Cessna T310R near Kaycee, Wyoming.

 

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, June 30, 1975. Changes in the Service.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, June 30, 1975. Changes in the Service.: 

Monday, June 30, 1975. Changes in the Service.

Women could no longer be involuntarily discharged from the United States Armed Forces as a result of pregnancy, by orders of the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

30 June 1975: The last operational Douglas C-47 Skytrain transport in service with the United States Air Force, 43-49507, was retired and flown to the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

This Day In Aviation.

Last edition:

June 28, 1975. Death of Rod Serling.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Health, In Memoriam, Paratroopers, Personalities, Smoking, television, The written word, tobacco, World War Two

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, February 24, 1974. Advent of Fireforce,

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, February 24, 1974. Advent of Fireforce, g...: 

Sunday, February 24, 1974. Advent of Fireforce, getting mad at Confucious.

The Fireforce vertical envelopment tactic was used by the 1st Battalion of the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the first example of its use.  The tactic was developed as Rhodesian Aérospatiale Alouette III had a limited carrying capacity in comparison to the very large helicopters used by the US in similar roles.

Rhodesian Alouette III.

The use of aircraft outside of their original intended roles was fairly common in African wars of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, January 20, 1974. First flight of the F-16.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, January 20, 1974. First flight of the F-16.: 

Sunday, January 20, 1974. First flight of the F-16.

First flight of the F-16.

YF-16, the aircraft before official adoption, and YF-17, a Northrup aircraft that did not gain acceptance.

It was an accident.  During high speed ground test a horizontal stabilizer was damaged and the test pilot took the aircraft off due to the severe oscillations it was experiencing. 

One of the greatest fighter aircraft of all time, it remains in production, although not for the U.S.

Sunday, January 21, 1943 (and 1973). Lost flights

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, January 21, 1943 (and 1973). Lost flights: 

Sunday, January 21, 1943 (and 1973). Lost flights

Today in World War II History—January 21, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Jan. 21, 1943: Stalingrad airlift ends when Soviets take Gumrak Airfield, the last Luftwaffe field in the city.

On Sarah Sundin's blog.

Obviously, by this point, the German 6th Army, or what was left of it, was doomed.   

FWIW, other sources report this as occurring on January 22.

Pan Am Flight 1104 crashed into a hillside in Mendocino County, California, due to bad weather and low visibility, killing all on board, including Rear Admiral Robert H. English, the commander of the the US submarine fleet in the Pacific.  The clipper had been en route from Hawaii.

The Civil Aeronautics Board determined:

Failure of the captain to determine his position accurately before descending to a dangerously low altitude under extremely poor weather conditions during the hours of darkness.

It took ten days to find the wreckage.

On this day in 1973, Aeroflot Flight 6263, crashed at Perm, killing four in the impact. Thirty-five survivors would freeze to death awaiting rescue.

Areoflot ranks number 1 in airline fatalities, with the rankings as of mid summer 2023 being as follows:

Areoflot - 11,270 fatalities

Air France - 1,756 fatalities

Pan Am - 1,652

American Airlines - 1,453 fatalities

United Airlines - 1,217 fatalities

Avianca - 992 fatalitie

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, January 5, 1973. Airport Screening makes its US debut.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday, January 5, 1973. Airport Screening makes ...: 

Friday, January 5, 1973. Airport Screening makes its US debut.

Mandatory screening of airline passengers went into effect in the United States.

Salt Lake City Airport.

Lex Anteinternet: Wednesday November 24, 1971. The Flight of D. B. Cooper

Lex Anteinternet: Wednesday November 24, 1971. The Flight of D. B. ...: 

Wednesday November 24, 1971. The Flight of D. B. Cooper

On this day in 1971 a man wearing as suit and tie, typical travel attire for the era, checked into a short flight from Seattle to Tacoma, Washington, something only requiring thirty minutes of flying time.  Once the plane was airborne, he slipped a note to a stewardess seated nearby, who at first ignored it, thinking he was trying to pick her up. He then told her to read the note, which claimed he had a bomb in a briefcase.

At the time no search of carry ons was conducted, and the stewardess asked to see the bomb, which the man proceeded to show her. And then a several hours long ordeal unfolded in which the man, who had checked into the airplane as Dan Cooper, ordered that he receive $200,000, two reserve parachutes and two main parachutes, and that the plane take a route in which Mexico was the declared ultimate destination.  The money and the parachutes were provided in Tacoma, where Cooper also released most of the passengers and all of the stewardesses save for one.  Showing very advance knowledge of the aircraft, a Boeing 727, he instructed the pilots to fly it at 10,000 feet, keep the wheels down, and to set the flaps at a certain angle, all of which made sure that it was flying very slowly.

Once airborne, he parachuted into the night near Mount St. Helens during a severe thunderstorm, leaving via the 727's unique integral downloading back staircase.  The man, misnamed by the press as "D. B. Cooper", was not apprehended and most of the money has never been found.

This has, of course, been one of the most enduring air mysteries and crime mysteries of all time.  The serial numbers of the bills involved were microfilmed, but only a small number of them have ever been located, and those by campers on the Columbia River in 1980.  The bundles they found were, moreover, badly deteriorated but their bundling was not, with a small number of bills missing in a manner which raised questions as to how that could have occurred.  Given that the money did not resurface, the official speculation is that Cooper died parachuting into the forest, in a thunderstorm, at night.

