My fault. Mostly just getting caught up with the daily life of an adjunct professor and occasionally doing some teaching. We’re into the 1960s next week, which means about three weeks of the semester remains and then into the long-ish summer break. I do have a little prep work for the Fall Semester, in which I assume I’m still teaching.
In the meantime. I want to pause and remember that we have just passed the 20th Anniversary of the crash of ATL-98 Carvair N83FA in Griffin, Georgia on April 4th. On that day I actually did sit back for a moment and took a moment for prayer and reflection. I never for a moment imagined that a blog article which was born from reading a John Le Carre novel and thinking “huh?” would generate so much interest. Looking at the WordPress statistics for the blog, it always seems to get a couple of hits most weeks. I was touched and honored to have received comments from Kris Whittington, son of pilot Larry Whittington who was killed in the crash of N83FA, and recently Vanessa Presley, who as a child in Griffin saw and heard the crash and who suffers from the after effects to this day. My deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to expand a little piece of aviation history here.
HM Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip board an ANA C-54 (VH-INY) at Western Junction, Tasmania. Feb 20, 1954. This C-54 would seven years later be converted into a Carvair which, with the registration N83FA, would crash on take-off at Griffin, Georgia in April 1997
http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/item/?id=AB713-1-2859
My research project, the history of B-24J-1-FO 42-50535 “Joplin Jalopy” got a boost this month. For some reason an article appeared in the Joplin Globe a couple of weeks ago (which I have managed not to read) but which, I am told, listed the correct number of operations the Jalopy flew. This would then indicate that someone read some of the research material I forked over to the globe in 2006. Shortly afterwards I received an email from Ray Foreman from KODE12 TV in Joplin (Hi Ray!) who had seen my January 2016 post commemorating the anniversary of the start of the now defunct “Joplin’s Bomber” blog. Apart from being a military aviation history enthusiast Ray has some connection with the Joplin Civil Air Patrol so I hope to have a chat with him, and them in the near future. This has been a timely prod not to let all that information go to waste.
B24J-1-FO 42-50535 “Joplin Jalopy” – 506BS / 44BG
I was relating all of this to one of my colleagues at Pittsburg State who then said “you ought to write this up for a journal article” (in one of the local academic journals) , so given a long enough period of rest I may actually do that.
In the meantime I will continue to be fascinated by little snippets that float into my field of vision from the world of aviation.
Rambles in the Air 