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Historical note, suitable for use on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

I missed this anniversary by a few days, partly because it came up right after I got home from my road trip.

But:

It was on June 27, 1923 that Army Air Service 1st Lts. Virgil Hine and Frank W. Seifert passed gasoline from their aircraft through a gravity hose to another plane flying beneath it piloted by Capt. Lowell H. Smith and 1st Lt. John P. Richter, according to the DOD.

This was the first aerial refueling in history. According to the linked article, the Air Force did flyovers over all 50 states: a reliable source informs me that there was a flyover of the Texas capital, which I missed.

In honor of the anniversary, I considered embedding the entire MST3K episode featuring “Starfighters”, which I have sat through. However, I do not feel it would be right to subject you, my loyal readers, to the full movie. Especially since I believe this kind of cruelty is outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

So I’ll just embed this part of it:

If you want to watch the full movie, and get your fill of aerial refueling and Robert “B-1 Bob” Dornan, a YouTube search should turn it up.

Edited to add: interesting article from The Drive that I missed earlier, about the history and current state of aerial refueling.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2023.

Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

Michael Norell, actor.

His acting credits in IMDB are limited, though his credits as a writer are more substantial. He did one episode of “Police Story”…

…and 110 episodes of “Emergency”. He was “Captain Stanley”. JEMS.

NYT obit for Don Bateman.

Cynthia Weil, songwriter. (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’”)

Redd Holt, drummer.

Mr. Holt scored his biggest hit as the drummer with the pianist Ramsey Lewis’s trio, whose original lineup also included Eldee Young on bass.
In 1965 — nearly 10 years after the band’s first record — they came out with “The ‘In’ Crowd,” a live album whose title track was a cover of a recently popular song by the R&B singer Dobie Gray.
The Lewis Trio version superseded Mr. Gray’s, reaching the top of the Billboard R&B chart and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their “‘In’ Crowd” won the 1965 Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz performance by a small group or soloist.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2023.

Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

John Beasley, actor. Other credits include “The Sum of All Fears”, “The Pretender”, and “To Sir, with Love II”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Claudia Rosett, journalist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Highlights of her journalism career include exposing the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal at the United Nations; covering the Russian invasion of Chechnya; and monitoring Beijing’s abrogation of its one-country, two-systems promise on Hong Kong. Her short book, What to Do About the UN, argues that the international organization founded in 1945 as a vehicle to avert war and promote human freedom and dignity has instead become fraught with bigotry, fraud, abuse, and corruption.
One of her most memorable pieces of reporting took place on June 4, 1989, when she was present in Tiananmen Square as Chinese tanks rolled over unarmed, peaceful student protestors. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal the next day, she wrote, “With this slaughter, China’s communist government has uncloaked itself before the world.” Thirty-four years later, these words still ring true.

NYT obit for Brian Shul (archived).

Posted in Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 30, 2023.

Tuesday, May 30th, 2023

C. Donald Bateman, big damn hero, passed away on Sunday. He was 91.

Most people outside of a small specialized circle have probably never heard of him, but:

…Bateman is credited by industry experts as having saved more lives than anyone in aviation history.

Back in the day, there was a huge problem with airplanes flying into the ground. The industry refers to this as “controlled flight into terrain” (CFIT). Two high profile examples of this were Southern Airways Flight 932 (the Marshall University crash) and TWA Flight 514 (the Mount Weather crash).

In the 1960s and 70s, there was an average of one CFIT accident per month, and CFIT was the single largest cause of air travel fatalities during that time.

Prior to the development of GPWS, large passenger aircraft were involved in 3.5 fatal CFIT accidents per year, falling to 2 per year in the mid-1970s.

Don Bateman developed the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) which warns pilots when they’re getting too close to the ground.

Those early systems used a radar altimeter to track how high the plane was above the ground. It helped a lot, but it wasn’t perfect: the GPWS had a “blind spot” looking forward, and could also be fooled if the plane was configured for landing.

So Don Bateman went on to develop the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) which ties into GPS and a terrain database. EGPWS gives even more warning.