There's plenty of reason to suspect that is the case.  He obviously was extremely familiar with the aircraft, its systems, and knew something about parachuting.  Nonetheless, he wasn't dressed for a hike through the wilderness and, dropping at night, he could not possibly have had anything but a remote idea as to where he'd be coming down. While some discount the chances of his death, night drops are always risky, let alone one in which a military parachute was used (which it was) and in which he was badly dressed for the endeavor.  The fact that the money never resurfaced strongly suggests he was killed in the attempt.

In spite of the massive effort to capture him, he was not located alive and no body was ever found. . .to date and, more oddly, nobody was ever reported as missing.  The knowledge that he displayed was quite distinct and therefore the number of suspects would seem rather limited, but nonetheless there's never been any solid leads.

The mystery remains an enduring one not only because Cooper wasn't captured, but also because there are so many clues regarding him, and yet he remains elusive.  Suffice it to day, if the event occurred today, which it would not as airline security has changed so much, Cooper would have been captured or found dead.

Cooper in fact left many clues as to his background, and therefore his identity. There was, of course, first of all his appearance.  He had "olive" skin and therefore a "Latin" appearance, something that gave him somewhat of a minority appearance for a Caucasian.  He was smoking heavily, although that could have been to steady his nerves, and therefore was a smoker at any rate, although at that point a little over 40% of all Americans smoked weekly, with that likely meaning that well over 50% of men did.

More tellingly, however, Cooper demonstrated a knowledge of parachutes, and expressed a request for military parachutes rather than sporting ones.  A comment from the air noted that he recognized the Air Force base at Tacoma.  And he had an extremely advanced knowledge of the features of the 727, knowing how slow it could go, knowing how to precisely set the flaps to slow it further, and knowing that it uniquely had a real loading under fuselage staircase that could be opened in flight.

Indeed, the 727 had seen military use in Vietnam due to its rear loading staircase for that very reason, with the Central Intelligence Agency using them for air drops of material.

These combined facts strongly suggest that Cooper had a military background of some sort, but they also, when combined with other factors, discount his having been a paratrooper, as is sometimes suggested.  

Cooper did not ask for the static line T-10 model of parachute in use then and now, but rather one that could be deployed manually, as would have been necessary for the drop.  That was a necessarily choice, but otherwise Cooper seemed to display an ignorance as to actual dropping.  He wanted the plane low, 10,000 feet, which makes sense, but military parachutes have a very violent deployment which meant that getting his stolen loot to the ground would have been difficult.  Beyond that, keeping his shoes on would have been difficult as well.

Landing safely would have been extremely difficult.  Deploying into the night, and in a severe thunderstorm, the odds would have been against him making it to the ground and landing uninjured.  Even if he did come down in the storm without injury, military parachutes of the era required, for good reason, the wearing of protective footgear, which his dress shoes were not in any fashion.  Moreover, his leaving in the night meant that he was risking coming down in trees experienced parachutists desperately seek to avoid as they are so strongly associated with death and injury to them.  

Finally, his clothing wasn't close to being suitable for a hike out of the forest.

Indeed, the entire concept of parachuting out of the plane, at night, seems to have been intentional, but it also seems to have been reckless in the extreme for a plot which was otherwise very well planned out.  Cooper's plan either seemed to discount the dangers and difficulties with making his departure from the plane to the ground safe, and his escape complete, or he just didn't care, trusting to luck at that point. And that also gives us an interesting hint as to his potential identity.

Combining all fo these up to this point, what this suggests is that Cooper had military experience involving parachutes and airplanes, but not that of being a paratrooper.  Being a pilot or a cargomaster seems the most likely candidates.

Analysis of  his tie, however, conducted years later suggests that he worked in heavy industry, and in some managerial capacity.  The aircraft manufacturing industry itself would seem to be a good candidate, as his clip on tie contained metals and substances that were used in that industry at the time, and which were unlikely to be picked up accidentally.

Combining all of these, it seems likely that Cooper was or had recently been an employee of an aircraft manufacturing company, perhaps Boeing the maker of the plane, and in that capacity he had become very familiar with the 727.  He likely had some prior military experience, or at least was aware of the military use of the plane.  He knew too much about the 727 for that knowledge to be casual, and if he had picked up any studied knowledge for the attempt, it would have been as to the use of the parachutes, and not the aircraft.  That knowledge would have been easier to obtain, and perhaps could have been obtained on the job.

Indeed, the oddity of it can't help but cause a person to have at least some question as to a possible connection with service in the CIA, and that has been suggested.

Of course, suggesting a CIA connection to things is commonly done with certain big events, with some reaching the absurd level. The claims, for instance, that the CIA was involved in the 9/11 attacks provides such an absurd example.  But here, there's at least some credibility to those claims.

The OSS of the 1940s and the CIA of the 50s and 60s was truly populated, in part, with characters who were "spooks".  And examples of servicemen and espionage characters going rouge are not too difficult to find.  Not really analogous, the example of Jonathan Pollard certainly comes to mind.  But beyond that, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine Corps veteran, turned defector, turned lone assassin.  Timothy McVey was a serviceman who turned against his own society. The recent January 6 Insurrection featured a serving Army intelligence officer.

