Category: Transportation

Freefall, A True Story

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The Book of the Week is “Freefall, A True Story” by William Hoffer and Marilyn Mona Hoffer, published in 1989. The authors told a suspenseful story of a July 1983 Air Canada Boeing 767 flight that went awry. The authors caught the human interest element of the story as well, revealing biographical information on the passengers so that the reader would relate to and sympathize with the characters.

“Four more insistent beeps sounded, disrupting conversation. The cockpit was assailed by eerie warning buzzers and foreboding color-coded lights alerting them to a series of problems escalating in severity.”

As is well known, commercial aviation is an industry especially fraught with danger. There are always multiple causes for disasters. Flight 143 ran into trouble for the following reasons:

  • The Boeing model 767 had been launched only three months before, so workers had yet to work out all its kinks and update its three different flight manuals.
  • The plane’s different flight-related measurements used a mix of the metric system and the imperial system, so there was confusion, and there were miscalculations.
  • The Canadian agency that regulated commercial aviation allowed cockpit-visitors, who might be a distraction to the plane crew.
  • There were miscommunications among the pilots, the flight staff, and a myriad of workers who maintained the plane.
  • Air traffic controllers were still using the outdated system of “primary radar” at Winnipeg’s airport.
  • A delay on the first leg of the flight due to a mechanical problem, a malfunctioning of the plane’s movie projector in the rear cabin, and undercooked food, resulted in additional stresses for the pilots, crew and passengers.
  • The airline’s workers were always under time-pressure every flight, as time is money. Their employer lost money every time there was a delay, so they rushed their assessment of the situation.
  • The airline’s cost-cutting measures meant two pilots had to do the work of three. The workers who were tasked with different jobs spoke English and / or French so there could easily have been something lost in translation, and cultural clashes.

Read the book to learn the fate of the people on the plane and on the ground.

Walter Ralegh

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The Book of the Week is “Walter Ralegh, Architect of Empire” by Alan Gallay, published in 2019. There are alternate spellings of “Ralegh” but the author used this spelling.

In this hodgepodge of a tome, the author recounted the tenor of the times and exploits of the explorer, colonizer and treasure-seeker Walter Ralegh. Around the time Ralegh (born circa 1554), men originally from Spain owned most of the riches of the world. Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s older brother by seventeen years, got permission from Queen Elizabeth of England to go on expeditions in order to steal those riches.

International voyages were dangerous, and use of multi-disciplinary expertise (of mathematics, ship-building and maintenance, cartography, alchemy and medicine, etc.) somewhat reduced the risks involved.

Queen Elizabeth believed she was (the Anglican Church) God’s representative on earth. England had an anti-Catholic bent. So when she funded Ralegh’s trips sailing across the Atlantic to colonize the Eastern Seaboard of North America, he recruited dissidents (who tended to be Catholic) to help him, to get them to leave England and become some other territory’s problem.

The voyages were made at intervals of several years, as they involved planning (data collection of the location of enemies whose ships could be pirated for their cargo), fund-raising, provisioning, recruiting of crew, etc.

Ralegh truly wanted to civilize the natives of foreign shores, but pirating of ships was so much more lucrative. He had thousands of men including his cousin, under his command. Through the decades, they encountered Native Americans when they hit land after their transatlantic voyages. Some expedition leaders ruled by fear and force and provoked violent incidents with them. The land was richly endowed with resources such as seafood and timber, and crops such as maize and tobacco could be grown for a profit. In his thirties, Ralegh named the territory now known as Virginia.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Ralegh’s adventures at sea, on land along the coast of North America, southeastern Ireland, and Guiana in South America.

His Majesty’s Airship

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“The New York Post wrote, ‘No more funds of American taxpayers [should] be squandered on these useless gasbags.’ “

The above is NOT a comment about the 2025 New York City mayoral candidates, but is a 1935 comment in reaction to the series of American airship crashes that killed hundreds of people.