There’s a great story about the early development of EGPWS: Mr. Bateman found out that, after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, there was a huge terrain database that the Soviets had built up available for sale on the black market. So he went to his superiors at Honeywell and convinced them to buy the database, and the early EGPWS were built on that.

Today, what the FAA calls “terrain awareness and warning systems” (TAWS) are required on “all U.S. registered turbine-powered airplanes with six or more passenger seats (exclusive of pilot and copilot seating)”.

Bateman assembled a small team to work exclusively on flight safety systems — over the years, typically fewer than 10 people.
Bob Champion, who came to manage the team for Bateman, said “he looked for innovators who could drive his ideas. He liked people who disagreed and argued so we’d have a good debate about how to solve a problem.”
He said Bateman called it a “team of mavericks.”

Bateman’s team devised critical safety additions, including:

The technology eliminated the “No. 1 killer in aviation for decades,” said Bill Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation. “It’s accepted within the industry that Don Bateman has probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of aviation.”

Posted in Obits, Planes | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 24, 2023.

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

Brian Shul, SR-71 pilot and author, passed away over the weekend.

I’ve had this obit on hold for a few days because I couldn’t find a good source to link to. FotB RoadRich forwarded the Flying obit, so much credit to him.

Bill Lee, musician.

Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.

He also wrote film scores for the first four feature films directed by Spike Lee, his son.

Chas Newby.

Newby was a member of John Lennon’s first band The Quarrymen, and news of his death was announced by The Cavern Club Liverpool — a music venue where The Beatles performed before finding global stardom.
“It’s with great sadness to hear about the passing of Chas Newby,” the venue wrote in a Facebook post. “Chas stepped in for The Beatles for a few dates when Stuart Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg and latterly he played for The Quarrymen.”

Gerald Castillo, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and the 1990-1991 “The New Adam-12”.

Kenneth Anger, the Hollywood Babylon guy. He also did some “experimental” films. (Edited to add: NYT obit archived.)

I’ve heard more than once that HB is notoriously inaccurate. I know, I know, but: Wikipedia.

And here’s a direct link to the “You Must Remember This” episodes (which I have not listened to yet, not being a regular listener of YMRT).

Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 10, 2023.

Friday, March 10th, 2023

Robert Blake. LAT. THR.

Yes, yes, “Baretta” and Bonny Lee Bakley. Also: “The Court of Last Resort”, “The F.B.I.”, “Electra Glide in Blue”, and “12 O’Clock High” among other credits. I’ve seen “In Cold Blood” but it was a long time ago. (I think I actually rented it on VHS.) I’d like to see it again: my recollection is that it was an excellent adaptation of what I consider to be a very good book, with some astonishing cinematography.

I can’t tell if Blake was the last surviving “Our Gang” member or not. If he wasn’t, he was certainly pretty darn near being the last one.

(And on a side note: “Fred” was actually played by two different Triton cockatoos: “Lala” and “Weird Harold”. “Weird Harold” was a “stunt double” that they only used when “Fred” was flying. I don’t know if either one is still alive, but the San Diego Zoo website claims that, with proper care, cockatoos can live anywhere from 60 years to a full century.)

The Reno Air Races. At least, in their present form. (Hattip to FotB RoadRich.)

The first major step in its demise happened Thursday when the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority’s board of trustees voted unanimously to authorize its president and CEO, Daren Griffin, to negotiate final terms for the event.
It calls for the event this year from Sept. 13 to 17 to be the final air race at Reno-Stead Airport, with an air show in 2024 to celebrate its 60th anniversary.

But:

Although the Stead location is off the table, the Reno Air Racing Association – which organizes the event – sent out an email Thursday afternoon saying, “We are committed to finding a new location so that the event can continue. In fact, we are currently exploring several other possible locations to host the event in the future but it starts with making this year’s event the biggest and most successful it can be.”
Among the challenges cited in this decision was an increase in insurance costs for the event from $780,000 to $1.3 million and regional growth that makes hosting it at Reno-Stead Airport more challenging.

