Blog Mirror: Laramie Regional Airport Digs Out From ‘Unbelievable’ 45 FAA Violations

 

Laramie Regional Airport Digs Out From ‘Unbelievable’ 45 FAA Violations

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.

2021 Reflections: The Transportation Edition

 

We don't tend to post original commentary on this blog, but on our others, but given the topics, it's appropriate here.

And this will be a dual post, appearing on both Railhead and The Aerodrome simultaneously.

Like some, as in all, of our reflection posts that have gone up on our companion blogs, this entry is impacted by COVID 19, as everything is. 

It's also heavily impacted by politics.

And of course, COVID 19 itself has become strangely political.

The onset of the terrible pandemic shut down nearly every economy in the world, save for those in areas with economies so underdeveloped that they couldn't shut down.  That impacted the world's transportation networks in a major way, and it still is.  COVID 19 also became a factor in the last election, with a large section of the American public becoming extremely unhappy with the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic.  Added to the mix, heightened concerns over global warming have finally started to accelerate an American response to the threat.

All of which gets us to transportation, the topic of these blogs in some ways.

For at least a decade, it's been obvious that electric automobile are going to replace fossil fuel powered ones. There are, of course, deniers, but the die is cast and that's where things will go.  

It's also become obvious that technology is going to take truck driver out of their seats, and put a few, albeit a very few, in automated offices elsewhere where they'll monitor remote fleets of trucks.  Or at least that's the thought.

The Biden Administration, moreover, included money for railroads in is large infrastructure bill.  This has developed in various ways, but the big emphasis has been on expanding Amtrak.

Amtrak Expansion. Cheyenne to Denver, and beyond!?

I have real problems, I'll admit, with the scope of the proposed infrastructure spending proposals that President Biden is looking at, but if they go forward, I really hope we do see rail service restored (and that's what it would be) between Cheyenne and Denver.

The plan proposes to invest $80B in Amtrak.  Yes, $80B.  Most of that will go to repairs, believe it or not, as the Amtrak has never been a favorite of the Republican Party, which in its heard of hearts feels that the quasi public rail line is simply a way of preserving an obsolete mode of transportation at the Government's expense.  But rail has been receiving a lot of attention recently for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that in a now carbon conscious era, it's the greenest mode of transportation taht we have, something the commercial rail lines have been emphasizing.

Indeed, if the American public wasn't afraid of a nuclear power the same way that four year olds are afraid of monsters that live under their beds, it could be greener yet, and there's some talk of now supporting nuclear power among serious informed environmentalists.  A campaign to push that, called the Solutionary Rail, is now active.  We'll deal with that some other time.

Here we're noting that we're hopeful that if this does go through, and as noted we have real reservations about this level of expenditure, that Amtrak does put in a passenger line from Cheyenne to Pueblo.  

A line connecting Ft. Collins to Denver has been a proposal in Colorado for quite a while and has some backing there.  The same line of thought has already included Cheyenne.  This has a lot to do with trying to ease the burgeoning traffic problem this area experiences due to the massive population growth in Colorado.  Wyomingites, I suppose, should therefore approach this with some caution as it would tie us into the Front Range communities in a way that we might not want to be.  Still, it's an interesting idea.

It's one that for some reason I think will fall through, and I also suspect it'll receive no support in Wyoming. Still, it's interesting.

During  the past year, locally, flights to Casper were put in jeopardy. This was a byproduct of COVID 19, as air travel dropped off to nearly nothing, nationwide, and that made short flights economically iffy.

Before the pandemic, Delta had cut back its flight schedule to Salt Lake, which is a major Delta hub. This caused its bookings to drop down anyway.  I used to fly to Salt Lake in the morning, pre COVID, do business, and then fly back that evening.  Once Delta cuts its flights back, however, that became impossible.

That meant that Delta, at that point, had aced itself out of the day trip business market, which it seemingly remains unaware of for some reason.  COVID hurt things further.  At that point it threatened to abandon its service unless it could receive some assistance.  The county and the local municipalities rose to the occasion.

Delta receives a subsidty to continue serving the Natrona County International Airport

 I'm really not too certain what my view on this is.  Overall, I suppose it's a good thing.

