September 11: Remembering Nine/Eleven

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I climbed into my favorite Piper Cub -- built in 1946 but kitted out as a WW2 artillery spotter with extra-large windows -- and few northwest on a GPS line toward the little airport where I planned to top off the gas tank for my annual flight around the White Mountains. It was one of those golden days that reward us for having the fortitude to live in New Hampshire.

I was considering a touch-and-go at Wolfeboro, where I'd graduated from high school in 1950, when the little radio in my breast pocket chirped to life: a pilot across the state line in Maine was ready for takeoff. Somebody told him to abort. "I'm already off the ground," he said. "Well, turn back," said the other voice. "There's a national emergency and the airspace is closed."

There being no fuel pump at Wolfeboro, I decided to keep quiet and fly on to Moultonboro. (The Piper Cub was designed before electrics were standard, so my portable radio and plump green earphones were entirely optional.) I landed, gassed up, and secured the Cub to a fence, whereupon a golf cart drove up and I learned that "a 707" had crashed into a skyscraper in New York City, and American airspace was indeed closed until further notice.

Well, the Cub and I did in time get home, and on every 9/11 thereafter until I grounded myself at 80, I flew around the mountains, surfing over the height-of-land on the Kancamagus Highway while raising my middle finger to Osama bin Laden. To the best of my recollection, every one of those days was golden too, as indeed seems to be the case today.

Read my earlier musings

The Marshall Plan saved Europe

It all began with Greece. At Yalta, in the now wartorn Crimean Peninsula, President Roosevelt and (reluctantly) Prime Minister Churchill promised Comrade Stalin a free rein in Eastern Europe, condemning millions of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Bulgarians to two generations of Soviet slavery. Southern Europe, however, was still up for grabs when the war ended, and it was the British Army keeping a Communists insurgency from taking over. Britain however was broke. Luckily for the Greeks, and for Western Europe, Harry Truman was a very different man than Roosevelt. In 1947 he promulgated a Truman Doctrine that put southern Europe in the American sphere of interest, to be followed by a Marshall Plan to finance European recovery. Read about it in the Warbird's Book Club.

Ed Overend recalls his year with the AVG

When he came back to the US in the summer of 1942, it seems that Ed Overend worked for a while at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach or Santa Monica CA as a test pilot. While there, the company magazine interviewed him about his year with the AVG. Read it here.

And the useful idiots still celebrate Chinese communism

For more than thirty years now, I've had a Google search looking for references to the Flying Tigers, and hardly a month goes by that it doesn't pop up a mention of how the American Volunteer Group and their descendants love the China and the CCP. It's all bullfeathers, of course. For more, see the Annals of the Flying Tigers.

See my review in the Warbird's Book Club.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: