Good Read - HL 190 (2)

REMEMBER CHRISTMAS GIFTS FROM OUR GROUP OF PILOT AUTHORS;  Check out our free listing of PCN pilot authors and their fine books at our author’s page: http://pcn.homestead.com/Authors.html

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From: "David L. Roberts" <robertsDL@mindspring.com>

Subject: Re: Firefly

Date: November 11, 2013 9:27:11 PM CST

To: Richard Diller <dick@thedillers.net>

HI Richard,

Congratulations and good luck with the book sales.  I will most certainly add it to my next revision and I encourage you to send your note to Mark Sztanyo at Mark@pilotcommunication.net  and ask him to include it in his next few PCN High Life issues.  My email list is four years old and many addresses are no longer good, but I still send messages to the list and suffer the innumerable bounces each time.  You'll do much better using his list.

But . . . . I would like a copy of your book, preferably a signed copy of the First Edition.  Please let me know the amount including shipping and I'll send you a check ASAP.
I'm looking forward to reading it.  A close friend of mine from USAF days, Bill Constantine, flew A-1s at  Pleiku.  We were on the same KC-135 crew in SAC in the mid 60s.  He's now a retired BGen living in Capetown, S. Africa.

Best wishes,
Dave

At 05:20 PM 11/11/2013, you wrote:

Dave,

I'm excited to report that my book, Firefly, A Skyraider's Story of America's Secret War Over Laos, has been published and is ready for purchased. Firefly has 312 pages, with pictures, and is a comprehensive report of what life was like for an A-1 pilot flying over Laos in 1969 and 1970. I communicated with my parents with three-inch reel-to-reel tapes, and many times I picked up the microphone right after a mission and told about it. My dad saved all those tapes, so most of the mission descriptions are as fresh as if they had happened today.

By choice, I specialized in night missions, so that is what much of the book is about: how we found the target, what napalm looked like when it hit the ground or a truck, what 23mm and 37mm fire looked like when it came up while I was making a pass at a target, and how we avoided hitting mountains in northern Laos at night. As far as I know, no one has written about the night mission, especially as it was flown over Laos.

I describe one search and rescue effort from my perspective, Boxer 22 (Google it for more information). I had my camera that day and have pictures of the actual pickup of the survivor that are one-of-a-kind of any rescue operation of the entire war. The circumstances of how I happened to get those pictures are described in the book.

I also talk about losing friends and fellow pilots who were shot down and with whom I had flown a day or two earlier, and how I dealt with it. At the recent A-1 Skyraider reunion in San Antonio, we learned that approximately 700 pilots (air force, does not include navy) flew A-1s in combat over the time of deployment of the airplane in Southeast Asia, 1964 - 1972. The air force lost 104 pilots either MIA or KIA, leaving about 600 who survived the war. The navy phased them out in about 1966, and lost 40 pilots.

Bob Gandt has allowed me to use a statement about what it meant to be an attack pilot at the very beginning. I describe the transition from flying F-106s to A-1s, and how I got to where I was.

The cost is $20 plus shipping and can be ordered at: www.fireflythebook.com. The Ebook is not ready yet, but I hope it will be within a couple of weeks.

Please add Firefly to your list of books by Delta authors and send this out to the PCN subscribers.

Thank you for keeping track of so many facets of the lives of Delta pilots.

Sincerely,

Dick Diller

 

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From: Ray D

Date: 11/16/2013 12:56:38 PM

To: Undisclosed-Recipient:,

Subject: Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines

  

BOOKSHELF

Book Review:

Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines

How a small local carrier grew into the most debonair of airlines

Patrick Cooke

Nov. 15, 2013 3:32 p.m. ET | WSJ

As impossible as it might be for today's traveler to believe, airlines long worked to provide customer satisfaction. In the 1920s, one offered personal headphones capable of tuning in AM radio stations from ground to air. Wicker seats replaced hard wooden ones, and airplane windows opened for easy trash disposal. In 1929, in what must have been an adventure in airborne amusement, one small flying operation experimented with screening in-flight movies.

Such are the complimentary snacktoids you'll find served up in Jack El-Hai's "Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines," an engaging yet somewhat dispiriting "company biography" of a proud and mighty American business enterprise that eventually came to be known, by the time of its demise after 80 years, as "Northworst."

Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines

By Jack El-Hai
Minnesota, 287 pages, $39.95

($29.67 @ Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Non-Stop-Turbulent-History-Northwest-Airlines/dp/0816674450/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384624336&sr=8-1&keywords=Non-Stop%3A+A+Turbulent+History+of+Northwest+Airlines ...rd)

A Northwest Orient Boeing 747-200 over Copenhagen in the 1980s.

Minnesota Historical Society Photo

The author's tale begins at the close of World War I, when barnstorming pilots hauled mail, and the occasional paying customer, in rattletrap biplanes that crashed with astonishing regularity. The U.S. Post Office assigned their routes. In 1926, an earnest engineer-turned-businessman named Lewis Brittin took over one such struggling outfit, a five-plane Minneapolis-St. Paul carrier, and named it Northwest Airways. Brittin was devoted to the Twin Cities, and it is from there, with backing from the Ford Motor Co. in Detroit, that he expanded out to destinations like Chicago, Winnipeg and Billings, Mont.

