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane. At first, he had been only fascinated. He had never seen aircraft so close, for it was against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community. Occasionally, when supplies were delivered by cargo planes to the landing field across the river, the children rode their bicycles to the riverbank and watched, intrigued, the unloading and then the takeoff directed to the west, always away from the community. But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet. Jonas, looking around anxiously, had seen others—adults as well as children—stop what they were doing and wait, confused, for an explanation of the frightening event. Then all of the citizens had been ordered to go into the nearest building and stay there. IMMEDIATELY, the rasping voice through the speakers had said. LEAVE YOUR BICYCLES WHERE THEY ARE. Instantly, obediently, Jonas had dropped his bike on its side on the path behind his family’s dwelling. He had run indoors and stayed there, alone. His parents were both at work, and his little sister, Lily, was at the Childcare Center where she spent her after-school hours. Looking through the front window, he had seen no people: none of the busy afternoon crew of Street Cleaners, Landscape Workers, and Food Delivery people who usually populated the community at that time of day. He saw only the abandoned bikes here and there on their sides; an upturned wheel on one was still revolving slowly. He had been frightened then. The sense of his own community silent, waiting, had made his stomach churn. He had trembled. But it had been nothing. Within minutes the speakers had crackled again, and the voice, reassuring now and less urgent, had explained that a Pilot-in-Training had misread his navigational instructions and made a wrong turn. Desperately the Pilot had been trying to make his way back before his error was noticed. NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED, the voice had said, followed by silence. There was an ironic tone to that final message, as if the Speaker found it amusing; and Jonas had smiled a little, though he knew what a grim statement it had been. For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.

After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.

When an airplane navigates through the sky it works its way along a route composed of beacons and waypoints – invisible signposts in the sky – which are defined by geographic coordinates. They constitute the pilot’s map of the world. Flight computers are programmed into these waypoints which are put into the systems before take-off. Assuming these coordinates have been programmed correctly, the plane will go from point A, passing through the designated waypoints, before arriving at point B without a hitch. However, if any of these waypoints are wrong, the aircraft will deviate from its flight programme and its destination which can prove fatal. Life for each of us contains thousands of waypoints; signposts that hopefully provide us with directions as to what to do, how to go about things and where to go next – our decision-making processes. But what happens when our own onboard computer, our brain, has initially been programmed with data that is corrupt and socially unacceptable. How are we able to make life decisions – correct decisions that is?

AMELIA EARHART began planning her round-the-world flight in 1936. She would not be the first to circumnavigate the globe—six male pilots had done so before her; however, if she was successful, her equatorial flight route would be in the record books as the longest: 29,000 miles (47,000 km). She never made it. Her achievement, instead, was to become the world’s most-famous missing person after she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, with no trace of her aircraft found.

During the chaos of the morning attacks, planes inbound from Enterprise, as well as a squadron of B-17 bombers coming from the mainland, had come under assault—from the attacking Japanese as well as the defenders. That was somewhat coincidental and to some extent unavoidable. Enterprise lost six planes in the melee. Halsey had been right to be worried. They were indeed shooting at his boys. By evening, however, defenders should have been alert to distinguish between friend and foe. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, incoming friendlies,” the control tower on Ford Island advised all ships and shore installations as this second group of aircraft from the Enterprise, the six Wildcats, entered the pattern with landing lights ablaze. But over the dry docks, nervous gunners on the Pennsylvania opened fire. That was all it took. The entire harbor erupted in gunfire. Four of the six Wildcats were shot down and three American pilots killed.

Whatever anxiety crew members on the Arizona and throughout the Pacific Fleet felt about the future would have been heightened had they known that on this same Thanksgiving day, the War and Navy departments in Washington issued what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, met with Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the commander of his carrier forces, and Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of land forces in Hawaii. Kimmel and Halsey had already organized task forces of cruisers and destroyers around the three aircraft carriers then operating in the Pacific: Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga (CV-3), and Enterprise (CV-6). To guard against a concerted attack or sabotage, they adopted a general protocol that only one carrier task force would be in Pearl Harbor at any one time. At the moment, this meant alternating between Lexington and Enterprise because Saratoga had yet to return to Hawaiian waters after a lengthy overhaul at Bremerton. A similar alternating routine was supposed to be in place among the three battleship divisions. Of the nine battleships in those three-ship divisions, Colorado was currently in Bremerton undergoing its own overhaul. With the war warning in hand, Admiral Kimmel and General Short concerned themselves primarily with the outer boundaries of their commands and not with Hawaii itself. The chief topic they discussed with Halsey was the delivery of aircraft to reinforce garrisons on Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to deploy Army squadrons of new P-40s, but Halsey quoted an arcane regulation that Army pilots were required to stay within fifteen miles of land and asked what good they would be in protecting an island.

