Somewhere on PPrune not long ago, someone said something like "call up an ex WW2 pilot today" or somesuch.
I have long reflected on how much the Sherm career, such as it has been, rested on the ex WW2 pilots who started TAA. Frank Ball in particular, who gave me many opportunities, beginning with my final interview to join the airline. But there were many others in his footsteps. And at John Hickey's funeral the other day I finally did take the step of going up to Eddy Clark, the founding Flight Captain of TAA's DC-9 fleet, and telling him what a difference the DC-9 training given me by TAA in 1974 (and thereafter) had made to my life. The rigorous training in cockpit management and applied airmanship I received in that world, and again in my DC-9 command training years later....have been with me ever since, in many other skies and worlds and airlines.
The lessons he and his peers taught then were, like the '9 itself, world standard. Clark, Winch, Maloney later followed by the likes of Lushey, Knappstein and Guggenheimer, were simply a different breed. Look hard today and you might find pale shadows of them, but their like has largely gone from the skies now and we are the sadder for it.
Nevertheless, many of these guys are still around and I urge older readers to do something tomorrow to pay some homage in some way to those who built what we now enjoy. And to younger folk who think history can teach nothing......study history a bit til you realize the truth.