The Book of the Week is “His Majesty’s Airship, The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine” by S.C. Gwynne, published in 2023. In this sloppily edited, chronologically disordered, wordy, redundant (but suspenseful) volume, the author recounts the history of airships through the late 1930’s.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Germans racked up significant construction- and flying-expertise with regard to airships with rigid frames. However, they had an abysmal safety record. They papered that over with jingoistic propaganda. The 1910’s saw a few conditions established to make airship flights less risky: flying only in summer and in clear weather with only light winds.

There was a high risk of fire because the hydrogen that filled the airships is easily combustible with just one spark. Helium is less so, but was expensive and difficult to obtain or make, and the Americans controlled the small quantity that was easily accessible.

The German government got the idea that in the event of a war, it could destroy cities at night via airships much more efficiently than it could with ground troops. In WWI, its submarines were actually more effective, because Britain wised up quickly– training searchlights on the airships, and shooting them into fireballs. By 1917, warplanes had become superior to airships, even with their mechanical problems.

Anyway, the author went off on a tangent, detailing the life-histories of a few different royal family members– main characters in the airships story. One such character was Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson. Beginning in spring 1924, he persuaded the British government to execute his big idea of contracting with a company to make airships a fun, efficient form of global, public transportation.

The author tossed around the term “socialism” but did not elaborate. He described two competing British airship projects; one as capitalist, and the other as socialist. Here is a clarification (more details of which can be found in this blog’s post, “The Last Idealist” about Norman Thomas, in the “Politics – Systems” category):

With SOCIALISM, the people collectively own entities, and share and share alike. These can be profit-seeking businesses; or the government can own entities that provide essential services– health, education, welfare and large public transportation entities– that should not be profit-seeking (but some of their subcontractors are, anyway).

With COMMUNISM, the government owns profit-seeking entities (businesses) in whole or in part (as in the former Soviet Union and China). So yes, these include public-private partnerships in which there are clearly outrageous conflicts of interest that result in patronage and profiteering. So, arguably, the former Soviet Union and China have both Socialism and Communism to a large degree. The U.S. is not far behind anymore.

Furthermore, in America, the super-rich who pay no income tax, salve their consciences through philanthropy, which allows them to propagandize that they’re helping the poor. BUT income tax revenues are pooled so that they could end up getting spent on anything in the political budget. The super-rich specifically choose where to donate their money– whom to help, and it is a tiny percentage of poor people who are helped, compared with the number who are helped if money is provided through income tax!

Anyway, read the book to learn the outcome of the flight of R101 (hint: a large, expensive project run by alpha males with hubris syndrome– in which Darwin award candidates partake– rarely ends well) plus lots more historical background that explains why rigid airships are a thing of the past.

As is well known, the American government has been a large, expensive project run mostly by alpha males with hubris syndrome. Given the current overwhelming influences of money and sophisticated messaging via global, sophisticated communications technology, individuals need not even be physically present anymore to run the government. Like Elon Musk, they can be a mastermind of national policies in absentia. Here’s what Musk is singing now.

AMERICA

sung to the tune of “Africa” with apologies to Toto and to whomever else the rights may concern.

See my influence echoing on the Right.

These are the results of our secret conversations.

I and Trump pretended to have a fight.

Withdrawal from D.C. has let me discreetly plot to save my nation.

I learned from my old man along the way,

looking to amass resources to impose my brand of supremacy.

I turn to forceful people for-pay.

Scan the whole world, is I all have to DO.

It won’t take a lot to make my dreams come true.

My money has such power, I can lord it over you.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

Trump’s taking this time to do the things we always pla-a-a-anned. ooh ooh

We reach out to our friends on the Right,

and we’ve grown prosperous, assisted by our hegemonic companies.

I know I’m doing what is right, sure as I am aiming to gradually rid the White House of democracy.

I need world conquest, deep inside.

Priming the pump for the great times to come.

It won’t take a lot to make my dreams come true.

My money has such power, I can lord it over you.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

Trump’s taking this time to do the things we always pla-a-a-anned. ooh ooh

Scan the world is all I have to DO.

It won’t take a lot to make my dreams come true.

My money has such power, I can lord it over you.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

(I act behind-the-scenes)

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

(I act behind-the-scenes)

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

I act behind-the-scenes in America.