of the tiny aircraft and helped the third passenger aboard, his girlfriend Sandra, 30. The plane taxied and sped down the runway. As it rose into the blue California sun, Norman felt a surge of excitement. But as they banked east over Venice Beach, it was clear there was a storm ahead. In front of them a thick blanket of grey cloud was smothering the San Bernardino Mountains. Only the very tips of their 3,000 m (10,000 ft) peaks showed above the gloom. Norman Senior asked the pilot if it was okay to fly in that weather. The pilot reassured them: it was just a thirty-minute hop. They’d stay low and pop through the mountains to Big Bear before they knew it. Norman wondered if he’d be able to see the slope he’d won the championship on when they wheeled round Mount Baldy. His dad nodded and sat back to read the paper and whistle a Willie Nelson tune. Up front, Norman was savouring every moment. He stretched up to see over the plane’s dashboard and listened to the air traffic chatter on his headphones. As the foothills rose below them, he heard Burbank control pass their plane on to Pomona Control. The pilot told Pomona he wanted to stay below 2,300 m (7,500 ft) because of low freezing levels. Then a private plane radioed a warning against flying into the Big Bear area without decent instruments. Suddenly, the sun went out. The greyness was all around them, as thick as soup. They had pierced the storm. The plane shook and lurched. A tree seemed to flit by in the mist, its spiky fingers lunging at the window. But that couldn’t be, not up here. Then there really was a branch outside and with a sickening yawn, time slowed down and the horror unfurled. Norman instinctively curled into a ball. A wing clipped into a tree, tumbling the plane round, up, down, over and round. The spinning only stopped when they slammed into the rugged north face of Ontario Peak. The plane was instantly smashed into debris and the passengers hurled across an icy gully. And there they lay, sprawled amid the wreckage, 75 m (250 ft) from the top of the 2,650 m (8,693 ft) high mountain and perched on a 45-degree ice slope in the heartless storm.

The battle of Leyte Gulf was short, lasting only from October 23–26, 1944. But don’t let the duration fool you. The Philippine Sea, around the chain of islands where the battle was fought, was a roiling cauldron for those four days. On the morning of the 23rd, that sea held the largest assemblage of ships, in terms of tonnage, the world had ever seen. By the evening of the 26th, Leyte Gulf had taken more tonnage to its murky depths than in any other naval battle in history. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 12 destroyers, one destroyer escort, over 600 planes, and 10,500 sailors and pilots. The Allied forces, on the other hand, lost one light carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, one destroyer escort, around 200 planes, and a little more than a thousand men. As a result of this devastating blow, Japan never again launched a major naval offensive.

Early the following year, Arizona steamed from its home port at San Pedro to Hawaii to participate in Army-Navy Grand Joint Exercise No. 4. It was a mouthful of a name for a round of war games that simulated an attack on Oahu from “enemy” aircraft carriers lurking to the north. Near sunrise on February 7, 1932, the first strike of carrier planes caught Army Air Corps bases by surprise. A second wave achieved similar results after slow-to-respond Army pilots landed for refueling and breakfast. In the after-action critique, the Army protested that the Navy’s attack at daybreak on a Sunday morning, while technically permitted under the rules, was a dirty trick.8 A few weeks later, on March 2, Arizona entered Pearl Harbor for the first time. Pearl Harbor in the early 1930s was minuscule compared to the massive installation it would become just one decade later. Despite wide inner lochs—bays of water spreading out from the main channel—its entrance was historically shallow. Nineteenth-century visitors had anchored off Honolulu a few miles to the east instead. In 1887, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua granted the United States the exclusive right to establish a coaling and repair station in Pearl Harbor and improve the entrance as it saw fit. No facilities were built, but the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. When the American Navy built its first installations within months of annexation, they were at Honolulu, not Pearl Harbor, because of the difficult channel access. Finally, in 1908, Congress authorized dredging the channel entrance and constructing a dry dock, as well as adding accompanying shops and supply buildings. Naval Station Pearl Harbor was officially dedicated in August 1919. The Army and Navy jointly acquired Ford Island in the harbor’s center for shared airfield facilities that same year.9

We came to a stop just in front of the aircraft. The smell of engine fuel was strong enough to make your eyes water. I could see the ground all churned up and the plane’s cockpit smashed on one side. It was incredible to think anyone had even survived. Yet there he was, head bowed, kneeling on the grass maybe twenty feet away. The pilot’s uniform was in tatters. The damaged arm hung limp at his side. I didn’t see a bone, thankfully, but it was certainly bleeding badly. He was skinny in a way that made him look young – perhaps not much older than Ephraim. I’d not expected that; I’d not expected him to be crying, either. It made me more uncomfortable than ever.

