Plane Sense
Something A Little Different
This Month: Aviation Movies —
The Good, Bad And
Just Plain Ugly
I’ve been writing this column for just over two years. Sometimes it’s extremely easy to write, sometimes you’re brain dead and you just can’t come up with an article that would be appealing to the readers.
Unless something happens in the near future I only have a few years ’til mandatory retirement. My original plans for then are still on the back burner. At least for now. This column I will be included in part of these future plans.
My wife, Candy, hates going to aviation movies with me. I nitpick them to death. “We don’t say that.” “Pilot’s can’t do that.” “That’s ridiculous!” You get the picture. So in keeping with that tradition I will institute an award this issue for the movie that portrays aviation and air traffic control in their worst light. I call this award the “BARTCC SAVAGE AWARD.” (For those of you who didn’t see my earlier columns BARTCC, pronounced bar-tack, stands for the Berlin Air Route Traffic Control Center, where I worked in the late 1970s.) In actuality, the BARTCC Savage Award is (was, I don’t know if it still exists) a real trophy given to the losers of softball/flag football/volleyball games played between the BARTCC controllers in West Berlin and the pilots of Pan American Airlines who flew the corridors to and from West Berlin during the Cold War. It was truly a butt-ugly piece of work. It looked like a flat black painted tiki-doll with the facial futures painted day-glo red, green, yellow, etc. You get the picture. I figure that this semi-fictitious award can be given to the most poorly depicted aviation film that I’m aware of. Please understand that these are my thoughts and opinions, not those of Harold, the owners of Pop’Comm, Roger Ebert, or anyone else and that my thoughts are only for flying and air traffic control, not the acting or cinematography.
From Lakeland’s Sun-n-Fun, here’s a look at a
Bell Aircobra
from World War II, and built specifically for the Soviets.