(Trump’s taking this time)

Trump’s taking this time to do the things we always pla-a-a-anned. ooh ooh

Major Noah

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The Book of the Week is “Major Noah, American-Jewish Pioneer” by Isaac Goldberg, published in 1938.

Born in July 1785 in Philadelphia, Mordecai Manuel Noah was raised mostly by his grandfather. In the 1810’s, Noah, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Pennsylvania and other “Yankees” (people living in the then-northeastern United States) were expansionists– proposed that the U.S. annex Canada and Florida.

Noah engaged in various profit-seeking pursuits in his lifetime: playwriting, literary criticism, speech-making, newspaper publishing, and international diplomacy. In 1813, he was named Consul on the Barbary coast. His territory included Algeria, Tunisia– where lived about sixty thousand Jews, and Spain. He hopped a ship to get to the Mediterranean. His goal was to stop the activities of pirates in that region, and to negotiate the release of twelve Americans who were then-prisoners of the Algerians.

As is well known, early-nineteenth-century Britain had the world’s best navy; she trained boys seven to twelve years old, in seafaring. In July 1813, a British navy boat captured Noah’s, as the War of 1812 was still raging. There ensued a long, complicated,(and weird!) series of events.

Fast-forward to April 1815. American president James Monroe sent a letter to Noah informing him that he should never have been hired as Consul because he was Jewish; his religion was unfavorable with regard to foreign-service negotiations in northern Africa, so Monroe was firing him as Consul. That letter didn’t get to Noah until July 1815, at which time, Noah was “headed to a dungeon in Tunis.”

Fortunately, the deliverer of the letter, an American commodore, hadn’t read it because it was addressed to only Noah, personally. Bristling and posturing, Noah lied to the commodore in such a way that led him to demand that the British pay his personal debts. After that, Noah “got the hell out of Dodge.” He had actually gone rogue– sort of a cross between Oliver North and Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. Upon returning to the United States, he printed his own propaganda to paper over his indiscretions, and used his friends in Congress to exonerate himself.

Noah then went into the newspaper publishing business. In the 1810’s, “American journalism was not yet out of its black period– an orgy of assault, battery, libel, recrimination, accusation, bribery, scurrility, chicanery, such as makes the succeeding development of yellow journalism appear by comparison, a Sunday picnic. Such was indeed, the tradition of journalism in our adolescent United States.”

In 1820, Noah, (actually seeking to profit in real estate), put forth a big idea of purchasing Grand Island, in the city of Buffalo, New York State, to provide a colony for the “wandering Jews” of the world.

Five years later, Noah had sufficient financial backing consisting of other people’s money to start his venture, which he called “Ararat.” He gave himself the titles Governor and Judge of Israel, making announcements in newspapers worldwide. Poland’s government wouldn’t allow Noah’s public notice to be published, as his campaign was perceived as a plot to overthrow the Hapsburg monarchy.

British rabbis to whom Noah gave fancy titles and invited to his new Israel, politely declined his offers of employment, saying they were happy where they were, and that he was undeservedly acting like the Messiah; only God would know the location of apocalyptic Israel. The French and Austrian rabbis weren’t fooled either, and actually called Noah a charlatan.

In the 1830’s, when pressured to explain himself as to why he switched political parties from Democratic to Whig (conservative), he gave the best excuse ever: The party, not he, had changed! His former party had become unprincipled. So in the interest of good conscience, he switched.

Read the book to learn much more about Noah’s philosophy, writings, and machinations.

The Oracle of Oil

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The Book of the Week is “The Oracle of Oil, A Maverick Geologist’s Quest For A Sustainable Future” by Mason Inman, published in 2016.

The author– a journalist rather than a historian or academic– described redundantly in great detail, certain issues and historical events (perhaps those from sources to which he had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on a bunch of others that were equally important.

The text was like Swiss cheese. He failed to mention the geopolitical issues of oil refining, oil spills, mergers of oil companies, nuclear disasters, and lawsuits and scandals that were game-changers in the energy arena.