It was then I saw on the side of the box – a name, a date: ‘Marcus Epstein: Frankfurt, March 2nd 1940’. It was today’s date, a year ago. And, at the bottom, a specific time. 2:10 p.m. ‘Romantic’, Mrs. Henderson had called Queenie’s clocks; but to me, realising what it probably meant, it made my throat thicken with tears. No wonder Mum had understood what a stopped clock might mean. Something must’ve happened to Marcus Epstein that day, at that time. Something terrible that made Queenie’s life stop dead. My brain tried to fill in the gaps. Perhaps Marcus was a Jew. Perhaps this was why she was so set on helping Hewish people, and had such guts when it came to standing up for what was decent. I didn’t know. In many ways it didn’t matter. It was Queenie’s private business. She was the person who’d thrown stones at German aircraft, and yet protected the injured pilot from more harm. She fought for people, that was what Queenie did. Beneath our race, our religion, we were all human beings. We all hurt in the same ways. Upstairs in front of the hall mirror, I could hear her now repinning her hair and fastening her coat. ‘Right, Olive, I’m ready,’ she called down. I went to join her, taking in her smooth, tearless face, the newly tidied hair. You’d never know from looking at her that her heart was still breaking. But that was the awful thing: life did go on, and so did that horrible empty ache you felt when someone wasn’t there any more.

(Which was probably just an empty casing. Probably.) Mellie stood next to him, supervising. When she saw us, she waved and gave us a sad smile, but she pointed toward the plane, where Piper stood at the base of the steps, talking with the pilot. In her hands, Piper held something large and flat—a display board. She had a couple of books under her arm, too. To her right, near the tail of the aircraft, the luggage compartment stood open. Ground-crew members were carefully strapping down a large wooden box with brass fixtures. A coffin. As Meg and I walked up, the captain shook Piper’s hand. His face was tight with

Aviation is different from science but it is underpinned by a similar spirit. After all, an airplane journey represents a kind of hypothesis: namely, that this aircraft, with this design, these pilots, and this system of air traffic control, will reach its destination safely. Each flight represents a kind of test. A crash, in a certain sense, represents a falsification of the hypothesis. That is why accidents have a particular significance in improving system safety, rather as falsification drives science.

Never Doubt His Plan A cargo helicopter flying over Alaska had some engine trouble. The pilot did excellent work to get the aircraft down, but electrics had been damaged, meaning he couldn't radio for help. He knew a search party would be looking for him, but there was such a vast area to cover. Being from a family of deep faith, he started to pray for God to send the rescuers in the right direction. Just when he thought it couldn't get any worse. One day while out getting freshwater, there was an electrical fire in the helicopter. He stood at a safe distance and watched it going up in flames. Then the gas tank exploded. He fell to his knees as it did. Watching his pride and joy go up in smoke felt like pouring salt on his wounds. He cried out to God, "I give up, I ask you to help me, and this happens. A few hours later he heard a distance sound, he perked up, he couldn't see anything, but it kept getting closer. Next thing he saw a helicopter in the distance, it was the coast guard coming to rescue him. When they landed, he ran over and gave them a big hug—asking how in the world did they find him. It turned out the smoke from the wreckage had travelled over 300 miles with the wind. The rescue team had followed the smoke. Sometimes what looks like a disappointment is God positioning us for a new level. If your helicopter is on fire today, so to speak, instead of being bitter, complaining, being upset. Have a new perspective, trust in God's plan. It may not make sense now. Being stranded is tough; being in the pits of life will feel uncomfortable. The setbacks, the closed doors can be discouraging, but you have to remind yourself. It's not working against you; it's working for you. Now you only see in part, but one day you will see in full.

If a German reconnaissance aircraft were observed, the Hurricane would be launched to shoot down the enemy, but the plane could not be landed after the attack. The only option available to the pilot was to parachute from the aircraft and hope that some of the escort ships would pick him up.

Most of these encounters with Soviet reconnaissance flights passed without incident. Some encounters were even humorous, as the pilots of either aircraft would make faces at one another or exchange colorful hand gestures.

The W right brothers were already the best and most experienced glider pilots in the world before they started to build a powered aircraft.

staffers in the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service concluded there might be fifteen more MAX crashes without a software fix, based on the future size of the fleet, the hours of anticipated flight, and a rough estimate that one in every hundred pilots might have trouble handling the rare sensor failure.

The first involved the sale of ninety F-86 aircraft to Pakistan, once again raised from surplus German stock. At the time Pakistan was a no-sale zone, embargoed by NATO because of its simmering conflict with India. The required subterfuge was undertaken with the help of the Shah of Iran, who allowed the planes to be delivered to Tehran by Luftwaffe officers and then flown to Pakistan by Iranian pilots dressed up as Pakistani officers.

One day the fighter pilot guided from the ground will chase, at supersonic speed, the atom-bomb carrier for scores of miles high up in the stratosphere. But science must not become an aim in itself. Only the spirit of attack borne in a brave heart will bring a success to any fighter aircraft, no matter how highly developed it may be.

