October 24, 2017 Gorilla Flying

The Liberty Gazette

October, 24, 2017

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Do you remember the movies and television series, Planet of the Apes? In some scenes, the apes wore space suits. I suppose this was so they could visit other planets, with or without other apes. Their spacecraft was undoubtedly more advanced than those of the golden years of aviation, the first half of the twentieth century. On board their spaceship were complex systems run by sophisticated computers. In their time, they didn’t need a flight engineer. But only a couple of decades before those apes went shooting through the galaxy, on real airplanes with complex systems, flight engineers were an essential part of the flight crew.

The flight engineer was like a mechanic, specially trained to monitor and operate the airplane’s systems. These engineers were essential for safety, operating electrical, pneumatic, fuel, and hydraulic systems. Of course, today, that position has been automated out of most cockpits. In modern jets, pilots monitor computers, which manage all the aircraft systems. But there was that one time, that one close call, when the world wondered if the apes, or gorillas, had taken a step back in time, perhaps jealous of those who had the opportunity to serve as flight engineers.

It happened on an airline flight, from somewhere over there to somewhere over here–the place doesn’t matter, really. Some airline companies had installed video cameras inside the cockpits so passengers could watch as the pilots took off and landed the plane. The trouble was no one could see all the important work the flight engineer did, only an occasional appearance of his hand moving controls. Pilots got all the glory. Perhaps that’s what drove the flight engineer on one flight to purchase part of a gorilla costume. Only part–just the left arm. The camera turned on as the plane came in to land and those passengers watching the closed-circuit TV saw a gorilla arm reach in to view and flip switches.

The flight engineer was suspended for his joke and the camera feed from the cockpit was terminated.

Mike: I flew once with an airline captain whose hair was eighteen inches long. He braided it and hid it down the back of his uniform, camouflaging his inner rebel during his day job. But word got out and after completing a flight, as he exited the airplane, the airline’s chief pilot greeted him in the jet way with a smile on his face and a pair of scissors in his hand. The captain kept the braid and had it sewn into a baseball cap. He kept the hair-braid-cap in his flight bag, and when the cockpit door closed, he put on the cap and flipped the braid out, maintaining his individuality, if even in a limited way.

The world is full of characters, and pilots are known to possess personalities prone to practical jokes. Our humor won’t be at the expense of the safety of flight, but it will be amusing.

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