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Braniff International's McDonnell Douglas DC-8-62 "Flying Colors" in flight, 1973. Photo courtesy Braniff International and NASM.

“No airline in the 1960s and ’70s displayed more stylish pizzazz than Braniff International,” write Melissa Keiser and David Romanowski in their book The Legacy of Flight. “Its new corporate owners made it their mission to remake the successful but stodgy airline into a vibrant, top-tier carrier by overhauling everything from where it flew to the food it fed its passengers (which soon included the inspired BRANwich).

“To reinvent the company’s image, Braniff hired a New York ad agency, which tackled the task with relish. They brought on board internationally acclaimed design talents Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci to reimagine aircraft paint schemes, airport lounges, uniforms, logos. Out went the traditional red, white, and blue airplane colors; in came a jelly bean bag’s worth of pastel hues. Pucci introduced space age-inspired stewardess uniforms that the cartoon family members of Hanna-Barbera’s Jetsons would have envied. The outfits included bubble helmets to ensure that a gal’s hairdo wouldn’t get mussed while crossing a windy tarmac.

Famed fashion designer Emilio Pucci created the "bubble helmet" for Braniff. Photo courtesy Braniff Collection, The University of Texas at Dallas.

“In 1973, to promote its South American destinations, Braniff commissioned artist Alexander Calder to create a unique work that would grace a DC-8 jetliner. The result, pictured here, was the exuberant Flying Colors. Calder created another work for Braniff in 1975, the Bicentennial-themed Flying Colors of the United States, using a Boeing 727 as his canvas.”

There are more than two million images in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum, and chief photo archivist Melissa Keiser has gathered 132 photographs into the 2010 book The Legacy of Flight: Images from the Archives of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (by David Romanowski and Melissa Keiser, Bunker Hill Publishing, 2010). See a slideshow of images here.

(Poster: movieposterdb.com)

We swear we were doing work-related research when we came across this quote from Daniel L. Rust’s 2009 book Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience:

“The first Hollywood movie showcasing airline travel, Three Guys Named Mike, was released in 1951 and starred Jane Wyman as a plucky American Airlines stewardess who became the object of affection of three men, all named Mike (Watch the full movie at Internet Archive). Directed by Charles Walters, the lighthearted film chronicled a stewardess’s training and provided a glimpse into the not-so-glamorous world of airline employment…. [A] young writer named Sidney Sheldon wrote the screenplay. As one of the most successful novelists of the twentieth century, Sheldon would eventually sell more than 300 million books worldwide, besides creating successful television shows such as I Dream of Jeannie and Hart to Hart.

(Poster: moviegoods.com)

Three years after the release of Three Guys Named Mike, John Wayne starred with an impressive cast in the granddaddy of airline disaster movies entitled The High and the Mighty. Based on Ernest K. Gann’s book of the same name, the film set the genre standard for decades to come. A generation of people watched spellbound as John Wayne defied the odds in successfully bringing a crippled airliner in to land at San Francisco after experiencing in-flight problems en route from Honolulu. The theme song, which won an Academy Award, was so closely associated with John Wayne that it was played at his funeral.”

Sullenberger with his daughters in 2001 -- pre-fame. (Photo courtesy Chesley Sullenberger)

Scuttlebutt inside the FAA has it that Chesley Sullenberger, or “Sully,” the pilot who executed a spectacularly successful ditching of a USAirways Airbus A320 in New York’s Hudson River, is the object of a petition drive to have him replace Randy Babbitt, who resigned as FAA administrator following a drunk driving arrest.

Now Sullenberger may be a hero and a durn’ good pilot, and yes, FAA administrators who were pilots have had some modest advantages over non-pilots in speaking the language and knowing the aviation community. But Sullenberger has also come across in his many public appearances as a nice, modest guy. He has stepped up to the plate when various causes have asked him to be their spokesperson. And he’s written a couple of books, one of which is awaiting release.

Well, Mr. Smith may have survived Washington when he served a term there, but the town can sometimes be pretty hard on FAA chiefs. Before the FAA administrator’s term was defined as five years in length, to extend it beyond the election cycle, each new presidential administration had to find an acceptable candidate for approval by Congress. It was a political football, and both parties knew it. Jack Shaffer, Nixon’s man, was pilloried by the air traffic controllers’ attorney, F. Lee Bailey, and when Shaffer left, Alexander Butterfield (a pilot, by the way) moved from the White House Staff office to FAA headquarters as administrator — where he promptly became entangled in the Nixon Watergate scandal. J. Lynn Helms set about modernizing the FAA, and must have irked somebody with some power, because the Wall Street Journal ran a series of unrelenting attacks on his education record, which caused him to resign.

