Nice pictorial of Atlanta Airport

JLF. May I inquire as to what type of equipment you fly? The history of Atlanta airport was very interesting and even though I have flown in and out of there several times, I had no idea how immense it is. I knew a gentleman who flew Pitcairns for E.A.T. in the 30's and he had some amazing stories about his experiences. He also flew Curtiss Condors and said that it was a great airplane in its day.

 

cool! thanks for sharing.

I had no idea about the Speedway history there.

and yes, that facility is freakin' massive.

 

Wynne B. had been blinded in a crash of a Stinson tri motor and we corresponded by audio tape in the early 70's. He told me of flying a Pitcairn PA-5 somewhere in Georgia or South Carolina at night and getting caught in a thunderhead before he knew it. before long he realized that he was inverted and going up at a prodigious rate. Nothing he did would change anything that was happening and he prepared to bail out until he figured it out that he would be going up at the same rate that the airplane was. So he stayed put and rode it out. He mentioned that he could "taste" the lightning and he was getting iced up as he went upward. He was spit out of the system at a very high altitude and simply sat in the airplane as it went back down to a warmer altitude and finally where he could fly it again and see some lights. Flying in the winter was a chore, as he put it, because the PA-5 didn't have much heat coming into the cockpit. It was a tube down near the floor and to warm his hands he had to take off one glove at a time, lean forward to get near the tube and then repeat it for the other hand. He laughed at the airplane going into a shallow dive every time he leaned forward to warm up because his big leather suit pushed the stick forward. Then he had to pull up and dive again to warm his other hand. He was quite a guy. I described the paintings for him that I was doing for the book that I was illustrating for Ernest Gann, " Ernest K. Gann's Flying Circus."

 

No jab at you but one at the Boeing sales team who " named " the Boeing 717 because it had one aisle or it was 17 feet wide...I really don't know. Will the real 717 stand up ? here it ia.
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As a frequent user of ATL, going back to the 1961-vintage terminal back in 1971, this is an utterly fascinating website. Thanks for the link!

 

Back to Wynn. He flew Condors for Eastern and thought that it was a great airplane but that it could ice up on the wires and interplane struts. Their de-ice equipment was the rudder pedals and they would kick the airplane sideways a few times and the ice would break off, stopping the vibrations. He said that if you didn't get the airplane slowed down in the downwind you would never get it slow enough to land and several times he scooted across the field when he was getting trained to fly the Condor.
One can see the lineage of the Condor's fuselage layout and vertical fin in the DC-1,2,3 I think. The Condor F-32 Sleeper lasted only about 6 months because the Douglas DC series came out and killed it as well as the Boeing 247.

 

Someone need to take a picture of the security lines at 7AM on a Monday morning... it compeletly explains the tag "the World busiest airport".

As much as I love flying, I would rather drive than have to get thru Hartsfield. Great website... I had forgotten how it looked in the mid 70's when I first started to come to Atlanta.

 

I'm glad I only have to fly for pleasure. I usually go thru ATL security at about 5 PM on Thursday, when the wait is usually a total of about 5 minutes. The longest I've had to wait there is 25 minutes; the longest I've had to wait anywhere was once at FLL - 40 minutes. Yeah, those Monday mornings must be a pain......