Air Cargo News

A SALUTE TO THE PEOPLE OF THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK & NEW JERSEY

     The Friday before Labor Day is traditionally a “slow” news day in America. News hawks usually find a few gas stations raising the cost of fuel to cash in at the public’s expense on one more chase at Summer.
     Now, with a power blackout a near distant memory for cover, the big oil companies enmasse jumped in to the gouge game with some gas at the pump on the New Jersey Turnpike going up as much as 20 cents a gallon.
     Talk about thieves in the night.
     Best quote of the week came from Vice President Cheney who said, of 50 million people who were blacked out in that massive power failure, that he had not seen so many people in the dark since he laid out the plan for war in Iraq to the American public.
     Elsewhere, Friday before Labor Day news featured some poor slobs who work for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey turning over boxes of transcripts containing written versions of the last messages recorded of the victims trapped inside the World Trade Center September 11, 2001.
     There they were, looking dazed and bewildered, carrying typed copies of the recordings in brown boxes, that were snapped up by a gang of media resembling wolves at a feeding frenzy.
     We suppose that there must be good reason for those papers to be revealed. But thinking ahead to next Labor Day, that will occur again just before the third anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy, we wonder if another revelation will give the daily papers and television another excuse to show us those horrible 9/11 crash and burn pictures again?
     Of course, we should never forget. We should always remember and pause to honor those who suffered and were lost and were our heroes.
     But for us, the people left alive down here on the ground are the thing.
     The people who died had their problems ended in a horrible crescendo. The people left still here, have to endure the pain.
     Port Authority headquarters employees have moved from the exalted heights to a bunch of non-descript offices in some twenty-something floor buildings up on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in New York City.
     Many of these people who have spent their entire lives serving the bi-state agency while rising up through the ranks, lost both friends and family and co-workers on September 11, 2001.
     But beyond the unendurable, The Port Authority also lost its records, its picture histories, memorabilia, great works of art, all its surroundings and trappings of power, not to mention a comfortable familiar home, in one terrible instant.
     Now aviation books and pictures, for example, are being recovered one piece at time on Ebay and from private collections and antique dealers.
     Where once millions of artifacts and items of historical record were carefully stored and preserved, now only copies from other sources are slowly returning.
     As we have often written, it is our belief that Port Aviation Director Bill DeCota has performed the most impressive job of any aviation director in history.
     Against almost impossible odds of grief and despair, with world economies tumbling and wrenching, somehow the New York/New Jersey airports are on the move, building and developing at almost a fever pitch.
     As Bill DeCota has said:
     “Our people have been just great. There is a new face on the Port Authority. We are coming back.”
     Most recently Lufthansa opened a new wonderworld air cargo facility for the 21st century at JFK, as the newly revitalized grand entrance Van Wyck Expressway road into the big airport appears as a “miracle mile” of shiny new air cargo buildings for United, Korean, Lufthansa, Austrian and others.
     Maybe some social historian should do a book about the people that 9/11 left behind at the Port Authority.
     Never in aviation history has there been a time like right now.
     Certainly Port Authority people have come through and shown great courage and resource.
     Perhaps that’s a story for next Labor Day.

     Closer still is a rare and sadly dwindling number of air cargo pioneers who gather occasionally around their shared experiences building what once was the greatest all-cargo airline in the world, The Flying Tiger Line.
     As the Curtiss Commando (C46) sitting in the snow at Idlewild (JFK) during the 1950s attests, Flying Tigers got its first all cargo lift from the airplane that invented the form.
     But you don’t need to hear this stuff from us.
     Go right to the source.
     On Saturday, October 25th, all Tigers Alumni, Retirees and their friends are welcome to attend a reunion in Los Angeles.
     Flying Tigers Again will gather at The Proud Bird 11022 Aviation Blvd. El Segundo, Calif. 90045.
     RSVP by October 15 to Don Ashbrock, 2231 Kathryn Ave., Torrance, CA 90505 or contact Ernest Schimmer (emschimmer@aol.com) for more details. Tariff is twenty bucks. The memories and good times are priceless.