Travel Thursday!
Today’s feature: “Flagships of the Air”, from American Airlines sometime in the 1940s. I picked this for one big reason: it features transcontinental flight on the DC-3, and I love me some DC-3s.
Bonus: We haven’t done a Pan Am video in a bit, and this even fits in with the America! theme. “Wings to Alaska”, from 1965.
Bonus bonus: Nothing to do with travel really, but I remember this song from one of the 8-track tapes we had kicking around in our old Suburban.
I’m going back to military aviation today, even though I sort of covered that yesterday. It is shaping up to be a busy weekend, and I’m queuing Saturday and Sunday up in advance.
Today’s video: “The Second Seat”, a Naval recruiting film.
Edited to add 10/4: fixed the embedding on this one. Sorry about that: I don’t know what happened, and I wasn’t able to fix this yesterday.
Bonus video, a little on the long side, but it is Saturday, and I know at least one person will enjoy this: Brian Shul, author of “Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet”, speaks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2016.
Today is a day for randomness and a little self-indulgence on my part.
Jerry Miculek posted another cool video of another Smith and Wesson: this one a blued .45 ACP revolver, custom built for him by Roy Jinks. Y’all know I love me some .45 ACP revolver action.
Bonus video #1: shifting gears a little bit, “”Curiosity Killed a Cat”, a 1944 military training film about how when you’re in the field, you shouldn’t play with the crystals unexploded ordnance or things that might be booby-trapped.
Bonus #2: “Angel In Overalls”, another vintage WWII propaganda film. This one celebrates the P-38 Lightning.
I feel like it has been a while since I’ve done anything with military aircraft, so here’s a nice one for you: “F-14 Tomcat The Total Fighter”, produced by Grumman sometime in the 1980s. It’s only about 10 minutes long, too.
Bonus #1, also short, also from Grumman: “F-14 Air Combat Maneuvering”, featuring F-14 pilots in training at Fighter Town USA (not to be confused with Flavor Town).
Bonus: as a tip of the hat to Ygolonac, please to enjoy the following:
Someone on Hacker News posted a link to this website listing surviving examples of the Lockheed Constellation and Super Constellation. (I know, Comic Sans, I’m sorry.)
This inspired me, and I thought it might be fun to share some Connie videos. First up: “The Super Constellation”, a 1955 Lockheed promo film about the building of the Super Constellation.
Bonus #1: The EC-121 Air Force variant flies to Yanks Air Museum.
Bonus #2: Want to see one flying over the Black Forest?
Bonus #3: this is longer, and I have not watched all of it yet. An episode of the “Great Planes” documentary series focusing on the Constellation.
Bonus #4, since three out of four of these have been short: Super Constellation engine startup and takeoff.
Today, I wanted to put up something that pushes a few of RoadRich’s hot buttons (and my own).
The California Highway Patrol has a YouTube channel. I thought it might be interesting to look at some aspects of operations that are common to both the Austin Police Department and the CHP. These are things that APD devotes presentations to in their Citizen’s Police Academy (which is on-hold at the moment), so why not take a look at how a department outside of the United States handles these things?
First up: “Air Operations”. This is a two-parter: Part 1.
(Can I note here that I hate “vlog”? I would say I hate the word, but it isn’t even a word.)
Part 2: this covers CHP’s fixed-wing (that is, not helicopter) operations.
You know what else CHP has? The mounted police.
You know I had to do that.
Anyway, the CHP mounted patrol.
I thought I’d try some things that are lighter and shorter today.
First up: “See A Job”. Actually, I have the impression that “See A Job” is the title of this whole series of educational films, and the actual title of this one is: “The Airline Stewardess: What’s A Nice Girl Like You Doing Way Up Here When The Ground’s Way Down There?”, “the story of Elaine Vaughn, an African-American Pan Am airline stewardess.”
That was from the 1960s. Bonus: “Airline Glamor Girls”, stewardess training from the late 1940s.
More bonus, and in the interest of equal time: TWA explains their “Inflight Services Personnel Selection Process” as of 1979.
Another really short bonus. “Top Gear” enthusiasts may have seen this one, but I had not previously: Clarkson’s custom drink cabinet for the trunk of his car.
I just find that very cool. One more, but still on the short side: “A Roman Solider Prepares Dinner”.
It seems to me that the C-130 is an underappreciated plane.