If this volume was meant to be a career biography, the author should have simply said there were numerous issues and historical events that affected the subject’s career, but they were beyond the scope of the book. He could have simply named them without giving extensive depth to some and omitting others altogether.

Anyway, King Hubbert was born in 1903 in central Texas. He attended the University of Chicago, a focal point of intellectual ferment back in the day. He became a geologist and began working in the oil industry, which was in its infancy. He alternately worked and returned to school to earn higher academic degrees, during which he met theorists such as himself.

One was Howard Scott, whose early 1920’s vision consisted of a Communist society (all industries would be government-owned) which, through certificates rather than currency, would fulfill all of its citizens’ basic needs; food, clothing, housing, etc., pursuant to the amount of energy required to manufacture those goods. The people would work only sixteen hours a week, and have lots of leisure time.

By the early twentieth century, academics were spending untold amounts of time debating the merits of political, social and cultural systems– their own, and other nations’. In the 1920’s, they despaired that automation was putting people out of work, and monster-sized corporations manufactured their durable goods with “planned obsolescence” in mind. Propaganda even then, was persuading consumers to throw out old cars, machines and material goods (instead of repairing them), and buy new ones. In 1930, the nation was gobsmacked by the Great Depression.

In early 1932, Hubbert, Howard, and a few other engineers and scientists, included their aforementioned utopian fantasy in the theory of Technocracy, generating a report. Hubbert wrote the portion covering chemistry and physics. Engineers and scientists, rather than greedy capitalists, would direct their economy.

Two of their ideas have somewhat come to pass in modern society (a century later!):

  • Scientists and engineers (who are also greedy capitalists, from Silicon Valley) are controlling the world’s communications systems (and the U.S. government and economy); and
  • money has not altogether been eliminated, but two kinds of Socialistic means of exchange have been introduced in recent decades– the Euro and electronic currencies.

On the other hand, capitalism and consumerism have produced an abundance of material goods in the United States–to which other nations have aspired– lifting worldwide living standards. Yet, there is still extreme poverty, even in the United States. The overall cause of this paradox, is human nature– greed, guilt, fear and exclusivity.

Back in the 1940’s and for the next few decades, Hubbert and others made projections as to the amount of the earth’s fossil fuels still to be exploited by humans for their energy needs. His predictions were the most cautious. He truly cared about accurately analyzing data to publicize the truth.

In the early 1960’s, the newly elected president John F. Kennedy tasked committees with doing studies. There was interagency rivalry between the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Academy of Sciences. There were conflicts of interest, of course. Federal agency employees were clinging to their jobs and therefore trying to maximize their budgets. Oil-industry employees were hoping to get the government to pass legislation favorable to themselves.

The Atomic Energy Council (AEC) was a federal agency that approved the sites on which nuclear power plants were built. In 1966, the AEC refused to release a report critical of its nuclear waste disposal practices in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, salt mines in Kansas, Hanford in Washington state, and the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. Written by Hubbert’s committee, that report basically stated that the sites were cancer clusters. Nevertheless, by the mid-1980’s, approximately ninety nuclear power plants had become operational in the United States.

The author did mention that fracking is extremely damaging to the earth but didn’t mention how extremely damaging it is to people. Besides, it is extremely expensive, so shale gas drillers must take on crushing debt load.

In sum, there are no easy, simple solutions to the current fragmented, complex energy crises that plague the world. At the dawn of the 1970’s, Hubbert was proven correct in his assessments, but unsurprisingly, all the energy stakeholders in America clouded the issues with excessive propaganda. Read the book anyhow, to learn of Hubbert’s trials and tribulations in his trying to tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

Nerves of Steel

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The Book of the Week is “Nerves of Steel, How I Followed My Dreams, Earned My Wings, and Faced My Greatest Challenge” by Tammie Jo Shults, published in 2019.

The author, born at the dawn of the 1960’s, grew up in New Mexico and Colorado. For two years, military men in the recruitment offices of the Air Force and Navy told her she wasn’t allowed to become a pilot in their services because she was female. That was a lie. In March 1985, she was (finally!) inducted into the Navy, due to her chance meetings with honest men. She graduated near the top of her training class. Of course.

