My father Frank De Felitta (1921-2016) was a pilot who served with the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. To honor him on this special day I thought I’d post a couple of clips specifically about the plane he flew. The C-47 was a troop and equipment carrier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu-cHtE5AYQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJoiBRIxpwM The actor Robert Taylor was an avid flyer starting in the 1930s. He often flew himself and his co-stars to location, terrifying the studio executives who saw their valuable ‘properties’ vulnerable to sudden wreckage and instant death. (Planes then didn’t have built-in parachutes to guide them to the ground
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24XNg4DQTr8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98TETzMWjTg It’s hard to pick a favorite Howard Hawks films given the diverse amount of genres he worked in and always at such a high level. “To Have and Have Not’, ‘Bringing Up Baby’, ‘Rio Bravo’, ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘Red River’–Jesus, what an absurd list of genres to have conquered.
I mentioned on Monday that we flew in a Biplane this past weekend and experienced one of life’s must-do activities. (Cheap is wasn’t. But I’m happier paying for that than I am for a theater ticket to a Broadway musical I’m sorry that I wound up buying a ticket for).
This past weekend we attended the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, an amazing outdoor (and indoor) display of vintage aircraft, which not only serves as a museum of flight but which also offers an air show consisting of stunt flying of vintage planes by some very very very brave, well trained pilots. As
Did you know that there were no regulations in place for flying airplanes until 1926? And that pilot’s liscences, control towers, flight plans, flights schools and the FAA didn’t exist? You did? I don’t believe you. I didn’t know this until watching the above very nice short doc on what
Our semi-deep dive into vintage aviation continues with the extraordinary 1931 Hal Roach comedy ‘Air Tight’. The film is one in the series of short comedies known as ‘The Boy Friends’, which starred Mickey Daniels, Grady Sutton, Mary Kornman and other Roach-trained veterans of the silent incarnation of ‘Our Gang’.
Last month my son and I made a visit to McMinnville Oregon specifically to visit Howard Hughes’ ‘Spruce Goose’ in a museum constructed specifically to house and display that magnificent aviation folly. My interest in vintage aviation continues to grow. I’ve been collecting old New Yorker Magazines for years but
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhZqKlO6wEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1aKNy7hBV4 Airplane pilots are always quick to tell you that 99 percent of all aviation accidents are due to pilot error. This is almost a religious incantation with them–they believe firmly in ‘trusting the machine’, which I imagine is the only way to get over the insane fact that they’re
This past weekend my son and I journeyed to the little town of McMinnville, Oregon, to see what is arguably the ninth wonder of the world; the biggest plane ever built and never flown. Howard Hughes ‘Spruce Goose’ is a flying boat that was intended to be used during the