While, once again, none of those ins analogous, it's not beyond the pale to think that a former member of the CIA went to work for Boeing and then used his knowledge to develop this scheme. Such a former member would have most likely been a pilot or crewmember of the 727 effort over Vietnam, with both positions being ones that would have been much less spy like than simply a rarefied form of government service.

Such a connection has been suggested as the reason the crime has never been solved, and while that sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory, it's at least partially credible as well. The CIA of the 60s and 70s did all sorts of things that it kept secret that are of an iffy nature, and the Government intelligence branches weren't above doing that, even coming up with bogus UFO reports to gaslight an individual.  If there was a CIA connection in 1970s, it's not at all impossible to imagine the CIA realizing a former member was involved and acting to cover the entire matter up.

That doesn't prove that by any means, however.

Other possibilities simply include a Boeing employee, or that of a contractor, who knew enough about the 727 and went to learn enough about parachuting to pull that part of it off.  It's also possible that it was done by a pilot form another airline who possibly had prior military experience or who simply studied up on parachutes before attempting the plot.  Indeed, this is quite plausible.  It's even possible that Cooper was a member of the one Air National Guard unit using a militarized version of the airplane at the time.

While we don't know, my guess is that he was a former or current Boeing employee who had some prior service connection, but not as a paratrooper.

If that's the case, then the question would be why he wasn't discovered.

It's simply possible that, in spite of the extremely long odds, he pulled it off.  It's hard to imagine a person walking to a forest road dressed in a suit and hitching a ride to town, but then it's also possible that the suit covered up a second set of clothes.  Maybe under that we was wearing a pair of Levis and a flannel shirt, although dress shirts are thin.  Still, it seems unlikely, but it's not impossible.  Perhaps he landed safely, hiked to a road, with or without most of the money, and made good his escape, returning to work after the holiday.  As careful as he was, chances are that he wouldn't have spent any of the money right away, or knew how to fence it without getting caught, which would not have been difficult at the time.

More likely, in my mind, he has already quit his job with Boeing, perhaps a year or more ago, and didn't have work to return to, which would explain a lot.

The careful part of the plan was getting the money and getting out of the airplane. Beyond that, very clearly, much was left to chance.  Perhaps to Cooper his chances in life had run out and therefore what happened beyond that point didn't really matter.  If he made good his escape, he had the money, if he didn't, he wasn't going to have to worry about it.

Any number of things come to mind.  Reported to be ni his mid 40s, he was smoking like a train which always raises the possibility that he had lung cancer or some other serious health issue.  If so, Cooper may have needed the money for something, and if the end came in the jump, that something wouldn't have mattered.

And then there's the myriad of things that seem looming at the time and prove not to be. Debts, legal and illegal, failed relationships, or whatever.

So why didn't they figure it out?

Assuming, of course, no CIA cover up, which we will assume, although as we noted, as wild as that sounds, it's not completely beyond the pale.

Assuming that, the ability to simply disappear in 1971 was much better than it is now.  Now, it's nearly impossible, but at the time, that wasn't the case.  DNA testing didn't exist at the time. Finger printing did of course, but not everyone had finger print data and even where it did exist, it often didn't lead to leads for a variety of reasons, including bad prints and bad police data.  Photo databases were in hard copy and microfilm form.  Most people operated mostly on a cash and check basis at the time with credit cards being rare and even somewhat disdained.  Millions of men  had been in the Army, fo course, but that meant millions of paper records that had to be accessed by hand.  Employment records operated the same way.  Social Security cards were easy to get, and like now, they didn't feature photographs. Driver licenses did, but pulling those records would also have required near knowledge that the one being sought was of the guilty person.

So searching for people was much more difficult.

And indeed, this explains the reason that a person's becoming a lifelong fugitive from that era is not all that uncommon. Just recently, for example,  to identify of a 1969 bank robber was revealed.  Theodore Conrad was a 20-year-old bank teller that year, just two years prior to the year we're considering, when he robbed his own employer of $215,000 in cash.  It turns out that he was Thomas Randele, having relocated from Ohio to Massachusetts, where he had subsequently lived a quiet life.  Interestingly, his posthumous identify was revealed due to ongoing FBI work on the robbery, which has supposedly ceased on the 1971 skyjacking. . .

Another example would be Abbie Hoffman, who is remembered for being a radical anti-war protestor but who was arrested for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, a charge he was was a set-up, in 1973.  He fled in 1974 and turned himself in, in 1980, at which time it was fairly clear nobody was really looking for him anymore.

Randele was young and employed when he scooped up a bunch of cash on his way off the door and became a lifelong fugitive.  Cooper appears to have been a middle-aged, highly intelligent, and experienced man when he went out the back of the 727.  If he was at that time an unemployed, for whatever reason, loner, living in an apartment or even a rented house, he could well have just disappeared forever, even if killed.  He may well have had no work to report back to, or maybe it was minor work, in which case he would have just been replaced as an employee for failing to show back up.  Or if he was medically retired, and living modestly but alone, even if he never showed back up it might well not have meant much.  