I’ve been to Reno fairly recently, but have never been to the air races. (Always wanted to go, though.) I hope they find a new location. But I’m having a lot of trouble, just based on what I saw when I was in the area, visualizing a location that has the required infrastructure and space to support all those planes, as well as having enough hotels/motels/campgrounds to house the crowd coming in for the races. Perhaps the plan is to move to another location in Nevada? Or out of Nevada? I have a vague memory that there was talk about doing air races in South Texas some time ago…

Posted in 1970s, Birds, Law, Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 9, 2023.

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over an obit from Military.com for Jack Holder, who died February 24 at the age of 101.

Mr. Holder was a WWII veteran and a survivor of Pearl Harbor.

The young sailor survived that day by diving into a ditch between airplane hangars to avoid getting strafed by a Japanese pilot.
He went on to fly as a flight engineer on a PBY at Midway, scouting for Japanese forces with squadron VP-23. He later flew missions over Guadalcanal, retrained on the new B-24 and completed his WWII service flying missions over the English Channel. All in all, the young man had himself quite an eventful war.

He wrote a memoir, Fear, Adrenaline, and Excitement which you can get from Amazon.

On the occasion of an honor flight that celebrated his 100th birthday in December 2021, Holder announced that the secret to his long life was “good heart exercise and two scotch and sodas every night.”
There was a party after the 2019 “Midway” screening at the STK Restaurant at the W Hotel, the kind of hip, contemporary joint that makes a lot of folks over the age of 50 uncomfortable. Holder was right at home and was one of the very last people to leave as the night wound down.
The Jack Holder I met was slyly funny, incredibly enthusiastic about meeting new people and very excited about the chance to talk to younger women. The bonus for him was that almost every single woman he met qualified as a younger woman.

The Notorious B.I.G. “B.I.G.” in this case is Bert I. Gordon, who passed away yesterday at 100. THR.

For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Gordon was a monster movie impresario.

Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive.

I’ve actually never seen that, but I have the impression that it is pretty good.

In “Beginning of the End” (1957), a scientist (Peter Graves) uses radiation to make giant fruits and vegetables to end world hunger, but a plague of giant grasshoppers that has eaten the food invades Chicago and starts feasting on people. Lured into Lake Michigan with an electronic mating call, the grasshoppers drown. Mr. Gordon did the special effects in his garage, filming 200 grasshoppers jumping and crawling on photos of the city. Reviewers called the special effects absurdly obvious and the screenplay ludicrous.

Elements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”

We watched the MST3K version of this one fairly recently. It is not anywhere near as good as the NYT makes it sound.

Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.
Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”

His autobiography on Amazon.

All this was fodder for the hosts of the comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which brought the Gordon canon to a new audience. “I watched it one time, and I didn’t like them making fun of [his work],” he said. “I take my films very seriously.”

Left out of most discussions I’ve seen: “Tormented”, which we also watched the MST3K version of. I don’t think it is as bad as “Village of the Giants”…

(Yeah, I might be a little unfair in referencing the MST3K versions. But for the ones I’ve seen, I’ll steal a line from Gene Siskel about another movie: “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.”)

Chaim Topol, or just “Topal”, of “Fiddler on the Roof” fame. THR.

Other credits include both “The Winds of War” and “War and Rememberance”, “SeaQuest 2032”, “For Your Eyes Only”, and he played Dr. Zarkov in the 1980 “Flash Gordon”.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 3, 2023.

Friday, March 3rd, 2023

Wayne Shorter, saxaphone player and composer.

His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.
He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.

…

Mr. Shorter often said he was drawn to music because it has “velocity and mystery.” A lifelong fan of comic books and science fiction, he kept a shelf crowded with action figures and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the Superman “S” logo. In his later years, he cut the figure of a sage with a twinkle in his eye, issuing cryptic or elliptical statements that inevitably came back to a sense of play.
“Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”
Throughout his career he refused to hew too closely to any tradition except that of fearless expedition. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he liked to say, “only means ‘I dare you.’”