How they think. How they act. How it all determines who wins. His name was John Boyd. Boyd used different words for the first two steps. Instead of Data, he used Observe. Instead of Analysis, he used Orient. But he meant the same thing. A fighter pilot collects data on an enemy pilot by observing. He analyzes by orienting himself to the enemy. He decides what to do, then acts. When Boyd broke thinking into those steps, he discovered something interesting: Whichever pilot goes through the process quickest is the one who usually wins. He called going through the process and repeating it a loop. Boyd’s name for thinking: the OODA Loop. When you get to the end, you start the process again. You gather data on what you just did, analyze that data, and make another decision, followed by another action. Then you do it again. Whoever “loops” most quickly in a dogfight? They usually win. Because of Boyd’s OODA Loop, the U.S. Air Force made a change. They wanted planes to let a pilot go through the OODA Loop as quickly as possible. Planes that moved as quickly as a pilot could think. The process helped the Air Force think more clearly, too. As an organization. Thinking about how a pilot thinks, they made changes. Big changes. They ditched their old way of doing things. Approached the problem differently. Came up with a new plan for more maneuverable, responsive aircraft.

Ten days later, during lunch at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, Goering asked the young hero, "So you now have what, over a hundred conquests?" He meant enemy aircraft, but Jochen, sincere or not, replied, "Herr Reichsmarschall, do you mean aircraft or women?" Goering laughed so hard he nearly choked.

pilot announced the problem and added, “There are four of us but only three parachutes. It’s my plane, my parachutes—I have to take one of them.” The others agreed. He strapped the parachute on and jumped to safety. Left on the aircraft were a brilliant professor (a rocket scientist, no less), a minister of religion and a backpacker. The professor jumped to his feet insisting, “I am one of the greatest minds in the country. I must survive. I must take one of the remaining parachutes.” The others agreed. He prepared himself and launched out. The elderly clergyman started to explain to the young traveler, “I’ve lived a long life. I do not fear death. You take the last parachute.” She stopped him mid-sentence with, “No, it’s fine. That brilliant professor just jumped out with my backpack strapped on!

After January 1, 1959, the Castro Revolution changed the way business was done in Cuba. Abruptly, supplies for Cubana were no longer available, most routes were altered or suspended, and many of the pilots deserted their jobs or were exiled. In May of 1960, the new Castro administration merged all of the existing Cuban airlines and nationalized them under a drastically restructured Cubana management. At the time, many of Cubana’s experienced personnel took advantage of their foreign connections, and left for employment with other airlines. During the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April of 1961, two of the remaining Cubana DC-3’s were destroyed in the selective bombing of Cuba’s airports. Actually the only civil aviation airport that was proven to be bombed was the Antonio Maceo Airport in Santiago de Cuba. During the following years, the number of hijackings increased and some aircraft were abandoned at American airports, as the flight crews sought asylum in the United States. This corporate instability, as well as political unrest, resulted in a drastic reduction of passengers willing to fly with Cubana. Of course, this resulted in a severe reduction in revenue, making the airline less competitive. The Castro régime reacted by blaming the CIA for many of Cubana’s problems. However, slowly, except to the United States, most of the scheduled flights were restored. Not being able to replace their aging fleet with American manufactured aircraft, they turned to the Soviet Union. Currently Cubana’s fleet includes Ukrainian designed and built Antonov An-148’s and An-158’s. The Cubana fleet also has Soviet designed and built Illyushin II-96’s and Tupolev TU-204’s built in Kazan, Russia. Despite daunting difficulties, primarily due to the United States’ imposed embargo and the lack of sufficient assistance from Canada, efforts to expand and improve operations during the 1990’s proved successful. “AeroCaribbean” originally named “Empresa Aero” was established in 1982 to serve as Cuba’s domestic airline. It also supported Cubana’s operations and undertook its maintenance. Today Cubana’s scheduled service includes many Caribbean, European, South and Central American destinations. In North America, the airline flies to Mexico and Canada. With Cuban tourism increasing, Cubana has positioned itself to be relatively competitive. However much depends on Cuba’s future relations with the United States. The embargo imposed in February of 1962 continues and is the longest on record. However, Cubana has continued to expand, helping to make Cuba one of the most important tourist destinations in Latin America. A little known fact is that although Cubana, as expected, is wholly owned by the Cuban government, the other Cuban airlines are technically not. Instead, they are held, operated and maintained by the Cuban military, having been created by Raúl Castro during his tenure as the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

They flew up to 140 varieties of aircraft straight out of the factories and delivered them directly into the hands of us excitable young pilots so that we could get into the skies and defend our country from Nazi invasion. I

Isle of Guernsey, meanwhile, was responsible for picking Flying Officer Ken Newton out of the sea. Newton was an RAF pilot who had bailed out after a dogfight. Like the character Collins in the film, he was helped out of the water by sailors. The sailors were killed, however, by German aircraft raking them with machine-gun fire as they

Only in the Soviet Union did women carry arms and engage in routine front-line combat duty on a large scale during World War II. There were numerous Soviet women infantry soldiers, and at least two female combat pilots achieved ace status. Katya Budanova and Lilya Litvak each shot down more than a dozen Luftwaffe aircraft.