Of course, if he did show back up, people likely would never have taken notice.

So could he be found now?

That's an interesting question.

Randele was.  The FBI claims it closed Cooper's file, but Randele's was even older and unlike other recent cold cases, it didn't involve DNA.  Cooper left a ton of really interesting leads that still exist.  There's all that there originally was and now, more.  Moreover, the computerization of records has reached a state where it's reaching back into the past.

Given all of this, in my view, there's enough to take a second look, and some people have. For example, there's the work of Citizen Sleuths, which goes much further than what I've noted here:

Citizen Sleuths Analyze the D.B. Cooper Case

With all of this in mind, there's one other thing to keep in mind.

The most likely outcome of this mystery isn't a happy one, even assuming that a happy conclusion can be made from what was, after all, a terrible terroristic crime.  Cooper, whatever his real name was, likely went crashing into a forest canopy unprepared and at fairly high speed, given the military parachutes in use, and was likely hung up in the trees or killed right on the spot.  If not, his chances ankle injury were outstanding.  

No body has ever been found, but this very year a body of a hunter was discovered in Wyoming that had been out an equivalent period of time.  People go missing into the forest even now and are never found.  Cooper's body likely was hanging in the trees for years and has since decayed and fallen to the ground, to be distributed by wild animals.  His loot was probably distributed by the impact, assuming that it didn't get blown off his body when the parachute opened.  Only bits and pieces of the chute likely exist today, and nobody looks up in trees for those, and they likely couldn't be seen anyhow.

The F15 is back in production and so is the Mig 31.

The F15 is the F15EX variant, a brand new version of the old F15, which first went into production in 1976.  The planes history dates back to tests that go as far back as 1972.

The enormous Mig 31 first went into production in 1981 and has a history that goes back to 1975.

Why are they back? 

Missiles.

The F15EX can carry a seven foot long missiles that can reach deep into China, should the need arise, and its external hard points can carry more missiles than the F35.

The Mig 31, which might simply be getting an overhaul rather than new editions, can carry missiles that can reach into low orbit and hit satellites.

And so the Cold War sort of returns, in a way.

Lex Anteinternet: June 11, 1970. Leaving Libya

Lex Anteinternet: June 11, 1970. Leaving Libya:

June 11, 1970. Leaving Libya

F100 Super Saber taking off from Wheelus Air Force Base, Libya.

On this day in 1970 the American military presence in Libya came to an end when the U.S. Air Force turned Wheelus Air Force Base over to the North African country.

Few people today would even be aware that the USAF had a base in Libya, but it first started having a presence at Wheelus during World War Two when it took over the former Italian air field in 1943 after it was captured by the British.  It occupied the air field steadily until this date in 1970. During much of that time the US had friendly relations with the country's monarch, King Idris I.

King Idris I of Libya, who reigned from 1951 until 1969. The former king would live out his life in exile in Egypt.

Idris was overthrown in a military coup led by Muammar Gaddafi, who subsequently ruled the "republic" from that point until is his violent death at the hands of a revolutionary crowd in 2011.  During Idris' reign the nation went from being one of the poorest in the world to being one of the richest, due to the discovery of oil, and at the same time the purpose of the USAF presence in the country declined to the point of irrelevance.  Gaddafi wanted the US out and the US, for its part, was glad to leave.

Wheelus was soon used by the Soviet Air Forces as a base and as a Libyan air force base.  It was hit  in 1986 by the U.S. during it raid on Libya during the Reagan administration.

USAF FB-111 landing after air strike in Libya in 1986.

The air strip is an airport today.

On the same day William Bentvena was shot by Tommy DeSimone, an event, mostly recalled from the movie Goodfellas.  Bentvena was a "made man" of the Gambino crime family and DeSimone would disappear in 1979.

Lex Anteinternet: A Memorial Day Reflection on the Second World War....

Lex Anteinternet: A Memorial Day Reflection on the Second World War....: One poster noted that much expanded airline travel resulted from the war, and that certainly is the case.

Just prior to the war airliners were beginning to take on a recognizable form, with the DC-3 being a recognizable commercial aircraft that went on to do yeoman's service during the war as the C-47.

C-47 that went on to post war commercial use being restored at the Pacific Aviation Museum.

After the war, however, things really changed. Four engined wartime aircraft made four engined commercial aircraft inevitable.  By the 60s they were yielding to jets and modern air travel was around the corner.  It really took airline deregulation, however, which came in during the 1980s, to make air travel cheap.

Lex Anteinternet: And now Iranian protests against its government

Lex Anteinternet: And now Iranian protests against its government:

And now Iranian protests against its government

The Iranian people's level of trust for their own government is low and has been waning for a long time.

Which leads us to the blistering oddities of the current situation between the US and Iran.  And indeed, the odd ways in which that situation involves air disasters.

The relationship between the two nations went bad during the Islamic Revolution there when Iranian students, who morphed into the Revolutionary Guard, took the American Embassy in Tehran and held those there hostage.  President Carter attempted to secure the release of the hostages through diplomacy before ultimately deploying U.S. special forces in the form of the "Delta Force" in Operation Eagle Claw.

It failed.