It’s gotten better since the advent of five-year terms, and the first administrator under the new rule, Jane Garvey, as well as her successor, Marion Blakey, seemed to thrive at the job. Both were professional managers and highly attuned to the politics of the capital. For now, Michael Huerta is acting administrator, and he has a reputation as a manager. Maybe Sullenberger’s petitioners just want a pilot back at the top, but do they really want to do that to a nice guy?

Photo: FEMA

For 30 seconds beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, November 9, every television and radio station in every U.S. state and a few of its territories, both broadcast and cable, will offer different programming than usual. Wednesday’s message will be continuous whether by audio, video, or digital stream: This is a Test.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has assured the public that “it’s not pass or fail.” It’s simply the first nationwide trial of the emergency alert system (EAS).

That system has been tested on a local basis every week for the last 15 years, when EAS replaced the emergency broadcast system. But it’s never been tested simultaneously from shore to shore. For one thing, it takes a lot of coordination: from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service. Weather alerts, unsurprisingly, have comprised most of the genuine, local uses of EAS.

Photo: National Archives and Records Administration

But EAS’s roots are not in storm warnings. Sixty years ago, a national system, CONELRAD (Control of Electromagnetic Radiation), was established in case of an air raid during the Cold War. Before CONELRAD, urgent news arrived by telephone or teletype machine to radio stations and fledgling TV networks, where a bulletin was typed in haste and handed to an announcer to read breathlessly on air. In March 1951, an FCC study recommended to President Harry Truman that “basic key stations” of the air defense command (ADC) and select radio stations reserve a special phone circuit and radio frequency to ensure a uniform and sober distribution.

On December 10, 1951, CONELRAD went live on two positions of the AM dial, 640 and 1240 kHz. It was tested nationally for the first time in the wee hours of September 16, 1953. By the summer of 1956, nationwide tests ran as long as 15 minutes and included a selection of tunes by the Air Force Symphony Orchestra. Almost from the start, though, the system gave false alarms from poorly wired connections or even lightning. Once a station on the CONELRAD circuit began transmitting, all other radio stations were to power down.

A public service announcement for CONELRAD. Photo: National Archives.

Commercial radio stations were often based in the center of cities, with their broadcast towers sitting atop the tallest available structures, making a natural bulls-eye for an enemy bomber to home in on its signal. To prevent such radio range finding, all stations other than the ring of CONELRAD transmitters were to temporarily cease broadcasting. Only brief bursts of emergency instructions were issued to prevent enemies homing in on the CONELRAD sites, which were nonetheless set well away from population centers.

Until 1963, the FCC required all radios sold in the U.S. to carry a mark reminding listeners where to tune in for civil defense instructions. Under CONELRAD, the small triangular CD or civil defense mark was also sold in a kit to glue onto the dials of older radios. When the national test transmits this week, we’ll see how that old technique compares to today’s digital reach.

Each day this week until September 11, the National Museum of American History is displaying artifacts recovered from the horrific crash of United Airlines Flight 93 a decade ago in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, along with more than 50 objects from the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Helena Wright, the museum’s curator of graphic arts, describes the sensitivity guiding the artifacts’ collection and preservation. “Shortly after the attacks, we began discussing what our role as a museum should be, and concluded that we had a responsibility to document the events of September 11 in the National Collections,” said Wright. “The immediacy and deadly nature of the events posed particular collecting challenges. We worried about appearing ghoulish in the face of bereavement, about important material deteriorating or even being thrown out, and about whether we understood enough about the events to document them for posterity. And we knew we would have to be selective—we cannot collect everything.”

The exhibit includes personal items from some of the seven crew and 33 passengers who perished when a terrorist hijacking ended with the airliner plunging to the ground. One of the artifacts is a tattered but still readable personal log carried by flight attendant Lorraine Bay, who had been working in the first-class section.

Vertical Speed Indicator

Among the most arresting artifacts were those recovered from the aircraft itself, frozen in time at the second of impact. A bright orange call button ripped from a ceiling panel (above) is slightly charred. The aircraft’s vertical speed indicator lies mangled and marred.

The Smithsonian Channel has produced a 46-minute video to present the moving stories behind its collection, while the American History museum considers its exhibit a work in progress, and invites additional donations of artifacts and information from the public.