Delta is one of the two carriers, relying on regional contractors, serving the Natrona County International Airport, and hence all of Central Wyoming.  It flies to and from Salt Lake, while United flies to and from Denver.  

It used to have great connections.  A businessman in Casper could take the red eye to Salt Lake and then catch the late flight back. That's no longer possible  Frankly, depending upon what you're doing, it's nearly as easy to drive to Salt Lake now.

And perhaps that's cutting into their passenger list, along with COVID 19, although I'm told that flights have been full recently.

Anyhow, losing Delta would be a disaster. We'd be down to just United.  Not only would that mean that there was no competition, it'd place us in a shaky position, maybe, as the overall viability of air travel starts to reduce once a carrier pulls out.

A couple of legislatures ago there was an effort to subsidize intrastate air travel, and I think it passed.  While Wyomingites howl about "socialism", as we loosely and fairly inaccurately describe it, we're hugely okay with transportation being subsidized.  We likely need to be, or it'll cut us off from the rest of everything more than we already are, and that has a certain domino effect.

I don't know what the overall solution to this problem is, assuming there is one, but whatever it is, subsidies appear likely to be part of it for the immediate future . . . and maybe there are some avenues open there we aren't pursuing and should be.

At the same time, infrastructure money became available for the state's airports as well.

Wyoming's Airports to receive $15.1M in Infrastructure Money

The Federal funds can be used for terminals, runways and parking lots and the like.

Of Wyoming airports, Jackson's will get the most, receiving $3.38M.  Natrona County International Airport gets the second-largest amount at $1.34M.  Natrona  County's airport will use the funds for electrical work.

So flights were kept and improvements will be made.

Recently, pilot pay has been tripled, albeit only for one month.

United Airlines Triples Pilot Pay for January.

This due to an ongoing pilot shortage, which has been heightened by the Omicron variant of COVID 19.

I.e, United is trying to fill the pilot seats this month.

So, that's what happened.

Now, what might we hope will happen?

1.  Electric Avenue

Everything always seem really difficult until its done, and then not so much.

Which doesn't discount difficulty. 

The Transcontinental Railraod was created in the US through the American System, something that's been largely forgotten.  Private railroads didn't leap at the chance to put in thousands of miles of rail line across uninhabited territory.  No, the Federal Government caused the rail line to come about by providing thousands of acres of valuable land to two start up companies and then guarding the workers with the Army, at taxpayer expense.

We note that as, right now, railroad are already the "greenest" means of transportation in the US.  They could be made more so by electrifying them, just as the Trans Siberian Railway is.  At the same time, if a program to rapidly convert energy production in the US to nuclear was engaged in, the US transportation system could be made basically "green" in very little time.  Probably five years or less.

If we intend to "build back better", we ought to do that.

This would, I'd note, largely shift long transportation back to its pre 1960s state.  Mostly by rail.  Trucking came in because the US decided, particularly during the Eisenhower Administration, to subsidize massive coast to coast highways.  

For the most part, we no longer really need them.

Oh, we need highways, but with advances in technology of all sorts, we need them a lot less than we once did.  And frankly, we never really needed them way that the Federal Government maintained we did.  It's been a huge financial burden on the taxpayers, and its subsidized one industry over another.

Yes, this is radical, but we should do it.

Now, before a person either get too romantic, or too weepy, over this, a couple of things.

One is that we already have an 80,000 teamster shortage for trucking.  I.e., yes, this plan would put a lot of drivers out of work, but its a dying occupation anyway.  Indeed, in recent years its become on that is oddly increasingly filled with Eastern Europeans who seemingly take it up as its a job they can occupy with little training.  The age of the old burly American double shifting teamster is long over.  

And to the extent it isn't, automated trucks are about to make it that way for everyone.

The trains, we'd note, will be automated too.  It's inevitable. They'll be operated like giant train sets from a central location. Something that's frankly easier, and safer, to do, than it would be for semi tractors.

2.  Subsidized local air travel

It's going to take longer to electrify aircraft, particularly those that haul people, but electrification of light aircraft is already being worked on.  The Air Force has, moreover, been working on alternative jet fuels.

