I carried a copy of ``The High and the Mighty'' crossing most of
the Pacific in company DC-6s in the 60s, but nobody noticed.

As an extremely bored kid stuck in the mountains for summer vacations
I read every book with an airplane in it from the local library. It's
amazing how much crap they put in about social relationships and stuff
that you have to wade through to get to the airplane parts.

(This mountain place had a short unattended airstrip that I'd think
about flying into and out of, ascending the mountains without the
necessity of any work. Years later I flew in and out a few times,
and the mountain part was completely uninteresting, a strange result.)

As a grown-up, I can't reproduce the interest in airplanes necessary
to read this stuff, or rather it changed to an interest in physics
rather than fantasized freedom. The social relationship parts are
still crap.

If you want to get to the meat of the stories, old Flying magazine
stories ``I learned about flying from that'' always had some nugget
of warning. Add girls and a destination and you have a novel for kids,
if they can wade through the girl part.

Example of interest today, a story about a commuter plane that crashed
in Texas year ago now, that turned out to be from stalling the
stabilizer. That's an interesting crash.

--
Ron Hardin


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.