Fuel calculations were botched and desert conditions intervened to lead to a USAF EC-130 running into a RH-53 helicopter sending both to the ground with loss of American life.  It was a complete debacle and showed the depths to which the American military had declined following the Vietnam War.  The US was shown to be impotent.

Following this, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 occupants on board the plane.  The Vincennes had been harried by Iranian naval forces in a prolonged engagement that day and had actually crossed into Iranian waters in pursuit of them when the Iranian Airbus A300 was mistaken for an Iranian military aircraft and shot down.  Unusual for the US, the US never acknowledged that the error was a culpable one and the crew was not disciplined in any fashion.  In the Navy's view, the incident was a regrettable but not culpable event.  

Iran has always viewed it differently and has marked the anniversary of the event repeatedly.  It's one of the unifying events the Iranian people have with their government.

And now they've shot down their own airliner.

A lot has changed since 1979, let alone 1988.  Iranians are no longer that keen on the theocracy and the majority of them would abandon it.  Anecdotal evidence holds that a lot of Iranians have abandoned Islam itself with quite a few converting to Christianity very quietly.  The well educated Iranian population chaffs at the strict tenants of Shia Islam and its well educated female population can look back to the 1970s when they weren't veiled and Iran was even unique in conscripting women, which says something about the government's view of its female population at the time.  The Iranian government is going to change.

The recent American strike on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general should have served to really being a uniting force between the Iranian people and their theocracy, and it did briefly.  Now that seems to have already eroded.  Even before this incident occurred Iranian twitter accounts were starting to argue against their really being support for the government and some even declared the targeted general to be a terrorist.  Now the weakness of the country has really been exposed.  The American military has really moved on, the Iranian one has not, and now its culpable for killing its own citizens by accident.  And Iranians are back to protesting their government.  The government's capitol on the 1988 event may now have been spent.

Where this leads nobody knows, but nobody could have predicted this course of events in any fashion.

Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport, Orange County, California

Let me start off by noting that I'm not really a John Wayne fan.

I'm not a John Wayne anti fan either.

As I've stated on one of our other blogs, I don't really get hero worship in regard to actors and actresses, or other entertainers.  I don't expect actors in particular to reflect the characters they portray in any fashion whatsoever.  Many, I'm sure, are the very antithesis of the characters they portray and as a general rule, actors and actresses (which I'll henceforth condense into "actors") are among the most screwed up demographic that exists.*  This doesn't apply to all of them, by any means, but as a demographic they're genuinely pushing the envelope on odd and I've sometimes wondered, indeed I'm convinced, that quite a few actors take up that occupation to compensate for not feeling real, and then go on to adopt the cause de jour to try to give meaning to lives that otherwise lack them.

Now, I'm not saying that any of that applies to John Wayne.  Wayne came up in the days of acting when a lot of early actors actually came into it through some other movie industry role.  In Wayne's case he was an actor in Hollywood from the start, following a (fairly rare at the time) college career in which he played football.

I frankly don't think that Wayne was the greatest actor in the world either, or although I also think that he was a better actor than his detractors would have it.  His greatest role was in the John Ford film The Searchers, in which he doesn't play to type at all.  His portrayals in the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Cowboys are all also excellent.  His late film The Green Berets, in contrast, is horrifically bad and I don't even think Stagecoach, which is widely beloved and celebrated, is all that good.  So my views are mixed.

Just because Wayne played a military man in a host of films in which all the portrayals were heroic doesn't make him a military man.  When his time came, during World War Two, Wayne agonized over joining the service and didn't. His career was just taking off and he worried about serving wrecking that.  He made, in my view, the improper choice.**

I know that his defenders here will cite a football injury but I just don't believe it.  By the end of the Second World war American manpower was in such short supply that men were taken into the Army who were basically blind in one eye and had border line mental psychosis.  With Wayne's connections, even if he had an injury, he could have gotten in.

So with all of that, I just regard actor John Wayne as an actor.  He had some admirable qualities to be sure.  He was apparently personally courageous in confrontation and even waded into a group of Vietnam War protesters to quiet them when he was somewhere with Jimmy Stewart, whose son had just been killed in Vietnam.*** That took guts.

Anyhow, I think it's silly in the first place that Orange County renamed their airport after John Wayne in 1979.  I wouldn't have done that. 

Indeed, I think airports that are named after people, generally ought to be named after somebody of significance, and I don't place actors in that category.  It makes no more sense, in my view, for Orange County to have renamed their former military field after John Wayne (indeed, there's some ironies in that) than it would make for the Port of Port Arthur, Texas to rename that facility Janis Joplin Port.  Indeed, the latter example might make more sense as Janis Joplin was actually from Port Arthur.

Port Arthur, Texas.  Should it be renamed Port Janis Joplin?

Indeed, if there was a desire to name the airport after a movie industry figure with a real role in aviation, it would have been Howard Hughes Airport.****

But that's impossible to imagine.

