Crane's Corner: 4-27-21 Recipe For Disaster

Crane's Corner

The Internet can take you to some interesting places. Some places you search for and some you find by accident. Places can connect you to your past, take you on a tour of the future or, in this case, spoil a treasured memory.

Since I was a little boy, I have always been fascinated by commercial aviation. It came from Dad. I think this was a result of his travelling the world for business and sharing some of his experiences with me. There was also the location of our home. It was twelve miles from JFK International airport in New York.

Unless the weather was bad, most nights Dad and I would watch the planes making their final approach, to the giant airport, right over our back yard. The planes were high enough, that the noise did not rattle the dishes in Mom’s china closet, but low enough that I could see their tail insignia. There was always a game trying to determine what kind of plane and which airline was the operator. Some were easy. Americans were all silver. Pan Am had the big globe on the tail. TWA was spelled out in large letters. There were some tricky ones. The prop jets flown by Mohawk and Allegheny and the foreign carriers including BOAC, Qantas, Lufthansa and Air France were more challenging.

I did get to know them all and almost always guessed right. I also knew the difference between the 707, DC9, and the long DCA. Later I learned to distinguish the bigger babies 747 and the DC10.

I had flown prop jets on National Airlines, Electra 224, when I flew to Orlando (pre-Disney) to spend a week with my Aunt Patsy. She was a great lady. Bless her soul. My first jet ride was a long and wonderful trip. More than 50 years later I can remember the thrill of boarding Pan Am’s Clipper, Glory of the Skies. Yes, I still remember the name. I was a long night flight to Germany, where I was met by another Aunt and Uncle. They were stationed there with the Air Force. We spent a wonderful trek through Europe for two weeks.

I had not thought about that trip for years. These days it is hard to love Commercial Aviation unless you travel in first class. Even that is not quite the same, but what is?

In the middle of January, I started thinking about the chili that I always cook up for the Super Bowl. I have the recipe pretty much in my head. The recipe is one that my Dad passed to me. He had read it and clipped it from an Eastern Airlines magazine. Dad has passed on and whatever he did with the recipe, it was not in the will. We had yet to find it in all the treasures and recipes that he left behind. I thought maybe we could locate it on the internet.

I searched on Google ‘Eastern Airlines inflight magazine’. That was unsuccessful so I tried, ‘Easter Airline Magazine Recipes’, ‘Eastern Airlines Chili’, and ‘Inflight Chili’. In one of the searches, I came across Pan Am Memorabilia. A few clicks later I found an entry about the Boeing 707-320 delivered to Pan AM on June 30, 1967, two years before it delivered me across the Atlantic. There were pictures and two great stories. One story was quite interesting and the other I never knew.

The first story told about how, the year before I boarded that 707, it had already become famous. In the climactic scene of the 1968 movie Bullitt. Steve McQueen, or his stuntman, was running all over the tarmac at San Francisco International.

He was trying to catch a bad guy who was already on board the Pan Am jet, and the jet was rolling toward takeoff.

In February of 1977, that same jetliner, Pan Am’s Glory of the Skies, was sold to the Colombian National Airline, Avianca. It was flown with Avianca for a dozen years before meeting a terrible end.

Avianca Flight 52 was making a second landing attempt, on a snowy night, when it crashed into a hill in Cove Neck, New York. This happened twenty miles from JFK and ten miles from my home, at the time, in Huntington New York. It was a bizarre crash,&