No, not Auburn on any given football Saturday. And not stuffed with cotton or fiberfill, but stuffed with people.
Yep, Flying Tiger Lines. The only civilian company back during the Vietnam airlift regularly transporting troops between the mainland and various islands in the big ocean.
Imagine, if you will, three hundred people on board a single aircraft, and fourteen hours in the air listening to what seemed like at least a hundred perpetually crying babies. Poor little tykes, takeoffs and landings were not conducive to sleep, and no amount of sucking on a bottle helped relieve the pressure on their tiny eardrums. After a while, for the most part, the moms just gave up and let them cry, while the dads did their best to focus on something, anything else.
No in-flight movies back then, thank you very much. We survived the tedium with walkmans glued to our ears listening to tapes (yes tapes) of favorite music. The Doobie Brothers, Journey, and Foreigner were particularly hot items, traded back and forth across the aisles, soldier to soldier, military spouse to military spouse.
The cabin crew consisted of eight, all but one of whom were female. These were women who had been there done that designed the tee shirt, you know, old frogs like me. The one young man (who was undoubtedly somebody's nephew since I remember that he mostly sat on his laurels while the gals did all the work) was strictly eye candy, before the phrase was coined.
The pilot and co-pilots were sharp-dressed knife-creased buzz-cut vets who had made their bones flying the corridors of hell, and were being rewarded with weekly trips between California and Manila, with stops in Alaska, Japan, Okinawa, Hawaii, Guam, and other assorted pacific rim rocks.
They flew us there, and brought us safely home when our tour was ended. God bless them all.
Never heard of Flying Tiger Lines? Yes you have, just not by that name. See below.
http://www.ruudleeuw.com/rem-flyingtigers.htm
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