And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again?

To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again?

Helicopters Nothing has done more to change the face of wilderness rescue than helicopters. They land in remote areas that were inaccessible to aircraft only a few years ago. If the spot isn’t flat enough, helicopters have been known to land on one skid while a patient is quickly loaded. When there is no spot to land, they have hovered with a rescuer hanging from a rope or cable, a rescuer equipped to attach the patient to the hauling system for evacuation. Helicopters go where the pilot wants because of the rapid spinning of two sets of blades. The large overhead blades create air by forcing air down. The pilot can vary the angle at which the blades attack the air and the speed at which they rotate to vary the amount of lift. The entire rotor can be tilted forward, backward, or sideways to determine the direction of travel. Without a second set of blades spinning in an opposite direction, the helicopter would turn circles helplessly in the air. Some large helicopters have two large sets of blades spinning in opposite directions, one fore and one aft, but most helicopters used in the wilderness maintain stability with one small tail rotor. When they are close to the ground, the spinning blades build a cushion of air that helps support the helicopter. This cushion of air varies in its ability to work, depending on its density. Rising air temperatures and increasing altitude reduce air density. So trying to land a helicopter on a mountaintop on a hot day is dangerous, and the weight of one person may prevent liftoff. Air density also is altered by the nearness of a mountainside. The downward shove of air by the blades can recirculate off the mountainside and reduce lift. One of the greatest fears of mountain flying is a sudden downdraft of air that can slam a helicopter toward the ground. Downdrafts are not only dangerous but also unpredictable. Add to air density and downdrafts the possibility of darkness and fog and wind, and you can understand that even if a helicopter is available it may not be able to come to your rescue.

When you’re in need of a rescue the approaching thump-thump-thump of rapidly rotating blades is a joyous sound. To give the helicopter rescue the greatest chance of success, a suitable landing zone will have to be found. The ideal landing zone should not require a completely vertical landing or takeoff, both of which reduce the pilot’s control. The ground should slope away on all sides, allowing the helicopter to immediately drop into forward flight when it’s time to take off. Landings and liftoffs work best when the aircraft is pointed into the wind because that gives the machine the greatest lift. The area should be as large as possible, at least 60 feet across for most small rescue helicopters, and as clear as possible for obstructions such as trees and boulders. Clear away debris (pine needles, dust, leaves) that can be blown up by the wash of air, with the possibility of producing mechanical failure. Light snow can be especially dangerous if it fluffs up dramatically to blind the pilot. Wet snow sticks to the ground and adds dangerous weight. If you have the opportunity, pack snow flat well before the helicopter arrives—the night before would be ideal—to harden the surface of the landing zone. Tall grass can be a hazard because it disturbs the helicopter’s cushion of supporting air and hides obstacles such as rocks and tree stumps. To prepare a landing zone, clear out the area as much as possible, including removing your equipment and all the people except the one who is going to be signaling the pilot. Mark the landing zone with weighted bright clothing or gear during the day or with bright lights at night. In case of a night rescue, turn off the bright lights before the helicopter starts to land—they can blind the pilot. Use instead a low-intensity light to mark the perimeter of the landing area, such as chemical light sticks, or at least turn the light away from the helicopter’s direction. Indicate the wind’s direction by building a very small smoky fire, hanging brightly colored streamers, throwing up handfuls of light debris, or signaling with your arms pointed in the direction of the wind. The greatest danger to you occurs while you’re moving toward or away from the helicopter on the ground. Never approach the rear and never walk around the rear of a helicopter. The pilot can’t see you, and the rapidly spinning tail rotor is virtually invisible and soundless. In a sudden shift of the aircraft, you can be sliced to death. Don’t approach by walking downhill toward the helicopter, where the large overhead blade is closest to the ground. It is safest to come toward the helicopter from directly in front, where the pilot has a clear field of view, and only after the pilot or another of the aircraft’s personnel has signaled you to approach. Remove your hat or anything that can be sucked up into the rotors. Stay low because blades can sink closer to the ground as their speed diminishes. Make sure nothing is sticking up above your pack, such as an ice ax or ski pole. In most cases someone from the helicopter will come out to remind you of the important safety measures. One-skid landings or hovering while a rescue is attempted are solely at the discretion of the pilot. They are a high risk at best, and finding a landing zone and preparing it should always be given priority.

The first eight female ATA pilots were only allowed to fly light aircraft which could be easily replaced ‘if broken by women’.

Four days before the declaration of World War II, on August 27, 1939, the test pilot van Chaim flew the first jet aircraft in the world, the Heinkel 178. Only a small circle of people directly concerned knew of this event, which for that time was of great importance. Exactly a year later, on August 27, 1940, the first Italian jet plane, the Caproni-Campini made its first flight. It reached 300 mph, and the event received great propaganda.

