PUSHING BACK THE CLOAK OF NIGHT

            Long considered one of the “seven wonders of the world,” and second only to the great pyramid of Giza in size and grandeur, the Pharos light marking the entrance to the port of Alexandria, Egypt could be seen by ships nearly 100 miles at sea. It was built around 280 BC from stone and masonry rising to a height of nearly 600 feet. One can only marvel that its light source – reflected by a bronze mirror – was a fire which burned 24 hours a day and which was fed by fuel raised by workers and possibly a dumbwaiter from sea level below. And despite great storms and numerous earthquakes, its light shone for 1500 years!

            In fact, for 10,000 years of human life on earth, fire of one size or another was the only source of light to penetrate the long hours of darkness. Among my treasured artifacts is a tiny olive oil lamp whose meager glow is a sweet-smelling reminder of those modest light sources described throughout the New Testament, whose wicks needed frequent trimming and whose reservoirs should be kept filled and ready.

            The first of my ancestors to come to the New World pioneered Nantucket Island in the early 1600s where he and his sons became prosperous building and outfitting the whaling ships which plied the northern seas to harvest spermaceti and whale oil which became the favored fuel for the young nation’s hundreds of lighthouses and many homes, and which, despite its high price reached a peak of 17 million gallons by 1845. Whale oil was largely replaced as a lamp fuel by a mixture of alcohol and turpentine known as camphene, of which 90 million gallons hit the market by the Civil War year of 1862 and which was half the price of whale oil.

            All of this began to change when, in 1846, a Canadian named Alexander Gesner discovered a method for extracting oil from certain kinds of coal which he named kerosene, often referred to at the time as coal oil, or paraffin in England. With the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania, from which it was quickly learned that kerosene could be distilled far more easily,  the age of kerosene-fueled lighting and heating seemed here to stay; and in a way it has, since the world’s jet engines today use that very fuel. At the worldwide rate of 5 million barrels per day!

            By 1875 coal oil street lamps began to appear in towns across the country and with them a unique but familiar public employee immortalized in song. (I recently pulled from my extensive collection of old LP albums “The Old Lamplighter” recorded in 1946 by Sammy Kaye with Billy Williams doing the vocal, and listening to it carried me back to a soda fountain called The Spot where high school kids gathered each noon to sip a Nehi and drop a nickel or two in the juke box.)

            Then on September 4^th, 1882 a miracle took place on Pearl Street in Manhattan when the Edison Illuminating Company went on line generating public power sufficient to light 400 lamps in the nearby homes of 85 customers, and by the next year, Roselle, New Jersey would become the first town to be lighted by electricity. In nearby Coytesville, the 150-year old three-story home and former stage coach Inn where I was born would become the first residence to be completely electrified when old wall and ceiling-mounted “gas lights” would receive Edison bulbs and a second life. In many parts of rural America, oil lamps would supply residential lighting until 1955. Some of my fondest boyhood memories involve vacation time spent in an old Victorian home in rural Connecticut where fresh cold water was hand pumped, the outhouse was an apple orchard away, and my job each night was to make sure the lamps were filled with kerosene in each bedroom well ahead of time. For me, it was sheer magic.

            In a modern world in which technological progress offers something new and wonderful on a near-daily basis, it is easy to forget that it has been only 132 years since the moment 10,000 years of relative darkness came to an end thanks to Mr. Edison’s Pearl Street “miracle.” In my own home today I confess to taking occasional nostalgic delight in turning off the switches and watching the gentle glow of my collection of kerosene-powered Aladdin lamps push back the cloak of night.

 With its round wick and illuminating mantle, the author’s favorite Aladdin lamp represents the ultimate in kerosene-fueled home lighting efficiency. They are still to be found in virtually every Amish home and barn.

