Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "PeriscopeFilm" channel.

  1. "Space Cadet". Good username. Railroads have been one of the largest taxpaying industries in country. The railroads long ago pad the government back for their land grants in the 1800's. The railroad accident rate has been in a constant decline since about 1995 and is now the lowest in history for fatal crashes. Railroads have been winning freight traffic back from long haul trucks because of their on-time deliveries compared to trucks fighting the heavy traffic on freeways, something the government built. And who exactly was supposed to pay for this nationwide system of monorails? The railroads, that were rarely profitable in the 1950's? No, it would have to be done by the taxpayer. And what exactly would have been gained by constructing monorails. Even now, the longest monorail in the world is only 60.8 miles while the longest maglev lines 19 miles. Both of these systems are in China and both were built by the government. The technical and financial issues with maglevs make it impossible to built a nationwide system. Typical monorails have no speed advantage over high speed trains already in service in many parts of the world, but they do have horrendously high costs of maintenance, another good reason why no country has thousands of miles of monorails in service. Building high speed rail lines for passengers might make sense, but you can't build a high speed line that competes with jets for long haul routes. Long distance commuter serve the likes the Northeast Corridor where we already have trains running at 120-150 mph. Other high speed lines with speeds of 220 mph are in the works for lines where passenger traffic will support them. That's a faster speed than any monorail. It sounds like you actually know very little about railroads.
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  2. The aircraft in the movie is a C-82 Packet, as the pilot said at 2:04. It was the predecessor to C-119 Flying Boxcar, which was a larger, faster aircraft. The last few Packets were retired in 1954 after a production run of only about 200. The C-119 was much more successful. It had a production run of more than 1,100. They flow in roles from freighter to medical evacuation to gunship until 1976. Retired USAF aircraft were modified with a jet pod on the top of the fuselage and used as fire tankers. Unfortunately, wear on the airframes and age, since many were about 35 years old, led to permanent grounding in 1987.
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  3. It is indeed a DC-7B. The four bladed props give it away, but the extra fuel tanks built into the rear of the engine nacelles mark it as either an SAA or Pan Am plane, the only ones to have these tanks. We obviously know this is a SAA flight, so it's a DC-7B. It was the first pressurized aircraft owned by SAA, and the four examples carried all the long haul traffic for the airline until the arrival of the first 707s in 1960. They had a brief engagement with two Comet 1s leased from BOAC, but the fleet was grounded after one of them crashed into the Mediterranean in 1954, and SAA never flew a Comet again. The flight was a very long 18 hours on the DC-7. It was restful in terms of things like meals and how you were treated, but it was a noisy plane and almost 100 mph slower than the Comet. The DC-7 also required a stop in Khartoum to refuel. The 707 was able to fly non-stop from London to Johannesburg in 14 hours or less depending on headwinds. Unfortunately, that only lasted a few years as more and more countries in Africa denied SAA use of their air space, and detours out over water brought the flight time back to the days of the DC-7.
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  4. The biplane trainer was the Boeing/Stearman PT-13/17. They were what almost all military pilots used in the first phase of training, and over 10,000 were built. The low wing monoplane was the Vultee BT-13 Valiant, the next step up from the biplane. The next step was not shown in flight, but the T-6 Texan retractable gear trainer was shown facing the cadets in several shots. They were the planes at 13:39 being used to sight in their machine guns. The T-6 was built to be a lead in for single engine fighter training. The T-6 was easily the longest lived in service of any of the aircraft seen. It wasn't retired by USAF as a trainer until 1959, but a few served as counter insurgency aircraft in Vietnam, while others flew in the same role in places like Algeria and Angola. The last T-6 in military service was retired from the South African Air Force in 1995. Several hundred are still flying today as warbirds and in air races. The twin engine craft In the row facing the cadets are Cessna AT-17 Bobcats. This was the standard twin engine trainer of AAF for the whole war. Generally, pilots who weren't successful as single engine fighter pilots had the chance to fly multi engine aircraft instead. Some, wanting to be bomber pilots, chose to go to multi engine training as soon as basic flight training was completed. Almost 6,000 AT-17s were built, and they were commonly used as "station hacks" for the CO and XO to keep up their flying hours, and general transports for other pilots from the base. Pilots being trained at March Field in Riverside reputedly used AT-17s to visit brothels across the border in Nevada, many of which had their own airstrips. Some went for the swimming pools, horseback riding, tennis, and excellent meals, along with gambling in the small casinos of the larger brothels. The single rooms each had comfortable beds with top grade mattresses, a radio in each room, big bathtubs and showers, plenty of hot water, and, most importantly, air conditioning. The price of a room without female accompaniment was only $2 a night, and that included a steak dinner at some of them. That was a pretty nice way to spend the weekend after barracks life. The madams knew what to do to make sure the pilots would keep coming back. Of course, others went for more nefarious purposes, but the pilots of March field were setting the scene for the resort hotel casinos of the Vegas we know today. The fighters were were twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the Bell P-39 Airacobra. The P-39 was already obsolescent by mid-1942 and was only used for training in the US, although we sent thousands to the USSR on Lend Lease. It was a well loved airplane there. The four engine bomber was, of course, the famous B-17 Flying Fortress. It was in use from before the war all they way to the end of it and after. The film must have been made in late 1942. The red "meatball" that was in the center of the star marking was removed in May 1942. The B-17s shown are F models, not put in squadron use until June, 1942. The film was careful not to show our more modern fighters like the P-47 Thunderbolt or P-51 Mustang
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  5. 1918-1919 was a real pandemic, not like we've had in past year and a half. When we get to the point we are carrying two or three bodies from a workplace in a day, then I'll start worrying.
