At random 6/8

You enter through double glass doors, walk along a steeply descending, rubber-carpeted and windowless steel corridor that protects you from all weather good or bad, until you arrive at the open cockpit door of the 747's fuselage. Once you step inside, a "flight attendant" greets you and, checking your ticket, directs you to your seat, where you toss your brief case or overnight bag into the compartment above your head, open a magazine from those available in the seat before you, and hope to lose yourself in it for the duration of the flight. That, alas, is airplane travel today. Boring at best (unless, that is, you‚re unlucky enough to be skyjacked by terrorists). As there are travelers today who have never covered ground by railroad, there are passengers who have never really known the excitement of propeller-driven aircraft. In those days of yesteryear (late 1940s and early 1950s), you could get to the airport as close to the time of departure as you wished. There was not even the most superficial baggage-check (no one was sneaking drugs or any other such illegal possessions into the country). Even at New York City's LaGuardia airport (Idlewild hadn't been needed or built yet), there wasn't much traffic (except at Thanksgiving and Christmas), so you could walk from the airport's parking lot to the main terminal in no time flat. Once the terminal doors were open to your particular aircraft, most likely a DC-3, the most reliable aircraft in the skies then, you walked -- beneath an umbrella, if you needed one and had thought to bring one from home -- to the flight of steel stairs that had been rolled to the plane's door well behind the wings. Such a walk, for a boy of eight or nine, was very exciting, believe me, smacking of foreign intrigue. It was only much later, when I finally saw Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman heroically parting at the airport in the rainy dark of Casablanca that I knew I'd found my real inspiration, lurking in my subconscious like a racial memory. In any event, once all the passengers were seated and their safety belts secured (I don't for the life of me recall any lifeboat instruction from the aisle), the exterior doors were slammed shut, the shapely and smiling "stewardesses" seated themselves in their back row seats, and the pilot started the engines with their wonderfully throaty hydraulic roar (which I've discovered you can find duplicated on volume 2 of Rodgers and Hammerstein's RCA recording of Victory at Sea) The plane then taxied to its appointed runway, and, without today's annoyingly interminable wait for other planes to take off, revved up its engines until little bursts of flame spurted from the back of each propeller housing, the plane taxied a long while before lifting off the runway. In those days, planes didn't lift off at 45-degree angles, as they do today. Maybe we were in less of a hurry to get to where we were going. The interior of a DC-3 was far smaller than today's 727, and gave you a sense of community, unspoken camaraderie that you don't have in today's jumbos, with their hundreds of anonymous passengers. I have in front of me now a TWA postcard from 1954, which my 8-year- old sister Beverly, no doubt at my mother's urging, successfully begged Captain Eddie Rickenbacher, TWA VP and World I flying ace, to sign. In those days, there was a certain iron- clad protocol regarding dress. And you definitely wore your suit, or at least jacket and tie, for the airplane ride. And maybe it was the sight of a fuselage filled with such model, well-behaved, and middle-class passengers that prompted the pilots to trust them so much as to let the door between fuselage and cockpit stay open and to invite the very occasional pre-teen kid up to give the instrument panel a look-see, and to help "steer" the plane. It was important to me, in those prop-driven days, to get a seat by the window, because, once you got into the air, you would be flying low enough to distinguish trees, farmhouses and barns, cars driving on highways. Farmland would appear like patchwork quilts. Only if there were stormy weather would the pilot climb into or above the clouds. Eating your lunch or dinner in the air was an adventure. This was because, flying so low, the plane would from time to time (and often quite frequently) drop precipitately into an "air pocket," causing your soup or milk to spill just as precipitately into your lap. Today, if you're scheduled to land in Pittsburgh, Pa., you will land in Pittsburgh, Pa.. Back in the 1950's, if there was rough weather along your route, you might very well end up landing in Philadelphia, Pa., or Newark, N.J. Then it was entirely up to you to find your way to your waiting parents in Pittsburgh, Pa. Commercial flying was a newsworthy event in the years immediately after World War II, when train travel was still the norm. It was great to be able to return to grade school the next day and tell your friends all about your great adventure, including your turn steering the plane and your Capt. Eddie Richenbacher autograph. Dr Nash and his wife are scheduled to take a dawn or dusk hot-air balloon flight over Kansas City some time this summer.