Anyhow, if we must subsidize something in long distance transportation, that should be local air travel.  Its safe, effective and vital for local economies.  I don't care if that is quasi socialist.  It should be done.

3. The abandoned runways.

Locally, I'd like to see some of that infrastructure money go to the extra runway or runways at the NatCo airport being repaired.  I know that they were little used, but they're there.

Wyoming's Airports to receive $15.1M in Infrastructure Money

The Federal funds can be used for terminals, runways and parking lots and the like.

Of Wyoming airports, Jackson's will get the most, receiving $3.38M.  Natrona County International Airport gets the second-largest amount at $1.34M.  Natrona  County's airport will use the funds for electrical work.

Only two airports in the Continental United States gained passengers in 2020.

And those were the Rawlins Wyoming and Riverton Wyoming airports, both of which are part of Wyoming's Capacity Purchase Agreement program, which is a state program guaranteeing some level of ongoing air service.

Neither airport has been featured here, even though at one point or another, I've seen both (but of course haven't flown into either).

Medicine Bow Aiport (Site 32 SL-O (Salt Lake-Omaha) Intermediate Field Historic District).

Teletype hut and beacon tower.

I didn't know that Medicine Bow had an airfield at all until MKTH photographed it.  I've never been to it myself.

But it does, as these photos show.

As these photos show, not only is a strip still there, but one of the big concrete arrows (which I've never seen in person myself either) is on the strip, indicating that it was once part of the Transcontinental Air Mail system.  It must have been part of a connection between Cheyenne and points further west, but what the next western airfield was, I don't know.  My guess would be Rawlins, but that would be just a guess.  According to the submitting material for its placement on the National Register of Historic Places, it was an emergency field on "Route T".  This was "Site 32" on the route.

Today the strip is owned by the Town of Medicine Bow, and is little used, apparently.  It's still there, however, including the noted remnants of the near century old teletype hut and its beacon tower.

 

July 16, 1941. The Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport opened.

It was the Washington National Airport in 1941.

The airport opened, obviously, just before the United States' entry into the Second World War, it's 1941 opening partially explained by a prohibition in airport funding that was lifted in 1938.

Washington National in 1944.

It was built on grounds near Arlington that had been part of a large plantation, but its location very much constrains it size, so it remains a shockingly small airport in spite of its signficance.

It was renamed for President Ronald Reagan in 1998.  

I've personally never flown into it, having landed at the nearby Baltimore airport once.

May 15, 1921. Opening day of the Curtiss Flying Field Garden City, New York. on May 15, 1921.

Both from the 2015 Model T. forum.

 

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.

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.

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*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.

Blog Mirror: Airport board partners with development firm to attract unmanned aircraft businesses

From the Laramie Boomerang about their airport:

Airport board partners with development firm to attract unmanned aircraft businesses

Frankly, I have a really hard time getting excited about something like this.

The Hanger. Wardell Field, Bar Nunn, Wyoming.

This is, and isn't, what it appears to be.

This is "The Hanger", a restaurant in Bar Nunn, Wyoming.  But originally it was what it looks like, an aircraft hanger.

Radial engine on display in The Hanger.  A decommissioned small airplane hangs from the roof.

Wardwell Field was Natrona  County's second airport (the first sits down in what is now Evansville).  The field served from 1927 up until the early 1950s when what had been the Army Air Force's training base west of Casper was turned over to the county. That latter facility, with its much larger runways and much flatter surface was obviously superior, so Wardwell was abandoned in favor of what is now the Natrona County International Airport.  During the boom of the 1970s the old runways were developed into streets and the town named in a playful fashion after the developer.

The fact that it was built on what had been runways was never forgotten and the town uses it as its symbol.  The old central hanger remains, but its now this restaurant.

Denver Airport A Train Station

Lex Anteinternet: Airport flaps and the law of unintended consequences. Parking should be free? No, it shouldn't, and it actually isn't.

Airport flaps and the law of unintended consequences. Parking should be free? No, it shouldn't, and it actually isn't.

 

Flying back from Tulsa, Oklahoma.  A trip which entails going from Tulsa to Denver (cheaply) and then from Denver to Casper (expensively).  Parking while you are in Tulsa is hardly going to be a significant element of your costs.

You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.