…

In total, Mr. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last bestowed this year for best improvised jazz solo, for “Endangered Species,” a track, written with Ms. Spalding, from the album “Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival,” where he performed in a quartet with her, Terri Lyne Carrington and Leo Genovese.
He also received a lifetime achievement honor from the Recording Academy in 2015. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He received the Polar Music Prize, an international honor recognizing both pop and classical music, in 2017. And he was among the recipients of the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that also included the composer Philip Glass.

Greta Andersen, long-distance swimmer. She was 95.

Ms. Andersen, who broke 18 world marathon records, has been called the greatest female swimmer in history, according to Bruce Wigo, former president of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, which honored her with its lifetime achievement award in 2015. “She often beat all of the men,” he said.

…

She was the first woman to complete five crossings of the English Channel and the first to win the race across it twice in a row, which she did in 1957 and 1958. (The first woman to swim the English Channel was Gertrude Ederle, a New Yorker born to German immigrants, who did so in 14½ hours in 1926, breaking the records of the five men who had preceded her.)

Christopher Fowler, author. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

FotB RoadRich sent over a nice obit for David Rathbun. He spent 26 years with Cirrus Aircraft, and did a lot of work on the SR20, SR22, SR22T, and the SF50 Vision Jet.

In a social media post, David’s brother, Daniel Rathbun, called him a “brilliant” engineer and credited him for being instrumental in the design of the Cirrus single-engine jet that recently won the coveted Robert J. Collier Trophy bestowed each year by the National Aeronautic Association. “David was indeed a gifted mover and shaker in the aviation world and will be horribly missed,” Daniel said.

Richard Anobile. I had not heard of him previously, but his story is relevant to my interests.

Mr. Anobile went on to combine movie frames and dialogue in books that ambitiously reconstructed complete films, including “Casablanca,” “Psycho,” Stagecoach,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Frankenstein” and “Play It Again, Sam.” He used the same formula to describe “verbal and visual gems” in the films of W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.

This was in the days before VCRs, DVDs, and widespread availability of older movies for easy viewing. Most famously, he got involved with Groucho Marx.

“The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” published two years later, was a more ambitious project, and it brought Mr. Anobile into closer contact with Groucho, then in his 80s, through an introduction by his agent.
In addition to excerpts from his many hours of interviews with Mr. Marx, the book included photographs and illustrations, as well as playbills, reviews, advertisements, family scrapbook entries and pages from film scripts. Mr. Anobile also interviewed the other two surviving Marx brothers, Gummo (who left the group long before they started making movies) and Zeppo, as well as friends like the comedian Jack Benny.

I’m going to note here that used paperback copies of this are available on Amazon for reasonable prices.

Getting back to Groucho and Mr. Anobile, there was a problem:

But Mr. Marx regretted the publication of his raw opinions of people like his brother Chico (“All he could do was shoot the piano keys”); Noël Coward and Truman Capote (whom he tarred with gay slurs); George M. Cohan (“a no-good Irish son of a bitch”); S.J. Perelman, who contributed to the scripts of two Marx Brothers films (“I hated the son of a bitch and he had a head as big as my desk”); and Marilyn Monroe, who had a small role in “Love Happy” (1949), the brothers’ last film.
In late 1973, Mr. Marx sought an injunction in New York State Supreme Court to stop the distribution of the book, although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter” and that Mr. Anobile had assured him that he was going to turn his raw language into respectable prose.
Whatever it was he had said — to paraphrase a song he had sung in “Horse Feathers” (1932) — he was against it.
To prove that Mr. Marx said what he had said, Mr. Anobile brought the tapes of their interviews into court. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1974, he recalled cautioning Mr. Marx not to say anything during the interviews that he did not want to see published.
He added, “He signed a jacket of the book, ‘This is a wonderful book, Richard, thanks to you.’”
Mr. Marx — who staged one of his depositions in a Manhattan hotel suite wearing a shirt patterned with the titles of Marx Brothers films and bearing the slogan “Money talks” — never got the injunction or the $15 million in damages that he had demanded.
Mr. Anobile told the blog Brain Dead and Loving It in 2018 that the case was settled after Mr. Marx’s death in 1977.

Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 31, 2023.