Anyhow, I also think it's silly that the Los Angeles Times has started a debate over renaming it, which they recently did with this item by columnist Michale Hitzik:

Column: It’s time to take John Wayne’s name off the Orange County airport

Most people familiar with the life story of John Wayne are aware that the late movie star was a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger — after all, he was still making a movie glorifying America’s conduct of the Vietnam War (“The Green Berets,” 1968) well after the country had begun to get sick of the conflict.But the resurrection of a 1971 interview Wayne gave to Playboy magazine has underscored the sheer crudeness of the actor’s feelings about gay people, black people, Native Americans, young people and liberals.This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible or immoral to enjoy westerns and war movies starring John Wayne; that’s a personal choice. But it certainly undermines any justification for his name and image to adorn a civic facility.

Okay, anyone familiar with John Wayne is likely already familiar with his 1971 interview with the pedophilic, pornographic smut magazine Playboy.   1971 was about the high water mark of the detestable Hugh Hefner's objectification of women, although we certainly haven't recovered from that, and part of its cover for barely disguised misogynistic pedophilia was to run serious interviews with people.  Next to Wayne's perhaps the most famous one came out a few years later when then Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was so unwise as to allow himself to be interviewed by the rag.

Wayne's interview became famous, or perhaps more accurately infamous, due questions asked of him in the rag regarding race and other matters.  Wayne didn't hold back on his views on various things in the magazine at all.  The columnist repeated some of them in his article, in order to make his point.  And indeed, Wayne made comments about homosexuals (Hitzik uses the term "Gay people", which isn't how I think they'd probably prefer to be referred to in this context), blacks and Indians.

We might note here from the onset that it's always baffled me why anyone cares what actors think about anything at all, and for that matter, any category of entertainer. Actors act.  They aren't those real people.  Who cares what they really think on any societal issue? And if people feel that's an excuse for excusing Wayne's comments, which I'm not going to do, I'll note that this extends out to every single topic that people ask actors to comment on. Whatever it is, if you are for it or against it, there's some actor you can get to comment on it, but why?

Anyhow, as we're opining on this, we'll take a look at Wayne's comments as well, although not in the order that Hitzik did, which probably wouldn't do them justice in context, and which isn't what made them initially controversial, which in fact they initially were.  More on that in a moment.

Usually, you only hear about his comments on blacks, which were:

WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. 

PLAYBOY: Are you equipped to judge which blacks are irresponsible and which of their leaders inexperienced? 

WAYNE: It’s not my judgment. The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background. … But if they aren’t academically ready for that step, I don’t think they should be allowed in. Otherwise, the academic society is brought down to the lowest common denominator. … What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard. …I think the Hollywood studios are carrying their tokenism a little too far. There’s no doubt that 10 percent of the population is black, or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves; they certainly aren’t Caucasian. Anyway, I suppose there should be the same percentage of the colored race in films as in society. But it can’t always be that way. There isn’t necessarily going to be 10 percent of the grips or sound men who are black, because more than likely, 10 percent haven’t trained themselves for that type of work.

Wayne was out to lunch in his comments and most particularly in his "white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility". These came in 1971.  But they aren't unusual for the time.  Indeed, because they weren't unusual, blacks of the era reacted less than a person might suspect, much less, as they were used to such arguments being advanced.  Today the opposite is very much true, and no wonder.

They were clearly racist and a person who stated them held undoubtedly racist views.  No doubt about it. And the old line about educating them up until . . was as old as the sun.  Indeed, it dates back to slavery.  No doubt in 1971 the percentage of college educated blacks was lower than it is now, but the overall American population in general was less educated in 1971.  It wasn't until after World War Two that high school graduation became an absolute norm and college education became societaly common.  The comment was absurd.

It's usually pointed out that Wayne personally had good relationships with black actors of his era, but that's hardly a defense to this.  A person being personally nice to people he's biased against doesn't make him unbiased.  Wayne was living in the past with these arguments, which were never valid, but that's part of the point.  A lot of Americans of that era were and these views were surprisingly common.  That's not a defense, it's just a fact.  The politics of the early 1970s still reflected this.

Indeed, Wayne's interview is just two years prior to Lynrd Skinner releasing Sweet Home Alabama, which is a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man.  Almost nobody considers this, but Sweet Home Alabama excuses the same sort of views, with the lyrics noting that they hadn't supported Wallace for Governor of Alabama but that a Southern Man didn't need Neil Young around.  That's very close to the same view, as what the Playboy interviewer was suggesting was the view that most Americans had but still had to argue, the time for waiting was over.

Put more bluntly, Sweet Home Alabama is also subtly racist.  Consider the lyrics:

Well I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well I heard old Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow

That's also a "we can take care of it" type of excuse, quite frankly.  But nobody gets too up and arms about the song and there's even been a movie in recent years that took its title from it.

Maybe they should.

Do these statements make Wayne a racist?  Yes, but in the very common society wide manner of the era.  That's not a defense to it, but it's also not a reason for the Los Angeles Times to reverse Orange County's 1979 decision.

It might have been a reason not to name the airport after Wayne in 1979, but a better reason not to name it after him is that he was an actor, and an actor with no connection to aviation.

Well, maybe the other things that Wayne said are.  Let's take a look at them, going next to his comments about Indians.

PLAYBOY: For years American Indians have played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns. Do you feel any empathy with them? 

WAYNE: I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. … 

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the government grant for a university and cultural center that these Indians [then encamped on Alcatraz Island] have demanded as “reparations”? 

WAYNE: What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything. I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me. 

