"The Good Ol' Days" Could Be Now!

By Ron Blehm (10 June 2004)

So I took it upon myself to find, to really hunt down, some old time pilots! What was it really like to fly in unheated, unpressurized cabins? How DID you navigate across open waters without ATC or VORs? My high school mathematics teacher was a navigator on a B-17 in World War II, and he could spend hours talking about his sextant, and sighting in on stars, and triangulating his position, and estimating wind speed and...Being the non-math genius that I am I was very quickly lost. (Same reason I never wanted to be a real airline pilot, back then you had to be a flight engineer first and I knew I could NEVER do that!) But, do you ever sim that way? Do ever leave the door open and the fan blowing so that your fingers go numb from the cold? (Maybe the wife-unit should be gone before trying that!) Do you ever fly with just the old-time navigation tools? (I was very proud of myself for making it out of Africa using NDBs only! I had figured my plan with the default planner using any NDBs I could find, then printed it, then, deleted it from the sim. Now I only had frequencies and headings to get me there, no GPS, no NAV-hold. Someday I'll do the math by hand...maybe not.) I had done a bit of flying for www.toomuchfs.com over the last number of months but I had never slowed down enough to actually FLY something.

Once I arrived safely in Hong Kong, I set out to talk to some former pilots. I met "Mallard" who flew with Marine Squadron 115 the "Silver Eagles" in WW II - under the command of Major (later promoted to General) Joe Foss, known as "Joe's Jokers" they flew F4U Corsairs and even received training under the watchful eye of then civilian instructor, Charles Lindbergh. (Yes, the Spirit of St. Louis guy!). He showed me a picture of himself, with Charles and Joe Foss, walking out to the flight line of Emirau (NE of New Guinea) in May 1944. He noted that the Corsair's nose and cowling was so big that in order to land you HAD to slip the plane so you could look out the side window, "Otherwise you had no idea where you were going!" Right then was when I decided that I should not try the Corsair for any carrier landings. Later, I found a guy named "Mack" who was also a Corsair pilot in World War II. It was hard for him to admit the part about slipping to land, but he spoke lovingly of how the plane handled, of her power, "Not at all like the sluggish P-40 or TBM" he said.

What was the hardest thing you did?" I asked. "Carrier landings in weather." He stated.

"What was the best thing you remember?" "Carrier landings, in weather."

"What would you like to do again?" "Carrier landings, without weather."

"Not a roll or stall or max climb?" "Nope. Carrier landing, it was the greatest thrill."

Don't the rest of you have 80-year old pilots in your town? Can't you still touch this part of history for yourself (before it's too late)? I saw a program on the History Channel (http://www.historychannel.com/) where they were taking World War II veterans out to the site of the USS Yorktown. On board Robert Ballard's ship were U.S. and Japanese fighters, one talking about all the flak and the other talking about all the bogies in the sky. They had likely shot at each other but both had survived, unscathed, and now sat at the same table sharing stories and memories like old friends. It was a great moment to see.

And here we are now, some 60 years after one of the darkest times in earth's history with a chance to make things better, to make things right. Now, in my mind, simming your plane over Berlin to blow the snot out of the Nazi war machine is a bit too much, that already happened once, no need to live that horror again. But there is no reason we can't talk to folks from older generations, to get their side of things, to help keep their history alive. Perhaps I feel an attraction to this theme as I have also spent a few hours recently watching documentaries and interviews about D-Day, and as my time with my own father is slipping, quickly away. But if we are to learn something from history, as we are all admonished to do, I would urge you to take a few moments and turn off your GPS, turn off your time compression, turn off your ATC, turn up the volume and just listen. Stop, look, and listen. We need to learn more than, "They didn't have GPS or nav hold back then and it sucked." We may do well to learn about then. And to that end, I would encourage you to turn off the computer and go find some living history to touch. THAT, my friend, is one way to bring your computer simming to life!

Ron Blehm
pretendpilot@yahoo.com

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