Book note: Touching History, by Lynn Spencer

On June 25, 2008, Dennis Prager interviewed Lynn Spencer, author of Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11.

Spencer is an airline pilot, and also a member of the National Security Committee of the Air Line Pilots Association. She has some interesting observations, I think.

Classic aircraft kept in flying condition

Did you know there's a Commemorative Air Force?

From its website:

The CAF was founded to acquire, restore and preserve in flying condition a complete collection of combat aircraft which were flown by all military services of the United States, and selected aircraft of other nations, for the education and enjoyment of present and future generations of Americans.

Also from its website:

“A generation which ignores history has no past and no future” – Robert Heinlein

hat tip: Public can view, fly in restored Flying Fortress » RapidCityJournal.com (June 12, 2008)

If your airplane goes kaput in flight...

... how lucky is it that every passenger on board is a skydiver, with a parachute?

Here's more, from Joe Hornaday of the Greensburg Daily News (Greensburg, Indiana).

The engine was spewing thick smoke and oil so the pilot couldn't see where he was going, the instrument panel went out, the flaps failed, the plane deadsticked, and the pilot still found the runway? The plane went off the runway and flipped, but the pilot got out of the wreckage himself? Yinga. I'm impressed. (Also happy that nobody was seriously hurt. Yikes.)

Book note: Reach for the Sky, by Paul Brickhill

I finally noticed the "more books you will enjoy" page in my copy of The Sky Beyond, and one of the touted books is Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill. The blurb runs:

The inspiring, magnificent story of Douglas Bader, legless fighter pilot, who led his Spitfire squadrons to victory in the Battle of Britain.

Uhm, says I, a legless fighter pilot?

What they mean, it turns out, is a man with two artificial legs, one for a leg amputated above the knee, the other for a leg amputated below the knee. Which is still pretty amazing, isn't it? At a guess. (What I know about what it takes to fly a military aircraft is not very much, folks. But I'm assuming there are reasons military pilots are notably fit.)

Checking around, I see there is a Douglas Bader Foundation in the UK, which promotes the welfare of amputees and other disabled people. I like their maxim: ‘ A disabled person who fights back is not disabled...but inspired.’

Reach for the Sky was made into a movie in 1956.

Book note: The Sky Beyond, by Sir Gordon Taylor

One of our bookstore customers asked us to find him a copy of The Sky Beyond, by Sir Gordon Taylor. It was his favorite book, he said, and he'd lost his. It took some time to find an affordable copy, this being an out of print book in short supply and high demand. Anyway, my husband finally found a copy - just as our customer found one on his own and bought it, just in time for a friend of his to sheepishly return the copy he'd borrowed and forgotten to give back.

Favorite book or no, three copies is too many, so we said not to worry, that we'd just read this one and then sell it.

Wrong. We're reading it, and will keep it. I have a fondness for tales of the early days of aviation anyway, and this one is a good read, besides. (At least it is up through Chapter 6, which is as far as I've gotten.) Taylor, an Australian, was one of the big pioneers of flight. Among other things he was instrumental in developing workable navigation systems for aircraft. He was also a keen observer of men and machines.

Here's a taste, from Chapter 3:

To carry the experiments on to the next phase I bought a de Havilland Moth twin-float seaplane. I had never flown a seaplane but had heard that the take-off was only for special beings called seaplane pilots; that only by some sort of involved technique denied to ordinary mortals could a waterborne airplane be persuaded to become successfully airborne.

Firmly believing this to be true, I made various inquiries of people who at some time or other had flown seaplanes, and with natural caution checked the advice of each expert against the others. All differed in some important respect. The only point upon which agreement was unanimous was that without this special knowledge of how to take off from the water, disaster was certain.

I was so confused by all this that I took the seaplane out on a good open stretch of water and, ignoring all conflicting advice on the subject, steadily pressed the throttle forward and went with the airplane, which I believed knew more about it than I did. It ran a reasonable distance and with light backward pressure on the control column became airborne quite smoothly and definitely. There were, I later discovered, some refinements to this procedure, to meet different sea conditions and the demands of different airplanes to them; but on the whole the thing turned out to be governed by the normal laws of behavior of a flying machine.

The operations of this seaplane had to be made to pay, to cover the economic facts of life: so I flew it to remote lakes and harbors where there were enough people to provide some traffic for passenger flights. I did the maintenance myself and, to economize on personal expenses and to live as I liked, I camped with my dog on the edge of accessible but, as far as possible, uninhabited lakes. A large Alsatian, he was the most good-tempered fellow, with traditionally good manners, but his formidable appearance was a strong deterrent to anybody with ideas of interfering with the airplane if I happened to be away fishing.

He loved the flying and, like all dogs in a car, liked to put his head out the side into the wind from the front seat, in which he traveled; but finally he would get disgusted with the force of the airstream and would just curl down in the seat and go to sleep. The only trouble I had was to teach him to jump out of the cockpit onto the plywood walkway alongside the fuselage and not to put his feet through the fabric of the wing when we came to anchor...