In the 1920s, flying was often an act of faith, even at a top speed of only 79 miles per hour. Pilots wore thick leather coats in subzero weather and flew in their underwear in the summer heat. Cows grazed on runways, which could present a problem upon landing, as it did for one pilot who reported that his engine, upon contact, went "deader than a smelt." Flying at night, pilots followed a crude trail of lighted beacons from town to town. The system worked fine as long as the pilots didn't mistake the lights of a train as a guidepost and follow it off into the darkness.

Under Brittin, Northwest's airplanes were upgraded as technology improved, and by 1930 the company was flying a fleet of six Ford Tri-Motors—the 12-seat "Tin Goose"—each equipped with a bathroom (a much underrated milestone). When travel time by plane started to beat train times, passenger service grew as important to the bottom line as mail contracts. Brittin continued to widen Northwest's route map, which eventually came under the regulatory whim of the Commerce Department and, later, the Federal Aviation Administration. The company began offering stock, and slowly Northwest departed its seat-of-the-pants past and headed into the corporate unknown along with other fledgling airlines, like United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

Mr. El-Hai observes that Northwest's history "covers the length of a human lifespan," and his book is a concise record of aviation's race to zoom further, faster and ever more fashionably through the 20th century. The Lockheed Orion, for example, makes way for the speedier Electra—Minneapolis to Seattle in 13 hours! That plane, in turn, is surpassed by the bigger and more luxurious Douglas DC-3, a "ship" that includes a galley staffed by the nation's first stewardesses. Part of their job involved lighting passengers' cigarettes and dispensing Seconal to the airsick. "Unlike the early years when the annual tally of passengers could fit inside a movie theater," the author writes, "Northwest was now [in 1939] flying the equivalent of the population of a pretty-good-size city every year."

Because Northwest's hub was located in northern climes, and because it had opened airways north to Anchorage, it knew how to operate in the cold reaches that nobody else wanted to fly to. During World War II, the airline nailed down lucrative government contracts to build airstrips and other infrastructure in Alaska as a safeguard against Japanese invasion. After the war, while the competition was stuck flying the mid-Pacific route to Asia via Hawaii, Northwest cashed in on its faster, "over the top" polar route to the Orient.

At the height of its power, from the mid-1940s through the 1960s, Northwest was the most debonair of airlines. Under the presidency of easygoing CEO Croil Hunter, it ordered several of the plushest airliner available, the double-decker, 100-passenger Stratocruiser, planes that the company called its "Castles in the Air." The ladies lounge alone, with its gold mirrors and fluorescent lighting, rivaled "the elegance of the Waldorf," as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune put it. Fine meals were served on real plates, prepared, according to the airline, by "women past middle age who have cooked for their families for years." For the first time in aviation history, alcohol was served in flight. The airline was forced to seek liquor licenses from each state its route passed over, but Illinois and New York refused, doubtless causing some confusion at the bar on the Stratocruiser's lounge deck.

It is by no means Mr. El-Hai's fault that the last third of his book, which is brimming with wonderful period photographs, reads as sadly elegiac. Too bad—we were having so much fun. For all the glamour, promise and profits of the earlier decades, the global circulatory system that Northwest and other airlines helped create also carried pathogens that would affect the way the world experienced air travel. Northwest was beset by six hijackings in the 1970s, political cranks and nut cases demanding to fly to Cuba, Algeria, Moscow and, in the case of one loopy air pirate, either "Afghanistan or San Diego." Clutching $200,000 in cash, Northwest's most famous hijacker, D.B. Cooper, parachuted from a Northwest Boeing 727 in 1971 to his final destination, whatever that turned out to be.

The OPEC crisis of the early 1970s was a body blow to the airline, as was the horrendous crash of a Northwest MD-82 in 1987, upon take-off in Detroit, that killed 150 passengers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_255

Nothing, however, scrambled the jets nationwide like airline deregulation in the 1980s. The author makes no judgment about the controversial act designed to free fare pricing from government control, but he is clear about what happened to mainstream carriers with the inevitable rise of discount upstarts like People Express and Freddie Laker. "Northwest had to become, like everyone else," Mr. El-Hai writes, "a low-cost airline."

Under the direction of a parade of business-school CEOs, Northwest played the discount game and spent the couple of decades lurching from one crisis to another: Pilots, mechanics and flight attendants complained that they had simply become "part of the equipment," Mr. El-Hai writes, and a series of labor disputes crippled the airline's ability to operate efficiently. Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, caused a huge spike in the cost of jet fuel. Stroppy passengers moaning for leg room were pelted with mini-bags of peanuts. When terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wearing an underwear bomb, attempted to kill everyone on board a Northwest A330-200 on Christmas Day 2009, he made the air pirates of a generation earlier seem positively genteel.

The end came in 2010 when Northwest merged with Delta Air Lines, an airline with similar biplane beginnings. A few weeks before Northwest's "red tail" logos disappeared for good, an incident occurred that might have served as a metaphor for Mr. El-Hai's history: A Northwest A320 night flight from San Diego with 179 passengers aboard overshot the Minneapolis airport and for 90 minutes was out of contact with air-traffic controllers. An FAA investigation later stated that the pilots had suffered a "loss of situational awareness.”

—Mr. Cooke, a frequent contributor to the weekend Journal, is a writer and critic in Pelham, N.Y.

Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324665604579081144065381588?mod=ITP_review_2

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