Maddie Ross in True Grit (written by Charles Portis)

I sometimes get the feeling recently that the Star Tribune is looking for something to do.  It probably needs something to do as its paper declines to the size of a large pamphlet and its reduced to running columns from the national syndicates.

Maybe not, but it's hard to look at the story on airport parking at the Natrona County International Airport as a real story.  Or at least its hard to get all worked up about it.  But I suppose its a legitimate story.

Here's the deal.

The airport is putting in some new parking, but it isn't in yet.  It won't be, maybe, for a long time, as its part of the airport's strategic plan, not a present project.

Big deal, you might say.

Well, it sort of is, maybe, in that there's a Wyoming state law that provides:

For public convenience, commissioners or boards having jurisdiction to regulate parking of vehicles shall provide free parking areas adequate to accommodate at least twenty percent of the number of vehicle parking spaces for which a fee is charged.

That's nice, eh?

Well, it is. And it was a law that was backed by former Natrona County Democratic legislator, Dick Sadler.

So, what's the deal, you may ask?

Well, the free parking is 1.5 miles distant from the terminal.  Quite a ways.  Probably nobody is going to park there.  At least not very many people, and not very often.

The tribune, alerted to this (it seems to have come up in recent airport board meetings), interviewed Natrona County Airport Board president Joe MacGuire on this.  MacGuire, who holds a pilots license (and whose father once kept a really neat A26 Invader out at the airport), is also a Republican state representative from Natrona County.  He tends to be blunt.  So, he told the Tribune that he knew it was a long ways away and admitted that its unlikely to be used.  He even stated , about the law;“It was kind of added in there at the very end and wasn’t even placed in a part of the statute that directly deals with parking,  Honestly, it’s kind of an unfunded mandate"

You know, it is an unfunded mandate.

Now, this is just the sort of thing that's fun for some people to get their back's arched up about.  Dick Sadler, the former legislator who often focused on Democratic populist type things while in the legislature has been working on this, apparently, out at the Airport and stated about the situation; "I passed that law and they hate my guts for it."

M'eh.

I very much doubt that.

But some folks are mad.  One friend of mine with far left political leanings commented "It's always obnoxious when rich people like MacGuire are quoted saying shit like, 'I wish everything at the airport was free.' I'm sure he's not really that much of a tool."

A very nice mural, obviously put up before terrorist attacks made extra security necessary, at the airport.  I have no doubt that most of these folks don't walk to walk 1.5 miles to the terminal. . . but I also have no doubt that saving $20.00 makes much of a difference to their trip.

MacGuire did say that, in the interview, but maybe he just deserves credit for being honest.

Consider the following.   The airport is only within $33,000 of going into the red.  That's really tight.  According to MacGuire the free parking at the airport costs the airport  $165,000. That makes quite a difference.

And now we learn, on top of it, that Allegiant Air is pulling out of Casper, and that will cost the airport $26,000.  With that loss, that $33,000 in the black becomes only $7,000.

That's really tight.

And as the airport manager noted, that's just the direct costs to the airport, not the ancillary loss, and that's likely to occur.  So that $26,000 direct loss is likely to become a bigger loss.  Indeed, it almost certainly will. Quite a few of those Allegiant travelers would have, well, parked at the airport while they were in Los Vegas (which is where Allegiant flew to from here).  That's a loss.  So, we can probably say that bare minimum, at least right now, the airport has probably less than a $5,000 margin, post Allegiant, before it goes into the red.

And while "free parking" is just the sort of "looking out for the average man" type of program that folks like to get behind, in this case, it makes darned little sense in general.

Indeed, the common thesis behind such things is that this protects the interest of the little guy. That would presuppose, in this instance, that the little guy is able to afford a ticket, set by the airlines not the airport, to fly out of Casper.  Most Casperites can in fact afford to fly out of here, but its so expensive that many, including most experienced travelers, actually choose to drive to Denver and catch a plane from there. The most expensive leg of air travel in and out of Casper is the flight to Denver or Salt Lake City.

The B Concourse (United Air Lines) in Denver.

Indeed, generally if you do that (and maybe you have to), you then park your car in a public lot that's so far from the actual Denver terminal that its located just outside of Dallas, Texas.  Or at least it feels that way.  And you catch a bus from there to the airport terminal.