Shults was passionate about and good at, piloting aircraft, but she had to endure numerous indignities and conditions perpetrated by her bosses that were even more life-threatening than they should have been, because she was female. She was cool under fire, and her Christian faith saw her through those stressful and traumatic times of her life. Strangely, a religious quote in her book indicated she believed her God is a male!

Anyway, after her Navy service, she transferred her super flying skills to a job fighting wildfires in California. In the mid-1990’s, she learned to fly a piston-engine plane (different from the military aircraft she had been flying). She engaged in surveillance missions to alert firefighters and others on the ground to situations that were more dangerous than usual; dispensed red mud to put out the fires; and spread fertilizer so as to facilitate the growth of new vegetation.

The third leg of the author’s piloting career involved getting a job at a commercial airline. The GI Bill paid for her training in a 737 jet. Compensation and benefits for women in the military and pilots’ union are equivalent to the mens’, but in some quarters, women are still treated as second-class citizens by men who don’t like “girls” to invade their fraternity.

Infuriatingly for American women, Congress is still one such place where there are a bunch of powerful men, so even if a female were to be elected president, those men would automatically smear her, and vote against everything she did.

As is well known, presidents have had to make serious compromises in civil-rights legislation in order to further their own mandates. Attitudes are very, very difficult to change, as almost every facet of American life began with a bunch of white alpha males:

  • the Founding Fathers;
  • Wall Street;
  • the military and law enforcement;
  • professional sports;
  • science and technology;
  • business and industry;
  • most of the licensed professions, etc.,

except for areas involving family, household chores and jobs in the arts and entertainment.

So it should not have been surprising that the author encountered yet more gender discrimination with her new employer– in the late 1990’s. Read the book to learn much, much more about Shults’ ordeals and triumphs that show that America is making slow, slow progress in workplace gender equality. Unfortunately, not fast enough for politics. Not yet.

As is well known, in the 1960’s, there were impatient civil-rights activists who believed that resorting to violence would facilitate the enactment of equality-legislation. After the American Civil War to date, white males have threatened and resorted to violence in order to hinder the enactment of equality-legislation.

Not to worry. There is still plenty of time for progressive historical events this election season. Currently, it’s like the start of the fourth quarter of football games, but fans, like voters, need only check the last five minutes of the games to see the winners. Turning off the idiot box for the next month will prevent a lot of emotional trouble. There’s no need to despair, as there might just be a quarterback such as Tom Brady who will step in late in the game. Thank goodness for the last minute. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

Character & Characters / Retail Gangster

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The first Book of the Week is “Character & Characters, the Spirit of Alaska Airlines” by Robert J. Serling, published in 2008.

Alaska Airlines (AKA) came into existence in the mid-1940’s with the buyout of Star Air Service. It faced stiff competition from Northwest Airlines, and Pan American– which was already monster-sized from: its contract with the federal government to deliver the U.S. mails, and exchanging many political favors.

Mostly, AKA transported passengers between the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. In early 1949, it completed a dangerous mission, flying about 140 Jews from Yemen to the airport in Tel Aviv, while an Arab bomb could have hit the plane anytime.

In the 1950’s, top executive Charlie Willis had such passion for and loyalty and dedication to AKA, that he borrowed $100,000 using his personal house as collateral, in order to restore the pilot-pension-fund shortfall, to keep his employer from going out of business. Beginning at the dawn of the 1960’s, he enabled his second-in-command-executive to engage in deficit spending. They broke the bank to do promotional gimmicks.

In the back of its model CONVAIR 880, AKA installed a stand-up beer bar, even though it replaced eight passenger seats. AKA generated goodwill by throwing parties it couldn’t afford for industry players, such as its own employees and trade associations. In the late 1960’s, it bought hotels and a ski resort. AKA was one of the very first airlines to provide in-flight movies and music. So it hovered near bankruptcy, repeatedly unable to meet its employee payroll. For years.

