Monday, February 27, 2012

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Stewardesses in Jet Engines

pretty blonde stewardess in jet engine
Last month, a jet airliner was forced to emergency land in Lake Michigan because a bird was caught in one of the plane's engines. Every year hundreds of birds collide with planes. But it used to be worse. Much worse.



During the early days of the aviation industry, stewardesses were often caught in the jet engines of commercial flights. In 1972, birds and stewardesses accounted for 77% of all animal-airplane collisions.



Referred to as a SASH (Stewardess Airplane Strike Hazard), these incidents were often worse than hitting a duck. A 98-pound stewardess striking an aircraft going 150 MPH at lift-off generates the same devastating force as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie dropped from a height of 10 feet.

perky and pretty blonde stewardess
The first published acccount of a stewardess trapped in a jet engine occured in 1947 when Korean Air Flight 11 took off during a snow storm.

sexy stewardess in trouble
It was often said that, "Stews of a feather, flock together." Young, attractive stewardesses discovered that if they traveled in large groups their matching outfits would distract and disorient predatory pilots.

sexy stewardess uniforms, sexy stewardesses
The largest number of stewardess strikes occured during the warmest months when stewardesses were most active and could often be found sunbathing on runways and airport tarmacs.


Not always fatal, these SASHs were so common that many airports maintained movable stairs to assist in removing the stewardess from the engine.


As jet engines got bigger, so did the problem.

 Pan Am stewardess finds the orifice too tight
Where previously stewardesses were trapped one at a time, the Boeing 747 would often scoop up more than one crew member.

two sexy stewardesses are better than one

And occasionally entire flight crews collided with engines. Sadly, there was no coffee, tea or me during this SAS flight.

coffee, tea or me, stewardess triplets

A memorable incident involving Suzie and Mary Jane Stanton, twin sisters from East Hunterdon, Georgia, caught the attention of the entire nation.

twin stewardesses

Often these incidents ended in the death of the stewardess. The surprising quickness and brutality of the collisions often left the victims eerily "frozen" in time -- like the residents of Pompeii. In 1961, after an emergency landing outside of Phoenix, the crew discovered this horrific scene.

kissing stewardess

Two pretty, young sisters kissing their dad good-bye as TWA Flight 341A took off on Runway 49 bound for Miami.

pretty brunette stewardess

This also explains the smiling faces on the stewardesses in many of the old photographs. Forgotten by most of us, prior to deregulation and 9-11, flight crews were encouraged to smile, act pleasant and treat their customers with courtesy and respect.

smiling stewardess

These photographs are gruesome evidence of a simpler, perhaps happier, time.

all I want for christmas is a stewardess

The following is the only existing photograph of a stewardess not smiling.

a non-smiling stewardess

During the summer of 1962, two unrelated events convinced the world to finally address the escalating problem of stewardesses in jet engines.

Stewardesses with lots of legs
A Finnish Air flight to Stockholm took off from a Helsinki Airport and inadvertantly scooped up two stewardesses and a pilot! This was the first recorded pilot-airplane collision fatality in over 25 years. While the loss of dozens of stewardesses a year was an accepted, although sad and unwelcome, hazard of the trade, pilots were considered a valuable asset by the airline industry at the time.


Closer to home, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, the First Lady, was involved in a non-fatal collision when she was dressed a little too much like an Eastern Airlines stewardess.


jackie kennedy lookalike
A shaken President Kennedy directed the FAA (Federal Aviation Agency) to solve the stewardess problem.

swedish stewardess in miniskirt

Given the Jackie Incident, the FAA initially targeted airline dress code. Mini skirts were out. Hot pants were in.

stewardess in hot pants or is it hotpants
Sadly, hot pants were not the solution.

sexy hypnotized stewardess
Jet design was evaluated. An alert FAA investigator noticed that some joker had painted a swirly-whirly design on most of the engines. A design that could easily hypnotize an unsuspecting stewardess.

smiling, hypnotized stewardesses need love too

The FAA made the painting of psychedelic art and other hippy stuff onto airplanes illegal and Europe soon followed with their own guidelines.

stewardess with a nice hat and an outrageous butt

Unfortunately, those swirly-whirly things were not the problem and hot pants fell out of favor.

The FAA was stumped -- until somebody remembered that Delta Airlines facility engineer Glenn Hughie invented the jet bridge back in 1959.

save a stewardess, use a jet bridge

Jet bridges saved lives, stewardesses became flight attendants, and an early, forgotten chapter in the history of aviation was complete.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Yellow Fever... Catch It

jeremy lin racist fortune cookie image MSG Madison Square Garden NetworkI'm watching the Knick game last night on the Madison Square Garden Network (MSG) and while Walt "Clyde" Frazier was summarizing the dishin' and swishin' this image replaced the game highlights.

Wow. Is Isiah Thomas the only guy at Madison Square Garden that knows how to use photoshop?

When the camera cuts to an adorably cute Asian woman holding a sign that says "Jeremy, Me Love You Lin Time" I shake my head -- but I figure that Asians are allowed to make fun of Asian stereotypes, it's akin to African-Americans using the n-word or Jews doing the whole Jewish humor thing.

But MSG mashing up a goofy photo of their new Asian star and a fortune cookie? That's pretty damn insensitive. Remember, Confucius say, "Point of Chinese point guard not to guard point but to point to Jesus."

Christian Jeremy Lin points to Jesus

Was MSG just having a bad day? Then I remembered the graphic they used after the last Miami Heat game.

Jeremy Lin racist fortune cookie image MSG and an equally racist LeBron James image
Note:
If you gave me basketball, a watermelon, Lebron James looking goofy and the freedom to be as racist as MSG, and told me to come up with a funny gag line, I would say, "Are you kidding me? That's too easy."
But I came up with nothing. And my goto racist guys came up with nothing too.
Somebody out there can do better, right?


Monday, February 13, 2012

All Hands on Deck!

all hands on deckLast week an All Hands On Deck Meeting popped up on my calendar. We have a new boss. I've never met him. I never will. He works 30 miles away.

I'm an office drone. I live and work in a hive of cubicles. We have no deck. We have staff meetings. So when the new boss scheduled an All Hands on Deck Meeting for last week, I metaphorically circled it on my Outlook calendar.

The morning of the All Hands on Deck Meeting it was postponed for three weeks. Our first ever All Hands on Deck Meeting will now take place in March.

I am not a sailor but when the captain tells the bosun to pipe "All Hands on Deck" I think it confers a sense of urgency to the proceedings. Something like, there's a pirate ship on the horizon, lets put up more sail and get the heck out of here or, we've got a German U-boat on the scope so we're going to need your best effort or, there's topless Playboy bunnies off the port bow, who has my binoculars?

Can an All Hands on Deck Meeting be postponed for three weeks and still be called an All Hands on Deck Meeting?

I've sent an e-mail suggesting that it be renamed a Staff Meeting. I may get to meet the new boss.

DISCLAIMER:
i love my bossFor the record, that's a picture of my coffee mug, and I do love my boss (wink). So, while it is true that I hate my job with a passion worthy of Mel Gibson, and it is true that my job is mind-numbingly boring, unfathomly useless and demeaning in ways that only a piss bucket boy from the 1700's would understand, it does pay the bills and I love my boss (wink).

My boss and everyone else in charge work very hard -- to make the rest of us feel small and insignificant, and miserable. But as my dad used to say, "Work is work. If it didn't suck worse than Karl Rove with a mouth full of broken glass, it wouldn't be work."

You saw the wink, right?