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No sir, the time has arrived when the pilots themselves, not the CAA, not the operators, not the ATA, should formulate the operating policies as regards safety. We do not have to accept the safety requirements of their totally unsatisfactory "T" category. We can set our foot down and refuse to fly the machines that represent every foolish whim which besets a designer who can't do anything wrong worse than break his pencil lead. We have been operating illegally out of many airports in this country for years as regard the one-engine inoperative section. This section states that the airplane must be able to clear every obstruction climbing out of the airport in the event of an engine failure at critical flight speed by at least 50 feet. What a joke! Ask any pilot on any airline if he can't think of at least a half dozen airports which fail to meet this requirement. They may name more than that. I'm sure I can name a dozen.

The peremptory manner in which the CAB has found the pilot guilty in a number of recent accidents after disregarding pertinent facts about the accident drives me into a vitriolic vein every time I meet an inspector who appears eager or willing to listen to me expostulate. The CAB’s latest faux pas is their release of November 12, 1947, on the United accident at Cleveland on Armistice Day, 1946. They say that Captain Brown ( a comparative neophyte with only 8340 hours) lined up the runway lights of the southwest runway with the “dark, unsettled section of woods north of the airport, mistaking it for the large landing mat in the middle of the airport which is likewise unlighted". They admit what every airline pilot who uses the Cleveland airport has known all along, that the airport is inadequately lighted. It is the most overrated airport in the country after the sun goes down. The lighting is lousy and everybody knows it but what do they do about it? The CAB washes its skirts of any responsibility by saying, "No detailed standards were in existence at the time of the accident by which the adequacy of airport lighting could be determined, this evaluation being accomplished through the discretion of the individual CAA's inspector concerned". Nuts! How can you win? What I want the Board to sell me on is this: How could Captain Brown be so stupid as to line up the three green lights at the end of Runway 23 with the dark woods to the northwest, when to have done so he would have flown over these three lights paralleling their lines? Any dummy knows that when he is lined up correctly the green lights at the end of the runway are lined up across his flight path, not parallel to it. That is, any dummy buy a CAB politician who wouldn't know a green runway light from a red light burning in a brothel window.

I just know I'm going to blow my tip when the PCA accident at Leesburg, Va. is publicized as "pilot error". I have read already where the CAB has found the cause from Horace Stark to hit a 1600-foot ridge to lie in his desire to avoid a 1-hour traffic delay in the stack at WA. True, he did report a few minutes earlier that he as proceeding CFR , but many things could have happened after that. Here are some facts: Horace Stark, who had 14,000 hours and must have made at least 4 or 5 thousand trips across that same ridge, was one of the finest airline pilots in the profession. His memory will always be revered by anybody who ever sat beside him in the cockpit. His ability has not been questioned by a single person since his death, and you must admit that this is truly remarkable. There are always those of us who will allow a little doubt to enter our minds and allow us to