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  6. More Diabetes = More Safety....
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  7. It's highly unlikely the humidity during the day was 90%. I live in one of the most humid areas of the country. On a summer day with a temperature of 93, the dewpoint is typically about 72. That's a humidity of 51%. That's still very high, it just doesn't sound that high. A hot day up north might still be 93 but the dewpoint is normally about 60. That's a humidity of 37%. Still unpleasant, but not like a humid day in the South. I'm old enough to have lived about half my life without A/C in my home or car. After living the second half with it, I'd never be without it again. Even if it was possible to stand it during the day, it's sleeping that's the killer. I well remember as a kid having my pillow laid out on the window sill, trying to catch a breeze. One of the reasons why crimes against persons goes up during a prolonged heat wave in the big cities of the north is irritability from lack of sleep. No matter what the cost, I just couldn't survive without A/C again.
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  8. I love the Caribbean, but things were different in 1948. The idea of being "whisked" there in a couple hours from Miami in an unpressurized, non-air conditioned DC-4, bumping along at 15,000 feet while dodging thunderstorms in not my idea of being whisked now. At 560 miles, it wasn't exactly a fast trip in a plane cruising at about 220 mph. The four hours time from Trinidad to Jamaica must have been on a Constellation since it was the only plane flying in 1948 with the required cruising speed of 350 mph. It would have been a lot more pleasant than the DC-4 since it was pressurized, air conditioned, and cruised at 23,000 feet. That '48 Chrysler woody cab may still be driving around Havana for all I know. The Tropicana was the premiere nightclub/casino during the postwar period and up to Castro's takeover in 1959. The casino was run by Mafia mobsters during the 50's after most had left the US during the times of Keufhaufer hearings. Although the casino is going, the Trop is still there, with the lavish shows and showgirls not much changed from 1948. Unfortunately, I was a mere 13 years old when Castro "liberated" Cuba, so it's the one Caribbean island I've never seen. San Juan has turned into a huge third world dump. The big hotel/casinos are, of course, safe and nice to visit, and Old San Juan is still safe and a tourist mecca, at least during the day. The rest of the city has been left to rot as Puerto Rico teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. The murder rate is about the same as Chicago, and police and government corruption is common. I haven't been back since Hurricane Maria last year, but I imagine things are even worse. Jamaica in 1948, and Kingston in particular, had one of the lowest murder rate in the world, even lower than London. Police were unarmed and, from what residents of Jamaica have told me. it really was a tropical paradise. After independence in 1962, drugs and drug gangs became a growing problem, and the police were generally armed by 1990. The murder rate is one of the highest in the world, and the police are now armed to the teeth, but very poorly trained. It's the only place in the Caribbean I've ever been caught in the middle of a gunfight. The special drug squad had apparently cornered several gang members at an outdoor cafe almost in the heart of downtown Kingston, and the police were determined to take them into custody. The gang members were just as determined not to be. The result was a 15 minute gun battle with automatic weapons on both sides. All my late wife and I could do is huddle in a doorway and keep our heads down as rounds whizzed around us. I was a police officer in the US at the time, and it was one of the few times traveling overseas that I wish I had my gun. There are some very nice resorts on the north coast like Ocho Rios and Negril that were still safe the last time I was there in 2003. If you decide to visit Jamaica, go to the north coast and try to get a flight into Sangster International (MJB) in Montego Bay. It's modern, air conditioned, and efficient. It allows you to avoid all the problems of Kingston.