Tuesday, January 31st, 2023

Lt. Col. Dr. Harold Brown (USAF – ret.)

Dr. Brown flew 30 missions during the war in Europe and later served in the Korean War. He spent 23 years in the military before retiring, earning a doctorate and becoming a college administrator.
He was one of the last surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group that included 355 pilots who served in segregated units operating from the war’s Mediterranean theater after beginning their training at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Fewer than 10 are still living, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization dedicated to preserving their legacy.
After taking off from Italy at dawn on March 14, 1945, Dr. Brown, a second lieutenant at the time, was piloting a P-51 Mustang strafing a German freight train near Linz, Austria, when the locomotive exploded, hurling shrapnel into the engine of his single-propeller plane.
With only seconds before his plane lost power, he bailed out and parachuted to safety. But he landed not far from his target, where he was apprehended by two armed local constables and was soon surrounded by a furious mob of some two dozen Austrians whose town he and his comrades had just attacked.
“I was met by perhaps 35 of the most angry people I’ve ever met in my life,” Dr. Brown said on the PBS podcast “American Veteran.” “There’s no doubt murder’s on their mind.”
“It was clear that they finally decided to hang me,” he recalled in a memoir, “Keep Your Airspeed Up: The Story of a Tuskegee Airman” (2017), which he wrote with his wife. “They took me to a perfect hanging tree with a nice low branch and they had a rope. I can still visualize that tree today.
“I knew at that moment I was going to die.”
But he was rescued from the vigilantes by a third constable, who threatened to fire on the crowd to protect Dr. Brown as a prisoner of war.

…

Dr. Brown was turned over to military authorities and served six weeks in prison camps until being liberated when the war ended.

The Boeing 747.

FotB RoadRich sent over a link: Boeing will be live streaming the handover ceremony at 1 PM Pacific (4 PM Eastern, 3 PM Central) this afternoon.

Bobby Hull as promised. ESPN. Chicago Tribune.

Cindy Williams. Other credits include “Cannon”, “The First Nudie Musical”, and the good “Hawaii Five-0”. And if you haven’t seen “The Conversation”, you really should.

She auditioned for Princess Leia on Star Wars (1977) but knew deep down that Lucas wanted a younger actress, and Carrie Fisher was hired.

Kevin O’Neal, actor. Other credits include “The Fugitive” (the original), “Perry Mason” (the good one), and “Lancer”.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 6, 2023.

Friday, January 6th, 2023

Kenneth Rowe, also known as Lt. No Kum-Sok of the North Korean Air Force.

This is an interesting historical footnote (recommended for use in schools) that I was previously unaware of.

Lt. Kum-Sok was born in what was then “the northern part of the Japanese-occupied Korean Peninsula”. He became a navel cadet, transferred to the North Korean Air Force, and learned to fly MIGs.

He got his wings at 19.

…

Mr. Rowe had become a member of North Korea’s Communist Party and “played the Communist zealot,” as he put it, while serving in the Korean War. But he had been influenced by his anti-Communist father and his mother’s Roman Catholic upbringing to yearn for life in a democracy. He had been thinking of a way to get to America since Korea was divided after World War II and the Soviet-backed Kim Il-sung imposed Communist rule over what became North Korea.

On the morning of September 21, 1953, while flying in a patrol of 16 planes, he broke off from the formation and flew across the DMZ to Kimpo AFB in South Korea.

Luck was with him. The American air defense radar just north of Kimpo had been shut down for routine maintenance, and neither American planes aloft nor antiaircraft crews had spotted him.
During the late stages of the Korean War, the Air Force had dropped leaflets over North Korea offering a $100,000 reward to the first North Korean pilot to defect with a MIG. Mr. Rowe maintained that he knew nothing of that reward and said he had simply wanted to live a free life. But he accepted it.

This was the first intact MIG that the United States was able to analyze. (At least, according to the NYT: Wikipedia claims that Franciszek Jarecki, a Polish pilot, defected in one on March 5, 1953.)

