I started out doing police training videos, but those have become thin on the ground. So when a new one shows up in my feed it is a cause for celebration.
Especially this one. I believe it is called “Out Numbered” and dates to 1968 according to the notes. Those same notes also point out that it features “Martin Milner of Adam 12 Fame”.
I want to point out that, while a lot of people knew Mr. Milner best from “Adam-12” (and I include myself in that category) he had a much broader and more interesting career beyond one cop show: “Route 66”, “Sweet Smell of Success”, both “Dragnet”s (the 1950s one and the late 1960s-early 1970s one)…
Bonus #1: totally unrelated to police work, but something I found kind of cool. This is a vintage (1969, maybe) promo film by Canadair for their CL-215 water bomber.
Bonus #2: “Testing a $600 survival tool”.
$600? At that price, not only should it include a tent, but it had better be setting up that tent for me automatically. And making me breakfast in the morning and dinner at night.
I thought today, for Military History Monday, I’d do a couple of videos at the intersection of survival and military history. For reasons.
Short-ish: Have you ever asked yourself, “Self, how do I escape from a sinking submarine?”
If so:
You’re weird. (Unless you served on subs in the Navy.)
I want to hang out with you.
“Submarine Escape” from 1953.
Long: there are actually two versions of this on the ‘Tube. I’m picking the longer one because the shorter one seems to be cut off. The longer one seems to be a little chopped as well, but not as dramatically.
“Survival in the Arctic Tundra”. In which the crew of a C-119 bails out and has to survive…in the Arctic tundra.
The Saturday Night Movie Group recently watched “Island in the Sky“, one of William Wellman’s two great John Wayne aviation films. (The other is “The High and the Mighty“.) “Island” is in large part about the crew of a downed aircraft trying to survive in the Arctic, and in equally large part about the interpersonal relationships between transport pilots, and how everyone unites when a crew is in trouble.
I’ve got another NASA film lined up today, but this isn’t space science.
“Flight to Tomorrow” is a 1967 film about NASA’s supersonic aircraft research, including the SST, hypersonic transports, and noise abatement.
Bonus #1: I thought it might be interesting to post this: “The M2-F2 Crash” from the Dark Footage folks.
Why? Well, some of you may recognize the M2-F2. Some more of you may recognize some of the footage in this documentary. Otherwise, stay to the end, when all will be revealed.
Bonus #2 and #3: The history of the M2-F2 and the NASA lifting bodies led me to this.
“Today, Tomorrow and Titan III”, part one of “Man In Space”. I know I’m sort of fudging here, but I really do view lifting bodies and supersonic/hypersonic transport as being a different category of science than the manned space missions.
Part 2: This also covers Bill Dana and the X-15.
Bonus #4: Just one more, because it is short. The Martin Marietta X-24B lifting body.
Time for some more true crime. Or “crime” in this first case.
At the end of WWII, some of Hitler’s SS men made off with an estimated $130 million in Nazi gold.
“SS Bank Heist – Berlin 1945”.
Bonus #1: Well, this is interesting. Somebody posted a full episode of the series “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories” (with Pernell Roberts) to the ‘Tube.
“The Hijacking of TWA Flight 541”. I picked up on this because it is one part of a story I find kind of interesting. Back in 1978, a 17-year-old girl named Robin Oswald hijacked a plane. Why? She was trying to get her mother’s boyfriend, Garrett Brock Trapnell, out of the Federal prison in Marion.
Why didn’t her mom do it? Because her mom was dead: Barbara Ann Oswald tried to break Trapnell out of Marion by hijacking a helicopter. When the chopper landed in the prison yard, the pilot grabbed the gun and killed Ms. Oswald.
The whole Garrett Trapnell story is really kind of crazy. Beyond the helicopter escape, he was a bank robber, con man, aircraft hijacker…and bigamist. There’s a book about him that I’d love to find: The Fox Is Crazy, Too (no affiliate link, because Amazon prices are insane).
(And for those of you concerned about me exploiting a 17-year-old: she was tried as a juvenile and did minimal time. Robin Oswald actually appears briefly in shadow talking about Trapnell’s hold over her, and how she was a dumb kid at the time: Roberts mentions that she’d led a “productive life” since then.)
I miss this series. It was tight and informative: I find “The FBI Files” to sometimes be a little on the long side. Somebody needs to release this series on DVD, or get streaming rights.
Bonus #2: I miss the series so much, how about another episode? This one is about one of those product tampering scares from the 1980s. But there’s a twist…
“Vintage Tiny Home on Wheels – 1976 GMC Motorhome Tour”.
I really like that form factor in a RV. I also like the fact that it has an internal shower and toilet. They don’t make these any more, but I think if i was going to adopt the RV lifestyle, I’d look for something similar to this.
“It’s Everybody’s Business”, a 1954 film from the US Chamber of Commerce.
Bonus #2: trolling, trolling, trolling, got to keep on trolling…
“Flugzeuge am Haken” from 1969, featuring the favorite plane of Lawrence, RoadRich, and WCD. (Yes, it is dangerously close to military history, and in German. But it’s less than three minutes long.)
Bonus #3: I swear that early in the life of this blog, I posted someone’s blog entry about their purchase of a fire truck, and what to look for when you’re buying a used fire truck. But I can’t find that post now.
“I BOUGHT A Legit FIRETRUCK From The Fire Department”.
You know, $3,000 is almost in my price range, if I wanted to mess around in a used fire truck. Then again, my local gun shop has a nice Colt Combat Commander modified by Clark Custom for $2,500, and I wouldn’t have to worry about parking the .45.
Military History Monday strikes again! And today I’ve got two kind of odd ones for you.