FLIGHT 232- SEARCHING FOR A NEEDLE IN A CORN PATCH

            When United Airlines flight 232 slammed into the ground at the Sioux Falls, Iowa airport and exploded into a huge ball of flame on July 19, 1989, it became one of the most widely witnessed aviation disasters in history. The amateur video footage which captured and froze in time that terrible one minute of violence quickly blossomed on home television screens across the country and around the world; and it would be viewed repeatedly for months and even years to come. What the general public might at first have thought was just an emergency landing gone wrong was in fact the inevitable consequence of a cascade of events which had begun 35 minutes earlier and 60 miles to the east when the tail-mounted and central of the jumbo jet’s three engines exploded at 37,000 feet. In the process, all three of the plane’s supposedly redundant hydraulic lines were severed leaving the cockpit crew with no means of controlling the giant jet other than by adjusting power alternately to the two remaining wing-mounted engines. Without flaps and spoilers, the only option was to literally “fly” the plane onto the ground at 250 miles per hour, and pilot Al Haynes and his “front office” crew did a masterful job of pulling off what they did.

            That 184 of the plane’s 296 passengers survived the fiery impact was a miracle which still cannot be fully explained today.  That investigators were able to put together a jig-saw puzzle of bits and pieces spread across hundreds of square miles of space and months of time in order to solve a handful of aviation mysteries is the story behind the story; and the motivation for today’s column.

            The turbofan jet engine gets its name from the large (7^1/2 foot diameter) multi-blade fan which sits at the very front of a modern jet engine pulling in huge amounts of air to both feed and supplement the thrust of the fuel-driven jet behind it. It was this fan on the General Electric CF-6-6 engine mounted in the DC-10’s tail section which exploded on that July day high above Buena Vista County, Iowa, doing damage to surrounding components – including the illogically-routed hydraulic lines – before the 400-pound component departed for the earth far below, subject to the laws of gravity, wind, trajectory and sheer chance.

            In summer months, more than 12 million acres of Iowa countryside are clad in a rolling, green and nearly unbroken canopy of corn. To make searching conditions even worse, those tall rows of flowering stalks were engulfed in a nearly physical cloud of pollen dust during the weeks when thousands of citizen volunteers and law enforcement professionals were tasked with walking a grid pattern through miles of those breath-constricting rows in search of any piece of wreckage which might lead to the elusive fan hub in which the ultimate answers were believed to lie. Even a generous reward system failed to produce results as the trail grew cooler, while the use of low-flying helicopters only succeeded in angering farmers who watched their corn fields being blown into patches of mulch.

            While the airframe of the DC-10 with tail number N1819U had seen numerous engine changes in its nearly 20-year operating life, the particular GE engine in question had seen more than 15,000 cycles (landing/takeoffs) at a time when titanium-rich fan design represented a relatively-new technology. An entire industry awaited answers as one season morphed into another.

            On the afternoon of October 10^th -- 83 days after UAL 232 and its pieces came to earth -- 58-year-old Janice Sorenson was driving her harvester down the corn rows near her home just north of Alta, Iowa when the machine ran up against something that shouldn’t have been there: the largest part of a disk partially buried in the rich Iowa soil. Two days later, a neighboring farmer, Harold Halverson found the rest of the 350-pound fan wheel less than two miles away, and the NTSB and a panel of waiting analysts finally had their “smoking gun.” And a surprised Janice Sorenson would receive a check for $116,000!

            The almost-microscopic flaw which had bloomed into a crack in the fan wheel’s titanium hub would lead to a whole new set of testing methods and standards, the DC-10’s hydraulic system would see major routing changes, and United and other air lines would alter the frequency and depth of engine testing and replacement protocols.

POST SCRIPT:   As a result of examining the life changes of Flight 232 survivors and their rescuers over the years following the incident, we learn that PTSD with all of its ramifications exists beyond the battlefield and is just as real.

