Whipped Cream Difficulties

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.

The domestic flights often had no more than 15 passengers on average for each flight while Braniff’s Boeing 727 flights were filled close to the capacity despite being five to ten minutes slower than Concorde.

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.

Officially, it appears that the crew was given the choice by Dallas operations to either divert to Los Angeles or continue the flight unpaid to Honolulu. Urban legend has it that the pilot had been ordered to divert. Either way, we suspect that the pilot really did tell Operations that he had “a good airplane, good weather, and a load of passengers who have paid for a trip to Hawaii. What are they gonna do…fire me?” The pilot then brought the lead flight attendant into the cockpit and informed her of what was happening. Her response: “Is that all? I can get another job…I thought you were going to tell me that you were putting this big son of a bitch in the water!”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2020 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Planes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.