Ground Transportation, Denver International Airport.

All of which makes the "free parking" at the Natrona County International Airport more than a little bit absurd.  You can shave off a little of the costs of prolonged parking, sure, but not much.  And any free parking is always going to be second best and always, therefore, going to entail an added element of risk for whatever you left there.  All this means that the thought was nice, but extremely unrealistic.

 

The view from Salt Lake City's airport.  Like a lot of business travelers, I go to both airports a great deal.

Something that the residents of the County don't appreciate much, I think, is that the airport is a real gem.  We're very lucky to have it. We're so acclimated to it that we don't realize what a major piece of infrastructure it is.  The runways are massive.  Some of the runways, I'd note, are retired from use and aren't maintained, and there's no plans to put them back in use. That's a real shame.

The entire airport is a legacy of the Second World War.  It was the third airport in the county, replacing a second that is now the Town of Bar Nunn.  There's no earthly way that Bar Nunn airport, which wasn't even completely flat, could serve the needs of the county today.  Not even close.  It was likely barely adequate at the time it closed.  The Natrona County International Airport was built as a training airbase for B-24s and B-17s during World War Two, on a much flatter piece of ground, and the runways are numerous and enormous.  Beyond that, probably a majority of the hangers date to the Second World War and are gigantic. The airport complex it self features numerous buildings that date from the original airbase as well.  It's a huge, and great, airport.  Probably the closest thing to it in the state is Cheyenne's municipal airport, once a major stop for transcontinental air mail runs, but it's a shadow of what Casper's airport is.*

The airport receives quite a bit of international traffic, given its great facilities.  If kept up, and they're trying, it'll continue to.  Better yet, if the retired runways could be put back in use it would be fantastic, but there's no money to do that.**

 

British Antarctic Survey airplane at the Natrona County International Airport.  This is a common site at our airport.  Surprisingly, they did not fly here from the UK for the free parking.  Go figure.

Which takes us back to parking.  The airport's master plan is to put in new parking near the terminal, and it will include public parking, so that will solve the problem.

But it won't solve the short funding problem.

And, everything that legislators mandate must be "free", no matter what it is, in the end, isn't.  It's a reverse tax of some sort, or it just becomes a public impossibility.  Free health care, free college, free highways, whatever, aren't really free.  When there are few public "frees" its easy to appreciate that, when there are thousands of such mandates, however, they cease to be.

Which doesn't mean that they aren't worthwhile.  Some are. Some are not.  One like this, in its intent, is perfectly understandable.

But it isn't free.

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*Indeed I'll note here that the location of the Wyoming Air National  Guard's infrastructure at the Cheyenne airport is somewhat unfortunate.  The Natrona County International Airport was built by the United States Army Air Corps and it has everything, including size and an out of town location, that an airbase needs. Cheyenne's airport is surrounded by the town, on the other hand (you can circumnavigate the darned thing by car) and is smaller.  In terms of placement it wouldn't matter whether the Guard's airbase was in Casper or Cheyenne and the only reason I can think of it being in Cheyenne is that its close to F. E. Warren Air Force Base, which is also in Cheyenne. But F. E. Warren houses missile wings and nothing else, and doesn't have a large air strip itself. The aircraft at F. E. Warren are helicopters.

Maybe this is something that Natrona County should ponder, although over the years some super huge hangers have been built for the Air Guard in Cheyenne and it is, no doubt, too darned late now.

**Military traffic. . . is anyone listening?

Maybe Berlin Airlift Rates were achieved.

Light private aircraft parked on unused runway at the Natrona County International Airport.  This part of the tarmac was used just for small private aircraft.  Another was used for private jets.

They came in, and then they left again.

Hundreds of private aircraft, arriving in time to see the August 21 solar eclipse, stacked up waiting to land and landing one right after another all morning long, and then taking off right after that.

The airport has likely never seen anything like this take off and landing rate. . . at least not since World War Two.

"Making Ready" Airfield, Fairfield Ohio, June 9, 1917

"Making Ready" Airfield, Fairfield Ohio, June 9, 1917

Float planes, Anchorage Alaska

Float planes, Anchorage Alaska