Builders,
Below is a link to a family story written by Pietenpol builder Terry Hand. It is an account of taking his father, a US Navy Seabee in WWII, to see the memorial in Washington on the occasion of his fathers 88th birthday. I have read the story several times and find it moving, and I asked Terry if we could share it with Corvair builders.
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Every week I have people forward me stories from anonymous sources about servicemen they never met nor heard of before. The stories are often, neat, tidy and contain an unambiguous uplifting moral message. Some of these stories evoke Vietnam infantryman Tim O’Brien’s quote about war stories.
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Conversely, Terry story, about his own father, draws more questions than it answers. It mirrors the experience of many son’s of such men, sons who found their fathers very reluctant to say much of anything about what they had seen and done in their youth. Buy a mixture of luck and persistence, Terry discovers a key that unlocks some insight to his Father’s experiences. Well worth a careful read.
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The link to the story: After clicking on it, also click on the “download”
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Above, Terry Hand with his steel tube Pietenpol at CC#24 in Barnwell, SC.
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Terry also has a wicked sense of humor, ‘refined’ by years in the Marine Corps. Above he is intentionally provoking an inter-service rivalry by wearing the “Hat of Power” normally reserved just for CC#22,28,32 host Kevin Purtee. This is a major protocol violation. The photo is from late at night, Barnwell College #31. Terry and fellow Marine Andy Shorter were joking around saying things like “The Marines have been sent in Force…Two….why so many?” We expect this stuff on the day before the birthday of the Corps (Nov. 10).
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Terry also wrote a very well received guest editorial here. While he is an airline guy today, flying heavy stuff globally, he also spent a significant amount of time instructing in T-34s at Pensacola. The insight in the editorial comes from lessons learned as an instructor at “The birthplace of Naval Aviation.”
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Link to the editorial:
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Here is a sample of the mail on Terry Hand’s Editorial:
Zenith 601XL builder and flyer Phil Maxson writes:
“This is an excellent article. Each of these points resonated with me, but I’m particularly struck by number 5. I am beginning my 24th year with Mars, Inc, a mult-national food company. We are very big on the Freedom principle, and in our case, it is called “Freedom within a framework.” In a company of 70,000 associates it is not possible for everyone to have their own “do whatever you like” form of freedom, but each one of us is obligated to exercise our own talents and skills within our purview. We have a framework that includes five principles: Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and the one I’m emphasizing here: Freedom.”
Builder Matt Lockwood writes:
“Terry- Thanks for this. Especially point #1. There is a certain discipline that comes with making yourself slow down and consider the ramifications of your decisions…i.e fish tank tubing for fuel lines and/or routing it through the cockpit. Some of the information that is out there on the internet doesn’t consider the ramifications, nor do these anonymous advisors out there have to suffer the consequences of you taking their advice. Everyone, please be careful. Thanks again to you and to WW. P.S. I thought ‘NATOPS’ stood for ‘Navy’s Attempt To Operate Planes Safely’Matt Lockwood, VT-3 1997-1998″
Builder Jerry Mcferron writes:
“Footnotes and warnings are often written in blood. Don’t add yours.”
“In the early 60s my Dad was a Navy flight instructor at Pensacola teaching in T-34s. Earlier, in 1958, Dad was the co-pilot in a helicopter that crashed and he was severely burned. He was the only survivor of the four crew members. A few years ago I received an e-mail from a lady looking for my Dad. Her Dad was the pilot of the helicopter. She had not yet been born at the time of the crash, so she had never known her Dad. If the fates of our fathers had been reversed, I would not be here. The investigation into the crash resulted in changes to the procedures for flying helicopters. Dad is now 76 and passed his physical a few weeks ago. He is still teaching people how to fly. When Dad calls me and says “I got to go flying today”, it makes my day.-Jerry”
Builder Dan Branstrom:
“Amen, and Semper Fi.”