Sometimes, just to see what was happening, my father would drive to the airport…. Before my birth, during the “Roaring 20’s” Newark Airport was the first major airport to serve the greater New York area. It was opened for traffic on October 1, 1928, on 68 acres of reclaimed marshland adjacent to the Passaic River. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey later took it over from the Army Air Corps and in 1948 started a major expansion and improvement program. Driving by and seeing activity from the road, we drove to where Eastern Airlines had a shiny new DC-3 on display, and as luck would have it, it was open to the public. It was an exciting moment when I boarded this aircraft and discovered that it was first constructed in 1934, the same year I was born. An example of modern technology, it was the first modern airliner and the forerunner of commercial aviation. The DC-3 was used during World War II, when the military version was identified as the C-47. After the war it continued as the primary carrier keeping Berlin open during the Berlin Airlift. On June 24, 1948 the Soviets prevented access to Berlin to the Western Allies’. Two days after the Soviet (Russians) announcement of the blockade, the United States Air Force airlifted the first cargo into Berlin. The American nicknamed the effort, "Operation Vittles," while British pilots dubbed the operation "Plain Fare." In July 1948, the operation was renamed the Combined Airlift Taskforce. Normal daily food requirements for Berlin were 2,000 tons with coal, for heating homes, being the number one commodity and two -thirds of all the tonnage flown in. The airlift ended on May 12, 1949 when the Soviets realized that the blockade wasn’t effective against the “Allied Resolve” and reopened the roads into Berlin.

Agustín Parlá Orduña was among the early Cuban aviation aces. He was born in Key West, Florida, on October 10, 1887, and received his early education there. After Cuba was liberated from Spain, the family returned to Havana, where he continued his education. On April 20, 1912, he received his pilot’s license at the Curtiss School of Aviation in Miami. On July 5, 1913, when the Cuban Army Air Corps was formed, Agustín Parlá was commissioned as a captain in the Cuban Armed Forces. On May 17, 1913, Domingo Rosillo and Agustín Parlá attempted the first international flights to Latin America, by trying to fly their airplanes from Key West to Havana. At 5:10 a.m., Rosillo departed from Key West and flew for 2 hours, 30 minutes and 40 seconds before running out of gas. He had planned to land at the airfield at Camp Columbia in Havana, but instead managed to squeak in at the shooting range, thereby still satisfactorily completing the flight. Parlá left Key West at 5:57 in the morning. Just four minutes later, at 6:01 a.m., he had to carefully turn back to the airstrip he had just left, since the aircraft didn’t properly respond to his controls. Parlá said, “It would not let me compensate for the wind that blew.” When he returned to Key West, he discovered that two of the tension wires to the elevator were broken. On May 19, 1913, Parlá tried again and left Key West, carrying the Cuban Flag his father had received from José Martí. This time he fell short and had to land at sea off the Cuban coast near Mariel, where sailors rescued him from his seaplane.

Newspaper writers and politicians treated the pilots as “knights” of the war. They flew fast and dangerous maneuvers in order to defend critical artillery observation balloons. They battled other pilots either one-on-one or in squadrons, fought like heroes, and died in droves. France alone produced at least 68,000 aircraft, of which 52,000 were lost in battle. The planes reached speeds of over 100 mph and fired machine guns, pistols, or rockets at each other. The winners sped away; the losers spiraled to the earth

Again and again, the question was asked: What made the Poles so good? The answer wasn’t simple. Generally older than their British counterparts, most Polish pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time in a variety of aircraft, as well as combat experience in both Poland and France. Unlike British fliers, they had learned to fly in primitive, outdated planes and thus had not been trained to rely on a sophisticated radio and radar network. As a result, said one British flight instructor, “their understanding and handling of aircraft was exceptional.” Although they appreciated the value of tools such as radio and radar, the Poles never stopped using their eyes to locate the Luftwaffe. “Whereas British pilots are trained…to go exactly where they are told, Polish pilots are always turning and twisting their heads to spot a distant enemy,” an RAF flier noted. The Poles’ intensity of concentration was equaled only by their daring. British pilots were taught to fly and fight with caution. The Poles, by contrast, had been trained to be aggressive, to crowd and intimidate the enemy, to make him flinch and then bring him down. After firing a brief opening burst at a range of 150 to 200 yards, the Poles would close almost to point-blank range. “When they go tearing into enemy bombers and fighters they get so close you would think they were going to collide,” observed one RAF flier. On several occasions, crew members of Luftwaffe bombers, seeing that 303’s Hurricanes were about to attack, baled out before their planes were hit. On September 15, the Poles of

Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But flying this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any one person, however expert. The test pilots made their list simple, brief, and to the point—short enough to fit on an index card, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. It had the kind of stuff that all pilots know to do. They check that the brakes are released, that the instruments are set, that the door and windows are closed, that the elevator controls are unlocked—dumb stuff. You wouldn’t think it would make that much difference. But with the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War, enabling its devastating bombing

The Wright Brothers lifted off in 1903,” he says, “but by 1908, only ten pilots had ever flown. Then they traveled to Europe to demonstrate their aircraft and inspired everyone. The aviation world changed overnight. Inventors began to realize, ‘Hey, I can do that!’ Between 1909 and 1912, thousands of pilots and hundreds of aircraft types were created in thirty-one countries.