Seeking to determine the MIG’s strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of future conflicts with the Soviet Union and its allies, the Air Force dispatched some of its most accomplished test pilots — including Maj. Chuck Yeager, who had gained fame in 1947 as the first flier to break the sound barrier — to put the MIG-15 through strenuous maneuvers. Their verdict: The F-86 was the superior warplane.

Again per Wikipedia (quoting Yeager’s autobiography), “the MiG-15 had dangerous handling faults…during a visit to the USSR, Soviet pilots were incredulous he had dived in it, this supposedly being very hazardous.”

He came to the United States in May 1954 and was something of a celebrity. He was introduced to Vice President Richard M. Nixon, was interviewed by Dave Garroway on NBC’s “Today” program and appeared on broadcasts for the Voice of America. He received an engineering degree from the University of Delaware, became an American citizen in 1962 and worked as an engineer for major defense and aerospace companies. He was later a professor of engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.

He was 90 when he passed.

And his plane?

Seven decades later, that plane still exists, and resides at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.
Its red star repainted, it is on display alongside an American F-86 Sabre jet, a remembrance of the dogfights of the Korean War in the swath of sky known as MIG Alley.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore (#6 in a series).

Wednesday, December 28th, 2022

Here’s a fun little quickie: a thoughtful Christmas present from FotB RoadRich.

The 1981 Braniff annual report.

The significance of this: the 1981 annual report came out in April of 1982. Braniff’s original airline operations ceased May 12, 1982.

(“Two later airlines used the Braniff name: the Hyatt Hotels-backed Braniff, Inc. in 1983–89, and Braniff International Airlines, Inc. in 1991–92.” Also: “…continues today as a retailer, hotelier, travel service and branding and licensing company, administering the former airline’s employee pass program and other airline administrative duties.“)

Posted in Christmas, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 9, 2022.

Friday, December 9th, 2022

Squadron Leader George Leonard “Johnny” Johnson, MBE, DFM (RAF – ret.) has passed away at the age of 101.

He was the last surviving participant in the May 17, 1943 “Dambusters” raid by 617 Squadron.

This is a great story:

The crew of Sergeant Johnson’s plane — flown by the lone American on the raid, Flight Lt. Joe McCarthy, a native of Long Island who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force — had an even tougher task
Its target, the Sorpe Dam, was an embankment lined with soil and rocks that was expected to absorb much of a bomb’s explosive power, in contrast to the two more vulnerable masonry dams.

…

Lieutenant McCarthy had to clear the steeple of a church, then dip to a level of 30 feet and fly parallel and extraordinarily close to the wall for his plane’s bomb to make a significant impact when it exploded underwater. He made repeated runs along the dam before Sergeant Johnson was satisfied that he could drop his bomb at the center point, where it could do the most damage.
“I found out very quickly how to be the most unpopular member of the crew,” Mr. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the University of Huddersfield in England, explaining that his patience had increased the chances of his plane being spotted by the Germans.
At one point, he said, his rear gunner pleaded, “Will somebody just get that bomb out of here?”
“After nine dummy runs, we were satisfied we were on the right track,” Mr. Johnson wrote in his memoir. “I pushed the button and called, ‘Bomb gone!’ From the rear of the plane was heard ‘Thank Christ for that!’ The explosion threw up a fountain of water up to about 1,000 feet.”

Two Lancasters hit the Sorpe: the dam was damaged, but not breached.

The squadron leader, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who would be killed in action later in the war, received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for valor. Sergeant Johnson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal.

…

His death, announced by his family on Facebook, came five years after Queen Elizabeth II conveyed the title Member of the Order of the British Empire on Mr. Johnson in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
The honor was bestowed after thousands had signed a petition asking that Mr. Johnson, a bomb-aimer during the war (the equivalent of an American bombardier), be accorded recognition in his final years as a collective tribute to the Dambusters.

…

For all the harrowing missions he took part in, Mr. Johnson said, he felt confident that he would survive.
“I didn’t feel afraid,” he told James Holland for his book “Dam Busters” (2012), in recalling his combat service between 1942 and 1944. “I was sure I was going to come back every time.”

Posted in History, Obits, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

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