“The Small Boat Navy”, a 1968 Navy propaganda film about shallow water Navy ops in Vietnam. The odd part? This is narrated by Steve MartinPerry MasonChief Ironside Raymond Burr.
Bonus: this is a little on the short side, and just has overlaid background music, but I wanted to include it for the odd factor. Video of test flights of the prototype two seat Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II trainer jet aircraft from the 1970s.
What’s odd about this? Two things: this is the only one of these aircraft ever built.
Well, actually, not that one, though these folks did manage to control the horizontal and the vertical.
This is a vintage (1969) promo film from Boeing, “The Outer Limit”, about the flight testing and introduction of the 747.
I’m fudging the definition of travel a bit with that one, but it is short. The next one is, admittedly, long, but it lets me cross another state off the list, and it is a place I enjoy visiting.
“The City of Las Vegas, the Early Years”. This covers the period from 1905 to 1920. See? Who says Vegas doesn’t have a sense of history?
Bonus: I’ve griped before about the hard hat tour of Hoover Dam (which I was lucky enough to go on) and how it was shut down after 9/11. Well, here’s a video (a little over 30 minutes long) of the hard hat tour from March 2001.
“If you’re going home by plane, wear the hard hat on the plane. It scares the heck out of the other passengers.” Man, wasn’t that a simpler time?
I was talking with my brother about calculator watches recently, which reminded me of this video from Techmoan: “Hewlett Packard HP-01 1977’s Smartest Watch”.
As a HP geek, I would kind of like to have one of these: however, examples in good condition are expensive.
Bonus #1: I also thought it might be interesting to do some startup videos. Not tech startups, but starting up things. For example, an Airbus A320:
Bonus #2: Or a railroad locomotive.
Bonus #3: Or a DC-3.
Bonus #4: Or a tractor, “with a 12 guage shotgun shell”. I believe this gives new meaning to the term “shotgun start“.
I’ve been running behind on obits, so here’s a roundup.
Roger Mudd, CBS, NBC, and PBS anchorman and reporter. He was also a distant relative of Samuel Mudd (the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg).
FotB RoadRich sent over some nice obits for Mike Collins. He sounds like a truly interesting guy: he worked for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) as technical editor and director of business operations. He was also a skilled photographer and amateur brewer.
Finally, Tony Hendra, “National Lampoon” and “Spy” guy, and “Ian Faith” in “This Is Spinal Tap”.
Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon? Or if not that, a passenger airplane from the 1950s?
From those wonderful folks at TWA, “Flight To California”.
Bonus, plus CanCon! “The Mother of Rivers”, about the Columbia River ice field. Made about 1947 for the Canadian National Railways by our old friends at the National Film Board of Canada.
Bonus #2: Again, I’m stretching the definition of travel, but this involves planes and is short. Have you ever wanted to see a Boeing 747-8 fully loaded abort a takeoff at 200 MPH? Using only the brakes, no reverse thrust? And by the way, the brakes are worn down to the metal studs?
“No Sweat!” is a nice little educational film: “…showing an under-the-weather F-86 pilot, who, through carelessness and preoccupation, turns a routine flight into a nightmare.” I think there’s probably some stuff in here that will also serve as useful reminders to general aviation pilots.
Bonus: “The Fighting 51st”, a documentary about the 5lst Fighter Interceptor Wing.
Bonus #2: Wanna see someone do aerobatics in a F-86? Here you go.
I don’t like falling back on the same people over and over again. In this case, I am pleading the timeliness exemption.
For those of you who may not have heard, there was an incident over the weekend involving a United 777 flying from Denver to Honolulu: one of the engines failed and the engine inlet separated from the aircraft. The aircraft was able to make an emergency return to Denver, and there were no injuries on board. Parts of the aircraft fell into a neighborhood in the flight path, and some of those parts went through the roof of a house, but there were no injuries on the ground.
So the question comes up: what do you do in these situations? What do you do if you’re flying a plane with 239 people on board, and the plane starts shedding chunks of itself on departure?
I’ve said this before, but one of the answers is: first, fly the plane. At least, for as long as you can: it doesn’t always end this way. (But we have learned a lot since 1979.)
“Captain Joe” put up a video explaining what happened (including what checklists the pilots would have used) from his perspective, based on what we know now.
Bonus #1: From the VASAviation channel, here’s the traffic between the United flight and Denver ATC.
This video states the plane made a full stop on the runway, where no problems were found, and then it was towed off to parking. However, the article I linked earlier says that the right engine was actually on fire when the plane landed: emergency services extinguished the fire and then it was towed off.
Which kind of made me wonder when I read it: why did they not evacuate the aircraft if the engine was on fire? My suspicion is that it was a trade-off. As I understand it, the expectation is that anytime they have to use those emergency slides, people are going to get hurt. They aren’t designed to be gentle, they’re designed to get you off the airplane fast, and there are usually bruises, sprains, or even broken bones associated with that. Emergency services may have felt the fire was small enough to be controlled, and decided the risk to passengers was manageable. It seems like that was the right choice in this case…
Bonus #2: sort of unrelated, but I wanted to put this here for reasons. “Reel Engineering” covers “No Highway In the Sky”.
We watched “No Highway” not too long ago (it is available in a reasonably priced bluray (affiliate link)) and I think it is a fine movie. The book, to my mind, is even better, and I would genuinely like to see more people seek out Nevil Shute’s work.
It seems like he’s mostly remembered for On the Beach, which, you know, is an okay novel and worth being remembered for. But he wrote a lot of other stuff as well: besides No Highway, I enthusiastically recommend Trustee from the Toolroom and Slide Rule, his autobiography of his experiences in the aviation industry.