Commercial airlines, initially transporting wealthy passengers, employed stewardesses in sexy uniforms– with no or minimal training, and offered alcoholic beverages included with the airfare. With evolution came the organization of labor– of pilots, flight crews and ground crews. Alaska’s bush pilots who had gotten in on aviation’s ground floor, had become disenchanted with the changing times. Bob Ellis sold his tiny airline in Alaska because he was no longer having fun, was emotionally exhausted from the government’s imposition of regulations, and didn’t understand the need for union labor. He had treated his employees well.

The Civil Aeronautics Board, one of the government’s regulatory bodies, was soon to stop subsidizing the (small, financially struggling) regional airlines (including AKA) in Alaska. The consolidation of the industry in the 1960’s meant no more floatplanes, biplanes, and single-engine monoplanes. These were replaced with DC-3’s and other faster, technologically superior aircraft.

Competing airlines were growing in size, complexity, and needed economies-of-scale and scope. Bosses couldn’t afford to pay for their employees’ expensive personal problems as though they were in a small business anymore. There was backlash by the workers against this vanishing era. They no longer felt like a family.

In summer 1970, AKA’s Willis (rumored to be an alcoholic) was able to get a new air route: to the U.S.S.R. Ironically, AKA had to lease a Pan Am 707 in order to do it. Willis became a drinking buddy to his Aeroflot counterparts. The passengers, who flew to Siberia, consisted mostly of Native Americans from Alaska visiting family, missionaries, and businessmen. They were treated to flatware made of gold, caviar in their Caesar salads, wine, and Russian samovars. The flight attendants dressed in Cossacks’ attire, with bear fur hats. Unsurprisingly, the flights proved insufficiently profitable over the course of three years.

AKA suffered less disastrous financial losses when the oil industry in Alaska kicked into high gear, in the late 1960’s. Oil-pipeline construction around Prudhoe Bay in the North Slope area became all the rage. From the Seattle-Tacoma airport, the airline’s Hercules’ C-130 planes transferred cargo, including hazardous materials that could accidentally cause a lot of wrongful deaths and property damage: 25,000 pounds of dynamite, heating and fuel oil and big, heavy drilling rigs for ground vehicles, and heaters.

In the early 1970’s, many pipeline workers liked hunting, but they got drunk before they flew home. AKA allowed rifles on their planes, so they hired the equivalent of bouncers who served as ground-crew screeners, and had a locked-up special gun-rack section in the front of the plane.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Alaska Airlines’ role in the development of aviation, people, power struggles, technologies, and the tenor of its times up until the book’s writing.

The second Book of the Week is “Retail Gangster, the Insane, Real-Life Story of CRAZY EDDIE” by Gary Weiss, published in 2020.

Currently fading from Americans’ memory, is “Crazy Eddie.” Launched in the mid-1970’s, it was a retail chain of electronics stores in the northeastern United States. The company became known for a spokesman who flooded all kinds of advertising media with emotionally-charged screaming, that Crazy Eddie’s prices were insane. The repetitive repetition of this singular message worked. Eddie projected an image of success that fed on itself.

However, from the start, the store’s top executive– Eddie Antar– committed financial crimes. He had selfish, greedy intent, unlike the aforementioned Alaska Airlines executives, who were merely big spenders out of unbridled optimism and honest ineptitude.

Starting in 1984 when the company sold shares to the public, Eddie and his key employees (mostly his relatives) engaged in securities fraud. They had ongoing, frantic bursts of activity in which they: “…stuffed cash in the ceiling, stole store sales-taxes, [plus, they falsified inventory records] and defrauded insurance companies without a second thought. They did not expect to be caught, and if the Antars had any doubt on that score, they had only to look to City Hall for inspiration.” New York City’s government had committed exactly the same kinds of accounting fraud for years and years, beginning in the 1960’s. As the behavioral-economics cliche goes, “The fish rots from the head down.”

By 1987, Crazy Eddie had 2,250 workers in 32 locations from Philadelphia to New England. Read the book to learn a slew of details on the fates of Eddie, his families, and his businesses.

