Fate Really Is the Hunter

In Barry Schiff’s “Fate Really Is the Hunter” (July 2025 AOPA Pilot), he spoke of his Kodak camera and N number. My Kodak camera and N number story is somewhat eerie.

My best friend’s dad was a B–17 pilot who survived 50 missions and later flew Pan Am DC–4s and 707s. As our aviation mentor growing up, he took us flying in many airplanes ranging from an old Fairchild 24 to a DC–3.

National Airlines had leased a Pan Am Boeing 707 to start domestic jet service because the DC–8 deliveries were late. At the time, Pan Am only had a couple other 707s. My dad was a national station manager, so I took several photos of the 707, N708PA, on the ramp at Miami International Airport (MIA).

In spite of surviving World War II, in 1965, my best friend’s dad crashed in a Pan Am 707 near Antigua in the Greater Antilles, 100 feet from the top of Chance Mountain. It was a horrible first time of my many brushes with the “fate” of other pilots in my aviation life.

Fast forward to a family reunion in late 2010. Since the family was Pan Am/National, I innocently brought pictures of that 707 along with other Pan Am/National memorabilia. One son looks at the photos and casually remarks, “Oh, N708PA, Jet Clipper Constitution. You know, this is the airplane dad was killed in. Where did you get these pictures?”

They said I turned white as a sheet.

I had excerpts from the accident report in Aviation Week with the N708PA number staring me in the face. However, I never realized until the reunion I had photos I had taken years earlier of that ill-fated 707. And “fate” assigned my boyhood mentor to that very 707 out of so many Pan Am 707s for that tragic trip.

Nicholas Frasca
Bradenton, Florida

High Anxiety

Quite often in aviation, commonly accepted explanations are built on shaky foundations. Mike Ginter’s exploration of his own stress levels in learning carrier landings (“High Anxiety,” July 2025 AOPA Pilot) was perfectly reasonable, but it is doubtful if Yerkes and Dodson had much to contribute. Their experiments in 1908 involved giving mice electric shocks of increasing intensity. The idea was to discover what intensity might speed the process of them learning a task. Even at the time, it was admitted that the results were less valid for complex tasks, and later experiments did not really duplicate their findings at all. Academic papers now explore the process by which such flawed research into animal behavior has evolved into models of human behavior to which it has no obvious relevance.

Jim Thorpe
Ross-On-Wye, Herefordshire, U.K.

Test Pilot

In “Test Pilot” (July 2025 AOPA Pilot), Barry Schiff explained that the “W” in the time zone designations represented “war time” and that the United States was on daylight savings time the entire year. Did you know that the British went on “double war time” from 1939 to 1945?

The British go on daylight saving time just as most U.S. states do. But during World War II, the British moved the clocks ahead by two hours as a “productivity measure.” The idea was that during the winter months in which the sun rose late and set early—England is very far north of the United States, so it has lots of daylight in the summer and very little in the winter—the working man might never see the sun during the winter months and become depressed. Even if he worked overtime, at least he would see some sun and it would brighten his day.

Pat Barron
Pocopson, Pennsylvania

Wiiings Not Required

As soon as I saw the July 2025 cover of AOPA Pilot, I went straight to Alicia Herron’s article, “Wiiings Not Required,” about Aaron Fitzgerald and a Red Bull BO 105 he flies.

In the 1970s when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I worked part-time for Keystone Helicopter, which was based near West Chester, Pennsylvania. At the time, Keystone maintained and operated a MBB BO 105 for Girard Bank, which was before computers and the internet made use of helicopters for this purpose obsolete.

Girard used N205BB to fly material to and from a helipad on top of its downtown Philadelphia headquarters to the Wall Street heliport on the Manhattan side of the East River, southwest of the Brooklyn Bridge. He also used it to fly material to and from a Morton, Pennsylvania, helicopter landing area.

Whenever possible, I’d asked to go on “ride-alongs” in the left seat of 205BB, which included post-maintenance flights and the early morning runs up to Wall Street and back as well as flights to Morton and pilot proficiency check flights. (I was sitting in the back for those.) On one occasion, I was asked to fly in 205BB from Keystone’s base to Atlantic Aviation in Philadelphia to drive the pilot’s car back to Keystone, which I did. A very cool ride to Atlantic. On another occasion, I went on a post-maintenance flight during which the pilot showed me what the BO 105 with a rigid rotor system could do—needless to say I was glad to get back on terra firma after that flight.

I thoroughly enjoyed flying in N205BB, and I am very grateful to the pilots and maintenance staff at Keystone Helicopter for allowing me to do this.

Jonathan Gulick
New Braunfels, Texas

Bookshelf

“Bookshelf” (July 2025 AOPA Pilot) mentioning the Biggles series reminded me of a similar series. The Brandy Papers by Donald Jack, published starting in 1962, has nine volumes and won several awards for humor. The first volume, Three Cheers for Me, starts with Brandy leaving Ottawa to serve in the trenches during World War I. After his time there, he moved to the flying corps and became an ace. The last volume, Stalin and Me, is in the Cold War. Brandy’s adventures cover a lot of world and aircraft history and combine these with a hero whose life is controlled more by accident and personality conflict than planning.

James McLellan
Phoenix, Arizona

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