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  9. The vessel in the film is actually HMS Londonderry, a Rothesay class frigate, commissioned in 1958. She was built for antisubmarine warfare, so that's why the ASDIC room was shown, although a submarine used by drug smugglers, especially penicillin smugglers, was doubtful at best. The film must have been made sometime after 1969 when the flight deck and hangar were added aft for the small Westland Wasp helicopter. The rifles shown were L1A1 SLR's, but they were never made in the automatic version for general service, regardless of the amount of automatic fire shown. The actual automatic weapons shown were the Sterling submachine guns, carried by both the landing party and the smugglers, and a Thompson submachine gun in the hands of one of the smugglers, complete with the iconic 50 round drum magazine
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  10. Sorry, Bernie is out trying to find a job.
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  11. Between the Navy and the Air Force, almost 600 F-4 Phantom II's were lost in the Vietnam War to all causes. That was about 1/3 of all the F-4's deployed to Vietnam. 201 A-1's were lost to all causes, not just combat, in the same period in the war, about 20% of the number deployed. Two A-1's shot down two NVA MiG-17's while two A-1's were lost to MiG-17's. Your argument that sending A-1"s into combat in Vietnam was suicide is hardly persuasive.
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  12. Unfortunately, your counter box at the bottom covers the copyright date, but this film was made in 1967, so it's not the 50's. This was part of a series made for Civil Defense covering various aspects of the bomb shelter and how to manage one.
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  13.  @bobrand3895  Yes, grabbed it, because it was just laying in the streets back then. They worked hard for what they got. Unfortunately, they also raised children who expected things to be given to them, and they raised children that think socialism is a cool thing.
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  14. Sounds like a couple of LAPD dispatchers were used in this one. I started in 1978, and I'm pretty sure I saw this one in the academy.
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  15. Here was the problem. When their marketing people said Americans wanted smaller cars, management thought "Cheap". When they said better gas mileage, management thought "Underpowered". When they were told Americans still wanted a small car to be well built, they thought "Cheap". GM management could never get out of the "Small = Cheap" mindset. That's how we got the Vega.
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  16. The copyright is on the opening credits - 1946.
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  17. Bit having the Thousand Year Reich curb stomped into submission in twelve years isn't a fairytal., Teddy?
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  18. Officer Jim Daniels and his pearl handle .38. Those were the days.
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  19. I'm amazed the the Army wouldn't have filmed this in color. Color movie film was common in 1953, and color views of France would have made the film at least a little more interesting.
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  20. The prototype Viscount was introduced in 1949 in time for the Farnsbouth show. The Hunter prototype likewise first flew in 1949. In addition, do you think the makers of the film put the wrong date in the title? It's pretty clear you don't know much about real airplanes. Maybe all your model building over the past three years has helped you learn.
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  21. The Duramold process wasn't well suited for aircraft. Early models of the AT-21 had significant cracking problems due to vibration and delamination when used in humid environments. Howard Hughes was a great believed in laminated wood being the aircraft composite structure of the future, and it was the only easily available material to use for his famous HC-4, better known as the Spruce Goose. Even the lightness of Duramold wood wasn't enough to make the HC-4 a military or commercial load carrier due to its great size and underpowered engines. It was also a seaplane at a time that seaplanes were already becoming obsolescent.
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  22. Bayer-Semesan was a product line that lasted from 1929 to 1943. It became Du Pont Semesan Company from 1943 to 1946, after which it became part of Grasselli Chemical Company. Given the Pan Am Clipper is the only vehicle of any kind shown in the movie, my guess is this was made immediately prewar, sometime between 1939 and 1940.
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  23. 59,000 miles and the old jalopy is already shot. I have a 2006 Suzuki Grand Vitara with 131,000 miles and it just had its first failure - the power window on the driver's side quit. I am old enough to remember when a car with 75,000 really was shot.
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  24.  @jackofalltrades8353  I'll tell you what, boss, go back and do those calculations against the debt. I already have, and it still won't pay off the construction costs of the dams and turbines. There was already a lot of hydro power in Ontario, and the Saunders project was built with the idea of supplying power to all the industries that were going to locate in New York and Ontario. Instead, it was completed just in time for the industries already there to shut down and move to of the country. The power generation has not only not paid for itself, they had to spend another $254 million to correct faults in the construction of the powerhouse and generators , and they are still settling continuing lawsuits over all the land seized for the reservoir. Do some research next time.