At the time of the Blitz a plan was presented in all seriousness for the building of an enormous Anti-aircraft Mountain, thousands of feet high, in Kent. From this, its sponsor explained, gunners would be able to shoot down the highest-flying bombers raiding London! And at various times plans came to D.M.W.D. for a space-ship; a gun for merchant vessels which squirted columns of water at approaching aircraft, presumably with the object of drowning the pilot in mid-air; and a weird and wonderful machine for manufacturing artificial tidal waves in the Pacific. Its inventor claimed that this would disorganize the Japanese defence system by washing all their outlying garrisons off the smaller coral atolls!

I was captivated by the description of the Navy test pilots, young hotshots catapulting off aircraft carriers, testing unstable airplanes, drinking hard, and generally moving through the world like exceptional badasses. The idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.

Major (later General) Curtis LeMay recalled the shock of fog when he flew in to a British airfield for the first time from the US. ‘Can you see the runway lights?’ the control tower asked the pilot of his aircraft, to which the pilot replied: ‘Shit, I can’t even see my copilot!

All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida. The flapping engine of the old Curtiss biplane woke Dr Mallory soon after dawn, as he lay asleep beside his exhausted wife on the fifth floor of the empty hotel in Titusville. Dreams of the space age had filled the night, memories of white runways as calm as glaciers, now broken by this eccentric aircraft veering around like the fragment of a disturbed mind.

Don’t have to see,” the pilot grunted. “Olga knows the way.” “Funny name for an aircraft,” Grace commented. “Is it after your wife?” “My gun.” Grace stared at him. “You named your plane after a gun?” “It was very good gun.

Southwest—unlike most other airlines, which fly multiple aircraft models—flies only Boeing 737s. As a result, every Southwest pilot, flight attendant, and ground-crew member can work any flight. Plus, all of Southwest’s parts fit all of its planes. All that means lower costs and a business that’s easier to run. They made it easy on themselves.

The other pilot may have been trying to be heroic but each time we pilots sign in to fly an aircraft we are duty-bound, morally and professionally, to operate the airplane as safely as possible. In all honesty, I'd rather be a coward than a dead hero.

El Al was one of the most secure airlines in the world, with armed sky marshals undercover on every flight, and most of the pilots having military experience. It was even the only airline so far to be equipped with infrared countermeasures systems, to combat the threat of anti-aircraft missiles.

The Wright Brothers lifted off in 1903,” he says, “but by 1908, only ten pilots had ever flown. Then they traveled to Europe to demonstrate their aircraft and inspired everyone. The aviation world changed overnight. Inventors began to realize, ‘Hey, I can do that!’ Between 1909 and 1912, thousands of pilots and hundreds of aircraft types were created in thirty-one countries. Entrepreneurs, not governments, drove this development, and a $50 million aviation industry was created.

These were men who were serving their nation in the cockpits of aircraft. Their job was to fight and, if possible, destroy the enemies of their nation. They were no different than the pilots of other nations.

Some has been written about the reaction of our forces to the bombing of the “highway to death.” The criticism revolves around the lack of apparent remorse or guilt, and perhaps even bloodlust, at bombing the relatively easy targets. Everybody reacts to the stress of war and life and death decisions differently, and to narrow the image one would construct of an individual to his reaction immediately following the events of any battle is superficial and simplistic. Naval aviators are a strange mix of people—utterly homogeneous in certain respects, particularly to the casual observer, and radically different in their core and substance. Very few naval aviators show honest emotion easily; they’re not supposed to fracture the military bearing that has been instilled in them through years of training and detached experience under the stress of carrier aviation. Anger is the easiest emotion to display because it is the natural, instinctual outlet for stress and fear. But even expressions of anger might be as diverse in their reaction to a common event as physical violence or the mere raising of a voice. Most emotion comes out at the officers’ club, or on liberty in a foreign port, where the beer either softens or heightens aviators’ feelings to the edges of their flexibility, which often is not very far. Virtually all naval aviators are college graduates—some from state colleges, some from the Naval Academy, even a few Ivy Leaguers. This is their greatest obvious commonality—a college degree and mutual survival of the weeding-out process to get where they are in the navy. Many are religious, many are not, and the greatest of the values shared by the men is a trust in their comrades, a dedication to their country, and an absolute focus on their mission. It is exceedingly difficult most times for an outsider to register where a naval aviator is “coming from.” The uniform, the haircut, and the navy-speak contribute enormously to the building of a stereotype. So do the mannerisms of each individual; some express the control of emotion in reserved stoicism, others in an outburst of emotional release through inappropriate laughter or anger. Still others never express emotion at all. But the emotion is there, it has to be; despite years of training and desensitizing to hide the race of the heart and the sickening chill in the stomach, anyone who has landed on an aircraft carrier, never mind fought in a war, knows what fear and exhilarating intensity are.

