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I’m currently reading this incredibly fascinating book. Inside is a little gem of a poem that will make my aviation colleagues smile… I especially like the passage about ECON 😆
“ An Ode to the Boeing 707
Those were the good ole days. Pilots back then were men that didnt want to be women or girlie men. Pilots all knew who Jimmy Doolittle was. Pilots drank coffee, whiskey, smoked cigars wearing their uniforms in airport lounges and didn't wear digital watches. They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn't bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some Government agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.
Pilots didn't go through the terminal looking a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on a cell phone!
Being an airline captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the Stewardesses were young, attractive, single women that were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolu-tion. They didn't have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harassment claim. Junior Stewardesses shared a room and talked about men; with no thoughts of substitution.
Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite; they could speak AND understand English. They didn't speak gibberish or listen to loud gangsta rap on their IPods. They bathed and didn't smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn't travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no Mongol hordes asking for a seatbelt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.
If a captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired.
Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there, after all it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast. Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for these new age guys.
There was very little plastic and no composites on the airplanes or Stewardesses' pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tattoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows.
It took 185 pounds pressure on the rudder to hold a 707 straight with an outboard engine out. That was because the Boeing's engineers were afraid the pilots would break their aeroplane if they gave them enough hydraulic power to hold it.
Airlines were run by men like C.R. Smith and Juan Tripp who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew most of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves...Not pseudo financiers and bean counters who flip from one occupation to another for a few bucks, a better parachute or a fancier title, while fervently believing that they are a class of beings unto themselves.
And so it was back then... and never will be again!
Clearly, it was a different time...
This then is the story.”
Graham M Simons
Peterborough
April 2017
English
