COME FLY WITH ME.

[Stanley]

COME FLY WITH ME.

19 August 2001

I should think that there are many people in Barlick who have had the same experience as me as regards flying. I was familiar with flight from a very early age. A man called Adolph Hitler used to send Dorniers and Focke-Wulfs over every night with specific instructions to ‘get Stanley’. As I huddled in the Anderson Shelter in the back garden at 38 Norris Avenue, Heaton Norris in Stockport listening to the bombs whistling down as they tried to get the large railway viaduct half a mile down the road, it never once occurred to me that I would ever fly. How times have changed! In the last three years I have flown round the world twice and when I was asked the other day what I thought about my second daughter migrating to Australia at the end of October I said, “Well, it’s only twenty four hours away.” I think that about sums it up, it’s not how many miles, it’s how many hours it takes you to get there.
This was really brought home to me about twenty years ago. I had flown back from New York, picked my car up at Heathrow and driven back to Barlick. As I was coming along Upper Lane I saw a friend of mine Joyce Lawson walking along the road and stopped to give her a lift. It turned out that she had been to London on a coach trip and had left for home about the same time as I boarded the plane in New York. It was as easy to fly the Atlantic as it was to go to London on the coach!
I wonder what percentage of people in Barlick have flown abroad for a foreign holiday, more than we would guess I should think. I’ve been talking over the last few weeks about transport opening up peoples lives and air travel has certainly done that. How many of those people thirty years ago would have imagined that foreign travel would become so easy? I think it’s wonderful that we have this opportunity nowadays, alright, there’s the matter of the cost but as I’ve always said if God didn’t intend us to fly he wouldn’t have given us credit cards. I’m sorry to say that in this matter I’ve never let shortage of money get in my way. I was talking about this to a friend the other day and told him about a lady I once met who used to be a stewardess on the first Pan-Am flying boat service across the Atlantic and he said I should write this down. So, for those of you who are interested in flying here are a few interesting facts about the early days straight from the horse’s mouth.
Opal Hess was an elderly lady when I met her in New York in 1980. She was retired but had been a stewardess on Pan-Am for over 35 years. She trained as a nurse and shortly after she qualified saw an advertisement for ‘hostesses’ on a new service Pan-Am were going to operate. This was the first regular passenger service over the Atlantic and it was seen as such a serious matter that only qualified nurses need apply. She got the job and found herself one of a crew of eight (I’m writing this from memory of a conversation almost twenty five years ago so forgive me if I get any of the details wrong.), two pilots, an engineer, a navigator and four hostesses. They looked after twenty-two passengers and the flight took 26 hours so everyone got a bed! The planes were Boeing Flying Clipper sea planes, this was 1939 and the thinking was that if they ran out of petrol they could land on the water and wait for someone to bring fuel out to them. The flight was made in short hops, first to the Azores, then Lisbon and finally on to Marseilles. Opal said it was a wonderful job even though they had to cook all the food for the passengers and crew.
When the war started the transatlantic flights stopped and she went on internal flights. She told me that the greatest advance in those years was the advent of the Douglas DC6. She said it was the first aeroplane built that was level in flight so you didn’t have to push the food trolley uphill towards the front! No small advantage this because the uniform included pencil skirts which hobbled their legs.
She worked on the Boeing Stratocruisers which were called Skysleepers because the passengers had beds. In 1953 she moved into the jet age on the transatlantic service with the introduction of the Boeing 707, Pan-Am’s first pure jet airliner. Opal told me two things about this plane I didn’t know, she said that on the first 707s they had to cook all the food and had particular trouble with the baked beans because they used to explode. She also said that the first 707s had a fault that was never talked about and took a while to solve, every now and again as the plane was flying normally it would suddenly go into a dive and fall about 20,000 feet. The crew were fairly accustomed to this but the passengers needed some reassuring! She said that on one occasion when this happened a passenger panicked and in trying to open the door, deployed the inflatable slide/life raft. This caused more panic than the dive and she had to borrow a pocket knife off one of the passengers and punch holes in it to let it down so that it could be stowed away.
Pan-Am flew the first 747 Jumbo service into Heathrow on 21st of January 1970 and Opal said this was the best plane she ever worked on. She told me that it had a hump for the cockpit because Boeing weren’t sure it could succeed as a passenger plane because of its size, they placed the cockpit high up so that if necessary they could re-design it with a nose that opened so it could be used for freight.
I remember the first time I ever saw a 747. It was at Prestwick airport early in 1970 and British Airways had one there fully loaded up to transatlantic weight, that’s almost 400 tons. They were training pilots in take-off and landing and as I drove along the road in Richard Drinkall’s cattle wagon I saw this thing taxiing up to the end of the runway near the road. I stopped to watch it take off and a police car pulled in immediately and told me I couldn’t park there. I told him that this plane weighed 400 tons and obviously couldn’t fly so could we just watch it please? The bobby was as interested as I was and we watched this enormous plane waddle to the end of the runway and sit there. I can still see the tyres squidging over on the rims as it turned on to the runway. We were right behind it so when the engines opened up it didn’t seem to move, it just got smaller and suddenly it seemed to shoot straight into the air. We agreed it was a bloody miracle and went on our way. Little did I know that within eight years I’d be in one making my first flight! After that I was hooked.
Here’s a question for you, which is the only commercial airline in the world that has never lost a passenger in an accident? Opal told me this and I have checked it out since, she was quite right. It’s the Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service. Never heard of it? Oh yes you have, it’s QUANTAS the Australian airline, they will never use this fact in advertising because they’d see it as tempting fate but the statement is true, they have never lost a passenger.
I’m glad I’ve got some of Opal’s stories down in writing, she is dead now and if nobody else has done it they would be lost to us. This bears out what I say to you about family history, it’s all valuable and you should preserve as much of it as possible.
So have a sit and think about transport and Barlick. Could Ernie and Billy Brooks ever have believed in their youth that people would be flying to Australia for their annual holidays? You might as well have said the Moon! But here we are at the beginning of a new century with all these possibilities before us. What will our children and grandchildren see? All we can be sure of is that travel to far flung places will become easier and at the same time travel near home will become harder! I haven’t quite worked that one out yet. When I do, be sure I’ll write an article about it for you.

SCG/19 August 2001