An Ocean to Cross

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The Book of the Week is “An Ocean to Cross, Daring the Atlantic, Claiming A New Life” by Liz Fordred with Susie Blackmun, published in 2001.

The author was born in 1953 in Southern Rhodesia. By the late 1970’s, she and her husband were both wheelchair-bound, due to a horseback-riding accident and an auto accident, respectively. Gluttons for punishment that they were, they decided to pursue the husband’s idea of building a boat with their personal hands, customized for them, and sailing it across the Atlantic Ocean. Many people who cast doubt on their dream had no clue how persistent, creative and resourceful this couple was.

The two were able to cut through some bureaucratic red tape in their home country because there were so few people of fair skin, including them and their then-leader, Ian Smith. But they encountered numerous delays for various reasons, including lack of money, lack of experience in boat-building and sailing, and government regulations. Their native Rhodesia was in the midst of political turmoil, and they needed sailing-practice in a challenging geographic location.

So they moved their craft to the South African coast, where they had to deal with South African customs, and submit a mountain of paperwork for various other reasons, including financing their boat-construction and supplies through: a bank loan, getting articles on their story published, and attracting sponsors. A series of guardian angels provided assistance through the whole laborious process.

Of course, they underestimated how much the entire project would cost and how long it would take; just one example– they allocated four days, with the help of family and friends, to drive their multiple vehicles to transport the boat (which was still a work in progress) to the Royal Cape Yacht Club in Cape Town South Africa, their launching place. Read the book to learn about: how long it really took, the details of their whole ordeal, and their learning-experiences and growth; from start to finish.

S.O.S.

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The Book of the Week is “S.O.S., Spirit of Survival, One Family’s Chilling Account of the Costa Concordia Disaster” by Dean, Georgia, Valerie, Debbie, and Cindy Ananias, published in 2013. This informative, suspenseful horror story is a must-read for all travelers who go on cruises.

“People were freaking out in various languages and everything was mass confusion.” Such was the situation on the Mediterranean cruise, Costa Concordia in mid-January 2012. The trip turned out to be not just a ruined vacation for the Ananias family– the parents and two of three grown daughters– but a series of life-threatening traumas and insult-to-injury indignities.

About four thousand people found themselves on a sinking cruise late at night. There were indications from the start of the trip, that the captain and crew of the ship were disorganized, negligent and sorely lacking in customer service training and emergency preparedness.

One circumstance (just one of many) that exacerbated the disaster, was that the ship was listing so precariously, lifeboats on one side of it were prevented from reaching the water by the laws of physics. After much exhausting effort, an attempt to lower the lifeboats failed, and hundreds of passengers already in them had to be lifted out of them only to fret about what to do next, how to get off the sinking ship.

In disasters such as this, life-threatening elements (such as which side of a listing ship will have operable lifeboats) are difficult to predict, but passengers can use ounces of prevention, and should, for the entire duration of the cruise.

The following are just some of the actions that can save lives in worst-case scenarios (if the parties involved are not too vain and don’t care how they look):

  • wearing one’s life jacket all the time (there weren’t enough life jackets for all the people on the Costa Concordia);
  • keeping tightly snug in one’s pockets– a packet in a waterproof holder containing: one’s travel documents, wallet-contents, contact info of one’s homeland’s embassy in all countries where the cruise might get shipwrecked, emergency-contact info of one’s family and friends, and (if one is American) contact info of major media outlets so that one can publicize one’s horror story while it is happening in order get maximum compensation from the cruise-line’s lawyers who are experts at defending against any and all legal challenges from anyone harmed by the cruise line’s activities;
  • keeping a flashlight tightly snug in one’s pocket all the time;
  • wearing sturdy, but lightweight and comfortably but snugly fitting shoes (not high heels) all the time;
  • carrying a sweatshirt tied around one’s neck or waist all the time– in case an evacuation takes hours in freezing weather; and
  • knowing how to swim before cruising.

Another step passengers can take to avoid losing valuable items, includes not bringing fancy jewelry or fancy clothing in the first place!

Read the book to learn: everything you ever wanted to know about what the authors went through during the cruise’s sinking, and their tips on how to avoid what they went through.