100 Years of Flying
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I was watching a "history of flight" special on TV last night, it being the 100th anniversary. Fascinating stuff. The best part was Boeing's introduction of the 707... its first foray into commercial jets. Douglas had already introduced the first commercial jet (the DC 3 or DC 6 or one of them). Anyway... there were 300,000 people out for the maiden voyage of the 707. The test pilot, no doubt a carryover from the barnstorming days, decides he has to spice up the show for the crowd. So completely unauthorized, he brings the 707 down to 1000 feet off the deck and does a slow barrel roll right in front of the crowd. The president of Boeing almost has a coronary. Then he comes back and does another one. What was so cool is that you would never ever see a pilot improvising like that in this day-and-age. The biggest problem commercial pilots have these days is staying awake on a commercial flight. They also showed footage of Chuck Yeager in "Glamerous Glynnis" the X-1 he used when breaking the sound barrier. I took the family down to the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian this summer and saw the X-1... but I had never seen footage of it flying. Very cool.... JM
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I was watching a "history of flight" special on TV last night, it being the 100th anniversary. Fascinating stuff. The best part was Boeing's introduction of the 707... its first foray into commercial jets. Douglas had already introduced the first commercial jet (the DC 3 or DC 6 or one of them). Anyway... there were 300,000 people out for the maiden voyage of the 707. The test pilot, no doubt a carryover from the barnstorming days, decides he has to spice up the show for the crowd. So completely unauthorized, he brings the 707 down to 1000 feet off the deck and does a slow barrel roll right in front of the crowd. The president of Boeing almost has a coronary. Then he comes back and does another one. What was so cool is that you would never ever see a pilot improvising like that in this day-and-age. The biggest problem commercial pilots have these days is staying awake on a commercial flight. They also showed footage of Chuck Yeager in "Glamerous Glynnis" the X-1 he used when breaking the sound barrier. I took the family down to the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian this summer and saw the X-1... but I had never seen footage of it flying. Very cool.... JM
Yeah those were the days. I actually do visualization of flights for aircraft for the newsest thing Flight Operations Quality Assurance. Airliner flights are fairly regimamented. I am sure during landing and approach they are wide awake, but the in between is pretty tedious. http://www.stransim.com/ftdesc.htm
My neighbours think I am crazy - but they don't know that I have a trampoline. All they see my head bobbing up and down over the fence every five seconds
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I was watching a "history of flight" special on TV last night, it being the 100th anniversary. Fascinating stuff. The best part was Boeing's introduction of the 707... its first foray into commercial jets. Douglas had already introduced the first commercial jet (the DC 3 or DC 6 or one of them). Anyway... there were 300,000 people out for the maiden voyage of the 707. The test pilot, no doubt a carryover from the barnstorming days, decides he has to spice up the show for the crowd. So completely unauthorized, he brings the 707 down to 1000 feet off the deck and does a slow barrel roll right in front of the crowd. The president of Boeing almost has a coronary. Then he comes back and does another one. What was so cool is that you would never ever see a pilot improvising like that in this day-and-age. The biggest problem commercial pilots have these days is staying awake on a commercial flight. They also showed footage of Chuck Yeager in "Glamerous Glynnis" the X-1 he used when breaking the sound barrier. I took the family down to the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian this summer and saw the X-1... but I had never seen footage of it flying. Very cool.... JM
The progress in aviation was on a par with solid state electrionics. From first powered flight to the sound barrier was only 44 years and then 66 years to a moon landing. Or 66 years to the rollout of a supersonic airliner. I'm glad I got to fly the Concorde before they retired them. Mach 2 at 60,000 ft is kind of cool. At any given instant there are considerably more assholes than mouths in the universe.