CHARLES LINDBERGH’S SECRET WAR

            When Charles Augustus Lindbergh gazed down in the gathering dark on the huge crowd covering Paris’s Le Bourget aerodrome, he wondered if there was even room for him to land the Spirit of St. Louis amid that sea of upturned faces. From that history-making May 1927 evening onward, the young American aviator, nicknamed The Lone Eagle and beloved by an adoring public wherever he went, would never be entirely comfortable in the role of the world’s most famous person. His indifference to public popularity and open dislike for members of the media became even more pronounced after his marriage to a daughter of millionaire business tycoon Dwight Morrow, and especially after the kidnapping of his first son and the media circus it spawned. Lindbergh detested the playboy image others had constructed around his every coming and going. And come and go he did, traveling the world promoting aviation and the industries growing up around it. (As a young lad living in New Jersey within a short distance of the Dwight Morrow estate, the author knew the excitement of waving a “Hello Lindy” greeting as the Stutz  driven by the hero of every young American would drive by.)

            Lindbergh was not appreciated by everyone, and among the latter were the President – Franklin Delano Roosevelt – and the entire White House staff. The “Lone Eagle” made no secret of his dislike for what he saw as a little-disguised drift toward socialism in the administration and he spoke loudly and frequently on the subject. Matters became much worse when Lindbergh became associated with the America First Committee in his outspoken opposition to any direct involvement in the unfolding European War, (a position which in 1940 was shared by a large segment of American society.) Because he was a frequent guest of such German WW I aviators as Ernst Udet and Hermann Gӧring it was easy for his detractors to label him as “pro-German”. In fact so discredited did he feel at the time that he voluntarily resigned his Colonelcy in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

            After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh wanted desperately to serve his country, but found himself “black-balled” by the Administration at every turn, until Henry Ford, who was not cowed by any politician, asked him to find out why the B-24 Liberator bombers coming off his Willow Run assembly plant were so easily falling prey in battle. Hired as a consultant, “Lindy” ended up relocating gun positions in the plane, completely reshaping Ford’s production line, and saving the great warplane from an early demise thus changing the air war in Europe. Next he was asked by United Aviation (Chance-Vought) to find out why the Corsair fighter plane – mainstay of the navy and marine air war in the pacific – was not performing as expected in combat. This finally led him to the front lines as he quickly learned the art of flying in combat, actually developing dive-bombing techniques which saved American lives while drastically advancing the campaign to isolate the Japanese garrison at Rabaul in New Britain.

            With the political walls now broached, he was next asked by Lockheed Aircraft to find out why Army Air Corps pilots seemed unable to come to grips with the challenge of mastering the highly-touted but difficult to fly twin-engine twin-boomed P-38 Lightning high-altitude fighter in MacArthur’s Western Pacific campaign. Here Lindbergh hit his pace, flying daily combat missions with the 475^th Fighter Group whose young pilots at first wondered just how this 45-year-old 1st world war veteran could even keep up with them.

            In the end the civilian Lindbergh not only taught them how to fly the P-38, but soon found himself acting as a squadron commander on many missions (kept secret from the politicians in Washington,) while winning the respect of MacArthur and his front line air commanders for his leadership skills. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the war effort came from his discovery of how to extend the P-38’s range by at least 400 miles by managing manifold pressure and fuel flow in a technique he was then asked to teach to other groups and which made possible fighter protection all the way to Tokyo for U.S. bombers.  It is believed that this one change in tactics did more to save American lives and speed an end to the war in the Pacific than any other single engineering innovation.

The Allison V-1710 turbo-charged engine which powered the P-38 Lightning was the only indigenous U.S.-made V-12 engine of WWII.  70,000 were built.                                                                                                                      Al Cooper Photo

            The most carefully protected “secret” of Charles Lindbergh’s  secret war took place on July 28^th, 1944, when his determined efforts to avoid personal air combat came to an end when he was engaged by Captain Saburo Shimada, one of Japan’s most famous fighter aces. Not only did he end his Pacific campaign by flying more than 50 combat missions, but he capped it off by shooting down a Japanese Zero flown by one of the enemy’s most celebrated airmen.

            I only wish I could call back those carefree days of the 1930s so that I could once again shout “Hi Lindy” to that “lone eagle” passing through our town.