The Sky Beyond has a copyright date of 1963. My copy is a Ballantine Books paperback, published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, first printing August 1970. I understand that it was later published by Bantam as part of its Air and Space series. For all that, though, it's awfully hard to find a copy (and we've just taken another out of circulation). May I suggest that somebody reprint it?

Book note: Trimotor and Trail, by Earl Cooley

From the inside jacket copy of Trimotor and Trail, by Earl Cooley, Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Montana, 1984 (ellipsis in original):

In Trimotor and Trail Earl Cooley tells of times, places and events lost to history. Like that of the free trapper, the buffalo hunter, and the plains cowboy before him, the world Earl Cooley knew as a young man was quickly plowed and paved behind him. Future generations will know it only from journals like this one.

-Driven from a homestead in eastern Montana by drought, grasshoppers, and bank failure in the aftermath of World War I. ...

-The backbreaking struggle to survive the Great Depression as a farmhand in the Bitterroot Valley of Western Montana. ...

-Working through forestry school as a lookout, smokechaser, and blasting specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. ...

-Volunteering for the first attempts to parachute firefighters to remote forest fires, including the two near fatalities on the first operational jump. ...

-Sustaining the smokejumper project through World War II by recruiting 4Fs and conscientious objectors, and by using cast-off parachutes. ...

-The War Department's secret battle against 10,000 bomb-carrying balloons launched from Japan. ...

-The Mann Gulch disaster in which 13 smokejumpers died after being trapped by an explosive forest fire. ...

-The life of a forest ranger among Idaho's "Salmon River Savages" and in the Cabinet Wilderness of western Montana. ...

-The evolution of Forest Service firefighting tactics and fire management policy. ...

Trimotor and Trail is more than the adventures of Earl Cooley, pioneer smokejumper and forest ranger. It is a chronicle of an America vibrant with frontier vigor and freedom as well as a testament to what men can do when confronted by an extraordinary challenge.

I haven't read the book. I've just flipped through it before putting it out for sale, but it looks interesting. Of course, I have a known weakness for noncelebrity memoirs, and for backcountry tales, and for history other than the shifting-boundaries-battles-and-rulers variety.

Book note: Torpedo 8, by Ira Wolfert

While glancing through Torpedo 8: The Story of Swede Larsen's Bomber Squadron, by Ira Wolfert, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1943, checking the condition before I put a price on it (we have a bookstore, with mostly used books), this jumped out at me from the Foreword (ed. note: content warning):

The Japs wiped out the United States Navy Torpedo Squadron 8 in a few minutes at the Battle of Midway. The minutes were hot and rough. The squadron was like a raw egg thrown into an electric fan, and only three men came out of the action alive. One of these is no longer fit for combat duty...

Our Navy, too, has wiped out whole Jap squadrons in a few rough, hot minutes, and there has always been great curiosity on our part as to how the Jap airmen left to carry on were taking it... [snip] ...when these hammer blows fell, how did the comrades of the dead feel, the men who had to step into the dead men's shoes and follow down their awful path? What was their reaction when they heard this news and how did they feel when they were ordered into similar planes and locked themselves in to take off on similar missions? Did they have left in them any of the confidence in survival necessary for the efficient operation of complicated machinery and necessary for the pressing home of an attack? Or did they have in them the unnerving efficiency-destroying emotions of men ordered to commit suicide and determined to commit suicide?

We wanted to know. We were most anxious to know, and on November 12, toward the end of a bloody afternoon on Guadacanal, we found out. That was the day two squadrons of Jap torpedo bombers were obliterated. Two young Jap airmen had managed to live unhurt through the destruction of their plane and were taken prisoner. They were both asked how they had felt when twenty-five bombers were sent out and one came back, when twenty Zeros were sent out and none came back, when thirty-three planes were sent out and only one came back, when, day after day, on mission after mission, it was only the odd planes that survived. They answered with enough difference to show that they had not been coached and that they were answering honestly, to the best of their ability. They did not blame their planes, their training, or their officers, or develop any great fear of us. Instead, each said he felt, as all Jap airmen felt, that the dead were responsible for their own deaths, they had not done their work properly.

Americans do not blame the dead for their deaths. Our traditions and teachings are against it. The Fascists - and the Japanese are purer Fascists than the Germans or Italians, each of whom has had something of a democratic tradition - cannot seem to conceive of their state or their superiors being wrong, but automatically think of themselves as being wrong. So they blame their dead for having died. But we, as democrats, have too much respect for the individual man to blame, without overwhelming evidence, our dead for having died. This reaction is as automatic in us as the Fascist reaction is in them. Also, we are too realistic and too sensitive to the worth of each individual man to accept a state or those in authority over us as being infallible. Nor do we have any inclinations for suicide or for suicidal actions in war. Our traditions, our teaching, and the whole American temperament are against all such antics.