PLAYBOY: Do you think they’ve had the same advantages and opportunities that you’ve had? 

WAYNE: I’m not gonna give you one of those I-was-a-poor-boy-and-I-pulled-myself-upby-my-bootstraps stories, but I’ve gone without a meal or two in my life, and I still don’t expect the government to turn over any of its territory to me. Hard times aren’t something I can blame my fellow citizens for. Years ago, I didn’t have all the opportunities, either. But you can’t whine and bellyache ‘cause somebody else got a good break and you didn’t, like these Indians are. We’ll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them with our tax money.

Shocking?

Yes, for sure.

Be that as it may, I still find plenty of people who, if you really know them, hold a basically similar view, and it was only in the 1960s that any other sort of view became widely held.

Indeed, the first time I heard it suggested that European Americans "stole" Indian lands was in the 1970s, when I was a kid and overheard it as part of a silent third party between my father and a colleague. The colleague mentioned that off hand.  This comment really surprised me at the time and I later asked my father if a theft had really happened.

He answered no, but his view was really more nuanced than that in that he regarded the pre 20th Century clash of cultures as inevitable, which is different from giving it virtue.  Plenty of people gave it virtue.  In my grade school library at the time I recall there was a book on Custer I read, written I think in the 1950s, that was practically a hagiography.  That sort of view had been extremely common into the 1960s and while there were those who swam against that current the entire time, it wasn't really until people like Mari Sandoz began to publish that there was any sort of wider reconsideration. By the 1960s the reconsideration had become widespread and was part of the era, and Indian activist movements developed and were in the news.

Wayne was still an active actor in the 1970s, to be sure.  Perhaps his most famous movie, The Cowboys, was yet to come, being released the year after this interview in 1972.  The interview obviously didn't impact his popularity much, if at all.  But here its important to remember that he was really an actor from the 40s and 50s who was the exception to the rule as he managed to age into later roles in the 60s and 70s.  By the late 60s his movies themselves, with the exception of The Cowboys, seemed to look back and Wayne was on record as hating some later Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch.  1971's movie, Big Jake, which I like, very much has that sense to it, amplified by the fact that it is itself a fin de siecle movie.  Coming after Peckinpah's violent masterpiece, the latter film seems to be from a much earlier era.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that Wayne's views were completely anachronistic.  Playboy likely knew that, and so Wayne was set up to look like a fool. Playboy itself is now a creepy anachronism and its only a matter of time until the Me Too era blows up all over it.  Unfortunately the creep who created it is dead and won't be round to take the brunt of the inevitably coming blows.

So Wayne also talked about homosexuals in his interview, which the Los Angeles Times refers to as "Gay people".  The term "gay" actually has, or at least had, a distinct meaning within the homosexual community and traditionally not all homosexuals have identified with it even if they identify as homosexual.  In this instance, therefore, the columnist himself shows himself to be insensitive an uninformed.

Wayne: Movies were once made for the whole family. Now, with the kind of junk the studios are cranking out. … I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films. 

PLAYBOY: What kind of films do you consider perverted? 

WAYNE: Oh, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy — that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?

I've never seen Midnight Cowboy and I don't intend to.  Wayne isn't alone in his view that it was "perverted" however and there are still those who regard the film as debased.  It was an X Rated film at the time and won an Academy Award, the first film (and maybe the only film) in that category to win one.  It came just after Hollywood abandoned the Hayes Production Code which resulted in an explosion of movies pushing the limits on depictions which indeed did result in a downward descent in what was portrayed on the screen which really hasn't ended.  1966's Best Picture went to The Sound of Music, 1967's to A Man For All Seasons, 1968's to In the Heat Of the Night, 1969 to Oliver!, and then 1970's to Midnight Cowboy.  No matter what you think of any one of those films, the 1970 award reflects some sort of shift in what was being portrayed in film.  For somebody who started making films in the 1930s, the shift would have been obvious and titanic.  Indeed, very early in the early history of film the direction was going the opposite way.

The real shocker in this comment is the use of the slur "fags".  That's an epitaph and in insulting one, and it was at the time.  Now use of that term would destroy an actors career.  Coming in 1971, however, it didn't.  That probably says something about the times.

1971 was two years after the Stonebridge Riots in New York, but it was also a time of massive social unrest.  Homosexuality may have come a bit more out in the open with the riots, but it certainly wasn't open.  Indeed, that would take at least another twenty years.  Wayne's views were probably the societal norm at the time, including a norm that was held by many others who people would regard as very liberal.  Indeed, the accusation that somebody was a homosexual was libel per se in the law and was commonly used as a smear against figures of the right and left by their enemies. 

The Los Angeles Times has been met with all of these criticisms but is sticking to its guns.  It's noted that the civil rights "revolution" had been going on for years at the time that these statements were made, which is true.  But that they were going on is different from claiming they'd been completed.  In reality they'd been gong on to some degree since the Civil War, and yet it's probable that a review of the LA Times from various years would find shocking examples of views that we'd find absolutely appalling today.  I'd be curious, for example, what its view as on Asian immigration to California?  The Times itself has acknowledged that its view on Japanese internment during World War Two was "shameful".

