Beldar and the Aviator

I haven't seen The Aviator yet, but I read with interest Harold Evans' piece in today's WSJ OpinionJournal defending the reputation of Pan Am founder Juan Trippe against impressions the movie may leave: 

If you are one of the 3.6 billion who have flown on a 747, it's Trippe, not [Howard] Hughes, who merits the raising of a turbulence-free glass.

This line prompted a personal flashback — one of little consequence to anyone else, but still very vivid for me.

As an aviation-mad child of Sputnik, growing up during the Vietnam War era in small-town Lamesa, Texas, my occasional trip to a big-city airport, and even more rare ride on a passenger jet, was huge. My third-grader heart was broken a few months after I was prescribed my first pair of glasses, when I learned that my less-than-20/20 vision doomed my fervent goal of becoming a fighter pilot, but I remained obsessed with all things aeronautic.

In the Texas panhandle, Lamesa was a fairly short drive from the mountains of New Mexico, and I learned to ski during junior high and high school through two or three weekend trips each year to the Sierra Blanca Ski Resort outside Ruidoso. Sometimes I went with my Boy Scout troop or DeMolay chapter, and a few times just with my dad. On those occasions, we came to enjoy stopping for dinner en route at a unique bistro, the Silver Dollar Bar and Steak House, plopped down on a dark stretch of road between Roswell and Ruidoso in the tiny town of Tinnie. On one such Friday night in December 1969, my dad and I were enjoying the cuisine there — "C'mon, just try the escargot, Billy!" — when we overheard four handsome, clean cut men at the next table who were animatedly swapping pilot stories. They were talking with their hands moving in three dimensions, thumbs and pinkies splayed as wings. Angles of attack! Dogfights and ejection seats and afterburners, oh my! Eavesdropping on their conversation was even more interesting than hearing adults discussing sex.

"Dad!" I whispered, "Do you think they're astronauts? Fighter pilots?"

"Well, son," opined my pa, "You could go over and introduce yourself politely and ask 'em, if you really want to know."

So I did. They were gracious about my interrupting their dinner — they probably recognized the hero-worshipping eye-gleam even through my thick glasses lenses — and they explained that, no, although they were all military aviation vets, they weren't astronauts or fighter pilots. But they were something equally or even more cool — two test pilots from Boeing and two senior instructor pilots from Pan Am. Working out of a decommissioned SAC base with long, empty runways outside Roswell, they were doing the final certification, testing, and training for a big new jet — something called a "Boeing 747." Hey, would my dad and I like to stop by the air base on our way home Sunday afternoon for a little tour?

As promised, they'd left our names with the security gate, and the two Pan Am pilots greeted us like old comrades upon our arrival. They led me and my dad to the biggest airplane I'd ever seen — unimaginably big, with this enormous odd hump on its nose! "What's the biggest jet you've been on, Billy?" they asked. "Boeing 727!" I instantly replied. "Well, son, you could park that 727 under the tail of this jumbo. Wanna come aboard, sport?"

The rows and rows of seats inside the Clipper Young America were pristine — still covered in plastic, in fact. Our hosts led us through them to the very front of the plane and gestured to the forward interior door. "Wanna check out the cockpit?" I opened it — to find that it was a coat closet. Big laughs. "C'mon, fellows, the real cockpit door is upstairs." (Upstairs? On an airplane?!?)

Soon enough they had me planted and belted into the pilot's seat, and then they started pointing out the various controls and computers and whatnot. "Same technology used in the Apollo program," said one pilot. "This aircraft can take itself off and fly itself across the continent to a designated airport without our ever touching the controls, if we'd let her, but — no, no! don't touch that! You'll take us to San Francisco!" More big laughs all around. We toured the upstairs lounge, all of the passenger and crew and maintenance and cargo areas, the whole plane — even climbed up into the wheel wells. "We'd love to take you for a spin, maybe do some touch-and-goes, but the insurance folks won't let us," they explained. "This baby won't be certified for passenger service for another few weeks yet."

None of my friends at school believed any of this when I got home, of course. I barely believed it myself.

About a month later, though, I got a postcard in the mail. The picture side showed a 747 in Pan Am's distinctive, subdued paint job, flying above the clouds. The post-mark was from London, England. "Dear Billy," read the text inscribed by one of our new friends (as best I can recall it), "I thought you'd be interested in knowing that I just captained the first commercial flight of a 747. We went from JFK in New York to Heathrow here in London. Remembered seeing you in the pilot's seat in Roswell. Thanks for the tips, they came in handy. Hope you can make the trip to London with me some day!"

Show-and-tell time at school, baby! Show-and-toldya so!

Juan Trippe would, I think, have been pleased. Howard Hughes even might have approved. But for me, that classy, thoughtful Pan Am captain will always be The Aviator.