To leave the quote off there is admittedly to take things out of context. According to the Foreword, to the surprise of outsiders, the Navy put together a new Torpedo 8 squadron, which it threw straight into the Battle for the Solomons. The squadron's slogan went from "Attack" to "Attack - and Vengeance!" And get vengeance they did, it sounds like, sometimes by doing what might seem suicidal.

Further reading: According to the Naval Historical Center, Lieutenant George Gay, USNR, was the sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8). (In the Foreword above, it notes three survivors. I don't know which account is right, or if they're talking about different time periods or events.)

More here: Torpedo Squadron 8 Plane Captain Relives ‘Battle of Midway’ by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class James E. Foehl, Commander, Navy Region Hawaii Public Affairs, at Navy.mil, 6/4/2007.

Ouch, this puts a human face on it, or, rather, several human faces: a YouTube video, an old Office of Strategic Services film, eight minutes long, in memory of the men of Torpedo Squadron 8. So far, I haven't been able to find a non-YouTube link for this video. (If the Navy or other official agency has it online, I'd be glad to link directly, in other words.)

To get back to the Foreword, there's this, toward the end:

Torpedo 8's revenge is one of the most grimly satisfying events of the American part of the war thus far. It's a legend of the kind that made epic ballads in ancient days. And this is the story of the men who lived that legend, of why they went out for revenge, and how they got it, and how they felt while getting it...

So, that's what the author was aiming at, if you're interested in books about the military, or history in general, or World War II in particular.

But what caught my eye was the comparison between worldviews, the difference between men who serve a government that serves its citizens, versus men who serve a state that places the state first, or an ideology or cause first.

Thumbing through, I find this in Chapter 2, on page 12:

Our men volunteer for suicide missions, not to seem brave, not to win medals or promotion, but only when, independently of their officers, they decide the possible gain is worth the probable loss. They decline to volunteer only when their private arithmetic does not add up that way. They do things that seem crazy, but never for crazy reasons, almost always for reasons that stand the test of sound adult thought.

Several paragraphs later, after elaborating on that theme, on page 13:

Contrast this with the Fascist notions of the Japanese soldiers, who cannot conceive of their superiors ever being wrong and continually try to carry out pipe-dreams and invariably go up in smoke. Their desk dreamers do not trust the judgment of their subordinates and many, many thousands of Japanese lives have been wasted on that account alone. The democratic process with the habits of thought it has produced in our fighting men, has given us a valuable, life-saving system of checks and balances in this war.

That's generally speaking, I'm sure...

Alaska Volcano Observatory: KVERT Volcanic Warnings Ceased

To whom it may concern,

I can't find a permalink for this notice currently on the front page at the Alaska Volcano Observatory's website, so I'll just reprint it here. (I hope that's all right. It's a public notice, after all.):

March 1, 2007

Dear colleagues:

It has come to our attention that as of January 1, 2007, the Federal Unitary Enterprise State Air Traffic Management Corporation of Russia halted financial support for the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT). Attempts to negotiate renewal of the annual funding agreement by KVERT leadership have thus far failed. As a result, on March 1, KVERT will cease issuing volcanic warnings to the aviation community.

This unfortunate event comes at a time when three volcanoes in Kamchatka are at Color Code Orange and intermittently producing ash. For 14 years, KVERT staff and affiliated scientists have alerted regional ACCs, MWOs, Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers (VAACs), and numerous air carriers to the onset of volcanic unrest. KVERT's vigilance and volcanologic and technical expertise has resulted in many hundreds of accurate and timely ash cloud warnings. It is a testimony to the success of KVERT and its international collaborations that during this time period of significant volcanic activity in Kamchatka, we are aware of no damaging ash-aircraft encounters among the many hundreds of thousands of flights through the region.

We do not know official reasons for this action, which, unfortunately, has occurred before in KVERT's history. In response, KVERT and AVO have alerted International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) representatives who have contacted the State Air Traffic Management Corporation in Moscow to express concern and urge restoration of funding.

During a period of reduced KVERT operations, the Alaska Volcano Observatory will continue its own routine, daily satellite monitoring of Kamchatka and we will issue hazard warnings to our interagency partners to the best of our ability. However, AVO does not have direct access to seismic or other ground-based monitoring and observational data for Russia, and thus warnings and notifications may not be as timely, accurate, or complete as those routinely provided by KVERT.

Sincerely,

Thomas L. Murray

Scientist in Charge, AVO

Duly noted.

In addition to Alaska's, the U.S. also has volcanic observatories for the Cascades, Hawaii, Long Valley, California, and Yellowstone. They all seem to be associated with the USGS's Volcanic Hazards Program, which has a Most Recent Updates for U.S. Volcanoes page.

And, yes, I live downwind from Mount St. Helens and a few other Cascade volcanoes, plus I have a fascination with volcanoes in general. Why do you ask? ;)