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On the subject of ‘war stories’, infantryman Tim O’Brien, wrote in his book The Things They Carried:
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“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. ”
Congratulations! No grammatical errors, misspellings, or misuse of apostrophes. Seriously, this makes it easier for some of us to take seriously. Dave
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To Dave and all the other people who don’t take what I write seriously because it has spelling and punctuation errors:
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I began to read and write very young, before I was four. I started school more than a year early, and was always very bright. When I was a 10 years old and we were living in Thailand, it was a very safe place and I was out riding my bicycle many miles from home. On an empty country road I was hit by a driver in a car who left me for dead. Several people saw this, but there were strong spiritual, cultural and legal reasons why they did not offer any assistance.
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I awoke in the ditch after something like an hour. I found my way home, under the illusion that several years had past. I was in the 5th field hospital on Sukumvit road for a week, beside soldiers fresh out of Vietnam. There was a long year of tests and nightmares, not a lot of fun for a kid.
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The end result is that I have a particular type of brain injury, and I have never been able to spell nor see grammatical errors since, and I can only read at the same pace I can speak. In written text, even common words like ‘went’ look correctly spelled to me as booth ‘went’ and whent’ before spell check, my only ability to differentiate them was by pronouncing them at a snails pace. Looking at something I wrote at 4 am, I have no ability to tell if the spell check was on or off, and it doesn’t work well for me.
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In conversation with me you would never suspect anything like this, but that is because conversation is 100% phonetic, and this is the pathway in my brain that gets all the work. In the last 42 years, the phonetic elements have been worked to the point that I have a phenomenal memory for spoken conversation, and I can retrieve quotes from books I read a decade ago, because when I read them, I did so slowly, pronouncing everything to make it phonetic instead of visual. None of the last 3 trucks I have owned have had a radio. I don’t need it. driving down the road late at night, I can remember note for note any song I have ever heard a few times.
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Being practical, I have a lot of things to share about airplane building, and the choices are to burden my wife with doing this for all the material I share, or not writing it. If you like the direct honesty of the tone, I will tell you that it comes out at 4am, and if it is fed through the editing process, I am given a few hours to consider how some people will take it wrong, and invariably, it gets diluted or deleted, because when I think about our national obsession with criticizing the work of others or taking offense at things, I often never send things because when you are speaking of subjects like people you loved who’s life ended at 23, it is unpleasant have to consider people who critique it for bad grammar.
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A bigger point, that directly relates to me sharing what I know about the serious subject of building your plane. I have pointed out many times, that a builder has a moral obligation to his passengers to gather proven information on how to build the best plane he can, from All sources, not just ones he finds pleasant. The very honest story about Chandler Titus below is directly written on this subject. If it has grammatical errors, I don’t want to hear about it.
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Although I have a lot to share, Some people are not going to take it seriously because it doesn’t meet his grammatical standards. This is nothing new to me. Last year, I directly told a guy, in person, not to do something, and 50 minutes later he tried it, and wrecked the plane. His friend offered the observation “If you had short hair, he would have listened, but he wanted to prove that he didn’t listen to people he perceived as hippies.”
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Many people think that my contribution to what they might know about planes is somehow limited to how to bolt a particular engine together. In reality, I could teach any 12 year old how to torque rod bolts. Learning concepts like how it is your moral obligation to learn from people, even ones who are unpleasant, have long hair and don’t spell correctly, does far more to reduce your risk and that of your passengers than anything I am going to show you about manipulating wrenches.
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Chandler Titus, 25 missions in a B-17 Ball turret, Pilot in the Berlin Airlift, worked at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for more than 50 years. Read the story to understand that very limited amounts of your potential knowledge will come in ‘nice’ packages.
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ERAU – models of integrity #2
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“Maybe half the stuff I know about planes comes from people I would never have chosen as a friend. I am fully aware there are many good reasons to dislike me. Do not set your goal on being friends with me, set it on learning everything I can teach you. That exchange in itself is a better basis for friendship than initially ‘liking’ someone. Trust me, on my worst day, I could run the White House protocol and etiquette department compared to Mr. Titus. I don’t know what he knew, but I am 50 times the people person he was. If I am not your kind of person, don’t let it stop you from learning what I have to share.”