It isn’t sexy. But it can carry a lot of stuff:
It can carry a lot of troops.
It can land on a short field.
It can land and take off from an aircraft carrier.
Properly equipped versions even have a “frappe” setting.
Today’s feature: “Touchdown!” a 1960s vintage promo film for the C-130 from the Lockheed-Georgia Company.
Bonus, just for fun:
This isn’t exactly travel, but more a cross between business and aircraft.
“Tailspin”, which seems to be from something called “Enterprise” narrated by Eric Sevareid. This is a fairly short documentary about the history, and especially the fall, of Braniff. Warning: for some reason, the sound completely drops out at about the 24:30 mark, but most of what’s left at that point is shots of parked Braniff aircraft and the credits.
Bonus video #1: did you know Braniff flew the Concorde? Well, technically, they offered Concorde service between DFW and Dulles, with connecting flights to Paris and London (operated by Air France and British Airways: I think this is what we might call a “codeshare” today, but the US leg of the flights was operated by Braniff pilots.)
They started the service in early 1979.
Bonus video #2: a 1966 vintage (and mildly amusing) Braniff commercial.
Bonus video #3: another one from 1965 for “The End Of the Plain Plane“.
“We won’t get you where you’re going any faster, but it’ll seem that way.”
Bonus video #3: footage of “The Great Pumpkin”.
If I remember Splash of Colors correctly, the Great Pumpkin was the last Braniff plane in the air. I do remember a story about them being enroute to Hawaii: during the flight, the captain called the chief stewardess up to the flight deck.
Travel Thursday!
I thought I’d do something different today. Instead of planes for our first video, trains. And instead of visiting a relatively civilized country, a fifth world banana republic.
“The California Zephyr”! With VistaDome! And courteous waiters!
To be fair, this is from the 1950s, prior to the decline and fall. And somewhat interestingly, Amtrak still runs a train called “California Zephyr” over a similar route (According to Wikipedia, the original Western Pacific Railroad, Burlington Railroad and Rio Grande Railroad incarnation shown here was discontinued in 1970, and Amtrak began running their version in 1983.)
Bonus video #1: More trains, this time the Santa Fe railroad. “Southern California Holiday”. Both of these videos also include some footage of the happiest place on Earth.
“You may cross here from country to country, with no passport problems.” I remember those days. (Never been to Tijuana, but when I was young, my family walked across the border between Texas and Mexico more than once. And when I was older, I made a couple more cross-border trips with friends. Then Homeland Security.)
Bonus video #2: Okay, travel by air this time. “California: World In a Week”, from the 1960s and United Airlines.
It is almost like being there. Except you don’t have to step over the needles and feces. Marineland of the Pacific operated until 1987, when it was bought by the people who owned SeaWorld. The new owners promptly moved all of the animals to SeaWorld San Diego, shut down Marineland, and poured concrete into the drains.
(Also.)
If you’re a big WWII buff (especially the kind of WWII buff that watches “12 O’Clock High”) you’ve probably heard of, or heard talk about, the Norden bombsight.
It was an early tachometric design that directly measured the aircraft’s ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb’s impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.
Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a circular error probable (CEP)[a] of 75 feet (23 m)[b], an astonishing performance for that period. This precision would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores.
To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale as the Manhattan Project. Carl L. Norden, Inc. ranked 46th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts. The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.
In practice, it wasn’t quite that accurate: Wikipedia gives a combat CEP of 1,200 feet.
I wonder, if you had told WWII bombardiers at the time that the detailed workings of the Norden bombsight would be available to anyone in the world 73 years later, what would they have thought? Maybe nothing. Who knows?
Bonus video: and here’s how you’d actually use one in combat.
According to Wikipedia, the last use of the Norden bombsight was during the Vietnam War: “The bombsights were used in Operation Igloo White for implanting Air-Delivered Seismic Intrusion Detectors (ADSID) along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.“
Travel Thursday!
I know we went to Singapore last week, but here’s a different view, from a different airline that still exists and is one of my personal favorites. Why?
“Singapore Stop Over”, from Qantas sometime in the 1960s.
Bonus video: in all our travels, I’ve been neglecting the United States. So let us fix that. And it is the time of year when I want to visit someplace slightly cooler.
“This Land of Ours: Montana”, from 1947.
To be fair, yes, I probably picked this just so I could use the Frank Zappa video.