AirSpaceMag.com

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.”

The U.S. Marines Corps recieved its first McDonnell F-4 Phantoms in 1962. In addition to the pilot, the F-4 had a Radar Intercept Officer (RIO), which of course led to a lot of front seat/back seat banter. According to Jon Lake and David Donald, authors of McDonnell F-4 Phantom: Spirit in the Skies, the droopy-tailed fighter saw action near Key West in the early 1960s:

The Marines were just too late to see action in the [October 1962] Cuban [missile] crisis, but the “Gray Ghosts” [VMF-531] did make it to Key West, where they flew scrambles against Mexican airliners, lost lightplanes and even the odd Cuban MiG-17. After Cuban MiGs strafed a fishing boat 50 miles southwest of Key West, Marine Phantoms were scrambled to investigate. Their crews soon discovered that the MiG-17 enjoyed a very short turn radius. As one of the MiGs closed onto the tail of his aircraft, one laconic RIO [radar intercept officer] was heard to remark, “You’d better do some of that pilot sh-t, ’cause we’re losing!”

Check out our February/March 2012 issue for more on the F-4—and nine other aircraft—in “100 Years of Marine Aviation: A Salute to 10 Aircraft That Carried the Few and the Proud Into History.”

A USMC McDonnell F-4 Phantom II on base, probably in Vietnam. Squadron VMFA-232. Photograph by Richard Rash, courtesy NASM.

"Have you seen me?" (Photo: Museum Vliegbasis Deelen)

The Museum Vliegbasis Deelen in The Hague, Netherlands, is missing its F-104 Starfighter. The 33-foot-long model of D-8105, with dummy missiles on the wingtips, had been mounted on tripods outdoors — until Sunday morning, when museum workers Twittered what they call an Amber Alert:

“A shocking discovery! Our Starfighter has fallen prey to people who use the current high metal prices to earn their keep. Or is it a practical joke? To kidnap the model, you need some seriously heavy machinery. If you see a Starfighter in a parking lot or on a flatbed trailer, contact us.”

Museum chairman Edwin van Brakel told reporters, “It would not fit in the back of a Fiat 500,” adding that it may be a prank because a note said, “Fly away. See you next year.”

John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Whether you love it or hate it, John Gillespie Magee’s “High Flight” remains the most enduring of aviation poems:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Sunday, December 11 marks the 70th anniversary of the mid-air collision over Lincolnshire, England, in which 19-year-old Magee was killed. An American Pilot Officer, he had crossed the border into Canada in 1940 to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. This weekend, Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire celebrates Magee’s life with a series of events, including a reading of his poetry.  Wikipedia has a very good page on Magee, who dashed off “High Flight” in a letter to his parents shortly before his death. His father, a curate of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., subsequently reprinted it in church publications. But the poem really gained fame after poet Archibald McLeish (then Librarian of Congress) included it in a poetry exhibition at the Library of Congress in February 1942.

Aerial view of Lincoln Cathedral, site of the December 11, 2011 commemoration. Courtesy Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.

While Magee wrote poetry in prep school (even winning a prize), the BBC speculated in 2007 that “High Flight’s” inspiration was due in part to hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) experienced by the author in his Spitfire. (Magee had written in his logbook about experiencing the symptoms of hypoxia while flying above 10,000 feet.)

“High Flight” is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force. A copy was carried by astronaut Michael Collins on his Gemini 10 flight, and it was quoted by President Ronald Reagan in his speech to the nation after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. The poem has found its way into dozens of pop culture references, including The Simpsons (in one episode Homer declared “we are about to break the surly bonds of gravity and punch the face of God”), Mad Men, The West Wing, and Battlestar Galactica.

“High Flight” also was used by U.S. TV stations when signing off for the evening. See a clip from the 1960s, here (“I was born in ’64, and I honestly recall seeing this from a playpen in my parent’s living room. I always wanted to be on that plane! I also loved this man’s voice,” writes one poster), and one from KCRA, in Sacramento, California, as late as 1986, here.