The Times is correct that his view was in the nature of "reacting" to the developments of the Civil Rights Era.  They were, and they were wrong.  Indeed, we might go further and hold them to be reactionary.  But they were apparently not shocking enough to keep the airport from being named for him when it was in 1979.  And they weren't so shocking to people to keep them away from The Cowboys the following year and a handful of final big films he made in the next eight years prior to his death.

In something like this, it's always popular to say "we've come a long ways", when often we really haven't.  The airport has its own problems and the naming of it after an actor in the first place is probably among the very least of them.  If anything, the naming demonstrates the vapidness of California, which takes itself very seriously on everything but which strikes many elsewhere as constantly goofy.  Celebrating an actor through the naming of an airport is just part of that.  Renaming it would likely turn into an equally odd act if not a downright circus.  Maybe if nothing else, this serves to focus on that.

If it were to be renamed, perhaps it might be time to actually consider that the figures of actors are poorly presented for anything serious.  The Times columnist suggests naming the field after guitar figure Leo Fender.  I don't know anything about Mr. Fender, but his guitars are great.  Having said that, that doesn't have anything to do with aviation.

Lots of other aviation figures who played a role in California do, however.  The Lockheeds, Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin. . .

and even Howard Hughes.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Anyone who follows actors and actresses biographies at all can't help not only to be appalled, but also note how often their personal lives grossly depart from the people they portray.  Actresses playing nuns don't live chaste lives personally, cowboy actors who play rugged frontier individualist might very well be the polar opposite, and so on.

Occasionally the opposite is the case, but so occasionally its' often a surprise when you lean of it.

**This is noted in the LA Times op ed I'll refer to below, FWIW.

***This is omitted in the LA Times article, but it was genuinely courageous.  That courage shows how people are often very mixed in their actual characters. When it was time to serve his country, Wayne didn't. But when a friend was under a type of assault, he intervened when he didn't have to.

Wayne struggled with certain deep personal convictions his entire life, it should be noted.  Exposed to Catholicism through director John Ford, he flirted with becoming Catholic his entire life, and ultimately did, but in his final illness.  Nonetheless, he was a frequent attendee at Mass for decades prior to that.

****Hughes, of course, was not only an early movie producer, but a giant for many years in the aviation industry.

Wayne did appear in a number of aviation related films, although I hardly think that qualifies you to have an airport named after you, and that's not in fact why it was.  He lived as an actor in the community that is just outside this airport.  Ironically, complaints from the community about the airport are constant.

Those Wayne films include the following, which I think is an inclusive list, but very well may not be.

Central Airport. (1933).

His role in this film was uncredited.  He played a co-pilot.  Until making this list, I'd never even heard of this 1933 film.

Flying Tigers (1942).

This film is famous, but in the bad category in my view.  It's about the famous American Volunteer Group of mercenary pilots that flew P40s, with the American government's blessing, in support of the Chinese Nationalist prior to the American entry into World War Two (after Pearl Harbor the unit was converted into an American Army Air Corps unit).

I'm surprised that its cartoonish portrayal of the Chinese and Japanese didn't make the LA Times op ed.  It's a typical World War Two film and is one of several in which, contrary to the myth, John Wayne's character dies.

Flying Leathernecks (1951).

This is a famous film, but I've never seen it.  It concerns a Marine Corps squadron at Guadalcanal.

I've often been surprised that Wayne's roles portraying military heroes carried on after World War Two, in which he did not serve. But in fact, most of those roles actually came after the war, and they started during the war.

Island In The Sky (1953).

Island in the sky is about a DC-3 that crashes in the Canadian wilds.  It's an excellent movie.

The High and The Mighty (1954)

The High and the Mighty was a groundbreaking film in that it was the first of a type, the on board air disaster type.  It follows the crew and the passengers that are on a plane that's failing as they crew struggles to bring the plane in safely  It's the first of its kind, and is very well done.

Wayne's aging makes an appearance here as he's cast as an aging co pilot, side lined because of his age, whose experience wars against the younger pilots education in his craft.


The Wings Of Eagles (1957)

This film is the biography of Naval aviator Frank "Sprig" Wead, an early figure in naval aviation who was severely injured in an aircraft accident.  I've seen part, but not all, of this film.

Jet Pilot (1957)

Jet Pilot is a terrible film that can only be explained by the Hollywood studio system of the time, which also explains the shear volume of the films that anyone actor made as well. In 1957 Wayne made, for example, three films.

This film was made the year after his greatest film, The Searchers, and only his being a captive of the studio could explain his being in this Cold War dog about improbable spy craft and a romance with a female Russian pilot.

The Longest Day (1962).

In this great World War Two film based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, Wayne plays airborne office Lt. Col. Jim Vandervoot.

This isn't really an aviation picture, but I've included it here as Vandervoot was a real person, of course, and a paratrooper.  To that extent, the film involved aviation. 

This is a great film, but Wayne is far too old in the film for the role he occupies in it.

Rutan Long EZ. Natrona County International Airport

This is a Rutan Long EZ homebuilt.  The distinctive looking homebuilt has been on the market since 1979. This one was spotted at the Natrona County International Airport.

Pacific Aviation Museum: Sikorsky H3 Sea King

Pacific Aviation Museum: Sikorsky H3 Sea King