Re: Designer job available at Estes

Penrose is nice. Canon City is nicer.

Jerry

Did anybody but me notice that the word "rocket" does not appear in that ad? Just being anal.....P.K.

From the job description they are airplane designers. I suspect the needs for rocket tooling is about 1/3 that of airplanes and as such is a afterthought.

Jerry

hmmmm... how about sending in a job application in the name "Heinrich Dorfmann", listing a lot of aircraft design experience.

(OK, who's old enough to recognize the movie reference?)

"Flight of the Phenoix"

Phoenix, Stine, Brant,.....viola

Flight of the Phoenix.

Dorfman's planes only work when Jimmy Stewart is flying them and then only long enough to get to an oasis.

"The Flight of the Phoenix" (?)

It was an enjoyable movie. Stewart always looks so natural in the cockpit (yeah, I know, he was a brig. general).

In the closing credits, they indicate one person was killed in the making of the film. I always wondered if it had to with the flight.

My uncle, an aviator and pretty sharp guy, tells me they could have never gotten the wing moved. Said it would have been way too heavy.

By the way, near the end of the movie when the bird is flying, you can see wheels sticking out the bottom of the skids. You'd think that would have had enough film that they could have used another shot during editing.

Doug How many aviation films did Jimmy Stewart make?

I read an article about the famous Hollywood stunt pilot Paul Mantz who actually flew the Phoenix in the film. It was his last flight, the landing skid hooked a sand dune on landing and flipped the plane or caused it to take a bad hop and nose in. He was crushed by the motor. You'll notice that at the end of the film they don't actually show the plane landing, just that the passengers come running over the dune to the waterhole. Apparently, the autopsy showed that he was pretty liquored up when he made his last flight.

When the cobbled together plane is shown flying from a distance with the oil workers on the wings, they are plywood profile cutouts because the plane was barely airworthy without the extra weight.

Scott McCrate NAR 71680

Here's a history blurb:

just noticed I spelled "Phoenix" wrong...please forgive me... DUH....

Herbert Viola. Doncha remember "Moonlighting"?

tah

"Ted Cochran" wrote in news:9ts9b.5112$BS5.2792 @newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net:

Al Viola. Something about his lungs.

len.

Where did you read that? None of the sources I've seen make any reference to Mantz being drunk, though admittedly all of them were "friendly" towards him. The plane was very marginal and dangerous to fly. As I recall, the accident was caused by one of the simulated landing skids (as someone else posted, there are wheels hidden inside them if you pay any attention at all) hooking the ground and flipping the plane. The film required lots of low flying and a long bouncing take-off run, so that was always a distinct possibility. Not that the drinking couldn't have happened, but the situation was already dangerous enough that serious fault on Mantz's part isn't necessary to explain the accident.

Steven,

You're resurrecting old threads :) When this one was still young, I did some digging around and saw the same type of allegations. Here's one I found just now on Google:

Yeah, sorry about that. Getting back into rockets after a long layoff, and my news provider has a long retention time.

I read HOLLYWOOD PILOT just recently, and I'm relatively sure that they bit about drinking didn't come from there. It's not totally incredible the Mantz might have had alcohol in his system when he crashed. He was a hard-drinking guy of the old-school. He had, in fact, come out of retirement to do the picture, and had suffered serious injuries that might have resulted in chronic pain and therefore some degree of "self-medication." But I'd be very surprised it he was flying in what he could have considered an impaired condition. Like I said, I'm curious if the allegations come from any reliable source or if this is simply one of those rumors that floats around the internet (and around the bar when old fliers sit and tell tales).

Just did some searching of my own, which includes fascinating pictures of the actual crash in progress. No mention of Mantz drinking (though according to the pages, he was called in at the last minute to do the shoot, and that could have been a contributing factor too, if he didn't have time to sober up and was too proud to turn it down). But obviously from the shots, you've got a broken plane (the entire tail is literally falling off!) that appears to be in a stable and controlled attitude just inches off the ground. Pilot error may have been a factor, but it clearly isn't a case of some sloppy drunk who couldn't fly the plane.