In his memoirs the author Roald Dahl, who took part in the invasion as a Hurricane pilot, confirmed the impression that the Vichy French were unprepared. Sent to strafe the Vichy aerodrome at Rayak, he recalled, on his first low pass over the landing strip, being astonished to see ‘a bunch of girls in brightly coloured cotton dresses standing out by the planes with glasses in their hands having drinks with the French pilots, and I remember bottles of wine standing on the wing of one of the planes as we went swooshing over’.19 It was a Sunday morning and ‘the Frenchmen were evidently entertaining their girlfriends and showing off their aircraft to them, which was a very French thing to do in the middle of a war at a front-line aerodrome. Every one of us held our fire on that first pass over the flying field and it was wonderfully comical to see the girls all dropping their wine glasses and galloping in their high heels for the door of the nearest building . . . we destroyed five of their planes on the ground.’ But the hope

There is only one unsolved case of hijacking in US aviation history - that of DB Cooper. A man, actually going by the name of Dan Cooper (it was later reported incorrectly by the media) bought a one-way ticket for flight 305 between Portland International Airport and Seattle, Washington. Shortly after take-off, Cooper whispered to an air stewardess to take a note from him, and that he had a bomb. The note requested she sit next to him and that he was hijacking the place. She did as told, and with some trepidation asked to see the bomb. Cooper opened up his briefcase enough the stewardess to see eight red cylinders in two rows. He gave her his demands - $200,000, four parachutes (two main and two reserve) and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft as soon as it landed. This was communicated to the pilot, who in turn made the authorities aware of the situation. When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper let all of the passengers go in exchange for the money, which the FBI had quickly assembled from nearby banks. As the plane was being refuelled, Cooper discussed his intended flight plan with the cockpit crew; he made a number of requests about altitude, direction, and even the position of the aircraft’s wing flaps. He also requested that the aircraft take off with the rear staircase deployed, however the captain refused - yet Cooper said he would lower it himself once they were airborne. Eventually, the aircraft took off, Cooper politely asked the remaining flight steward to join the crew in the cockpit and close the door. He did so, and at around 8pm the pilot saw the warning sign that the rear stairs had been lowered, and he and the rest of the crew felt a change in air pressure, indicating that the rear door had been opened. Dan Cooper - or whoever he was - had parachuted out with the money. He has never been found, and no additional information about the case have ever since come to light!

It was expected that the Germans would react vigorously, so four aircraft would be laid on to spot for the gunfire – two Hudsons and two Walruses – or Walri, as we called more than one.

A searchlight catches the plane for an instant. The cockpit is awash with searing bluish brightness. As if a revelation is about to take place. As if an angel is about to appear. He can’t see the instrument panel. The finger of light has the aircraft in its grip. Holding her suspended above the city. As if she is perched on a tightrope. Visible to the whole of Berlin down below. The glare bites into his eyes, sucks strength from his legs. He kicks the rudders to the right. The starboard wing tilts down. He pulls the wheel back. Below, a shifting tableau of coloured globes slide over the tilting smoking surface of the earth. Some roads and buildings made visible by fires and incendiaries.

The ballpoint pen was invented by László Bíró, a Hungarian journalist who fled to Argentina to escape the German occupation of Europe. In 1943 he licensed his invention to the RAF, and the first ballpoint pens were manufactured in Reading, England, by the Miles aircraft manufacturer, to supply pilots with a lasting ink supply!

When President Eisenhower accepted the responsibility for the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, no one would have questioned that he did this for correct and honorable reasons. National Aeronautics and Space Administrator (NASA) Keith Glennan had already made a public statement that the U-2 was operating out of Turkey as a NASA high-altitude, flight-research aircraft and had strayed over Russian territory inadvertently in high winds. Then, Nikita Khrushchev produced the wreckage of the U-2 deep in Russia near Sverdlovsk, it made a mockery of the NASA cover story; and when he produced the pilot alive and well, it demolished the rest of the plausible disclaimer. The CIA was caught without a plausible cover story, and the President had to choose. He could either discredit Allen Dulles and the CIA for operating that clandestine flight and a long series of flights without his knowledge, or he could, as Eisenhower did, stand up and take the blame himself on the basis that he knew of and had ordered the flights and was in complete control of everything done in the foreign arena by this Government. The latter choice would mean that the President of the United States is Commander in Chief during peacetime clandestine operations as he is in time of war. This is a totally new doctrine born of the vicissitudes of the Cold War. Many have considered this a very noble stand on the part of President Eisenhower, and it was. However, this public admission by the Chief of State that he had directed clandestine operations within another state is exactly the type of thing that reduces the prestige and credibility of United States in the family of nations to the condition described by Arnold Toynbee.