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  25. Given that WWII started in September, 1939, it seems pretty doubtful that anyone was taking a pleasure cruise on the Rhine. It's even more doubtful the Germans would have allowed such a thing to filmed in any case.
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  26. The frontline planes shown in the film are the Curtis P-36 Hawk, a brief shot of the P-40 Warhawk, the Boeing XB-15, Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, Northrop A-17 light bomber, Bell YFM-1 Airacuda, and the Douglas B-18 Bolo. Of those, only the P-40 and B-17 turned out to be successful combat aircraft. The B-18 achieved some success as an antisubmarine aircraft but was never used as a bomber. All the rest of the frontline aircraft were hopelessly obsolete by 1940 with the P-36 not the equal to any frontline German or Japanese fighter. B-18 was too slow and had too small a bomb load to have any serious use as a bomber. The A-17 was in use long after single engine bombers were shown to be too slow, too small, and had a weak defensive armament. Of all these though the Airacuda was the most disastrous failure. It was supposed to be the first real fighter bomber, able to bring down enemy bombers, engage in dogfights with enemy fighters, and able to be used as a bomber when required. It was also the only pusher aircraft until the postwar B-36. It was slow, the 37mm cannon fired too slow, the bomb load too small, and the handling was described from "challenging" to "downright dangerous". The 13 examples were rarely flown due the pilots hatred of the plane. It was so bad that by 1942, when the US needed almost anything that would fly, the 13 examples, that never entered operational service, were unceremoniously declared surplus and scrapped.
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  27. Really. If it was a complete victory, we would have had something like a black man elected President for two two terms, a black female Vice-President, black Supreme Court justices, eleven black senators, 57 black Members of Congress, black mayors of almost all large American cities, almost 35% of police officers in large cities are black...yeah, a real incomplete victory.
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  28.  @bermudezhg  Would you like to be speaking German or Japanese and living under a totalitarian government with death camps and no rights at all? .Does it hurt to be that stupid?
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  29.  @LC-jy8mj  Does it hurt to be this stupid?
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  30. Yes, because Neoarsphenamine, the only drug available at the time, wasn't a cure. It only stopped the bacteria from being damaging for a short period of time and had to be re-administered to be effective. This is why syphilis was mostly an uncontrolled disease until penicillin came along in the 1940's.
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  31. Probably not. It was only needed in places where the demand for phone exceeded the number of lines available. I don't think the post WWII demand for phone service in France was very high until maybe the mid-50s'. By that time, multiple conductor lines had replaced older single conductor copper, so line capacity was probably not a big issue. It would rear its ugly head again with the advent of the internet and dial up. Lines occupied for hours on end was never envisioned by telephone planners in 1946.
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  32. I was surprised at that also. Every K Ration had at least a 3 pack (with some 4 packs and sometimes a 9 pack) of one of about 10 brands of smokes. The government paid for these, which is why the brands were rotated. Almost any of the tobacco companies would have provided these cigarettes for free (as they did for many military hospitals) but the military did not want to be seen as promoting one brand of cigarettes. The lucky soldiers found one of the popular brands like Luckies, Chesterfield, or Camels while the unlucky were stuck with less popular brands like Wings and Carven-A. This practice continued up until 1975, substituting popular postwar brands like Marlboro and Salem for less popular brands, when it was decided that soldiers didn't need to get free smokes. Soldiers of the era when a meal also meant a couple free smokes have lamented the decision ever since.
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  33. Wolfman Jack on AFRN. You can tell the armed forces had really loosened up by 1971. We can date this one pretty precisely. The Alaska DJ plays a song called "Absolutely Right" by The Five Man Electrical Band. That song was a hit in Canada and Alaska during the winter of 1971. That coincides with the 42 below lament of the DJ so this movie had to be made in 1971 or 1972. "Laugh In" was at its height of popularity in 1971 and had stated to fade by 1972, so my vote is 1971.
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  34. I don't think six years qualifies as "just after". It's small thing anyway, but now we at least have a good approximate date.
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  35. It's hard to realize at this late date what a massive airplane the DC-2 and DC-3 was when it was first introduced. It had the sleekness of the Vultee V-1 and the DC-2 two more seats than that of the Condor. That went up to nine nine more seats on the DC-3. The early DC series aircraft pointed to the future of airliners while the Vultee and Curtis models were both made obsolete by the DC's. The next big leap in airliners wouldn't take place until the introduction of the jets in the mid to late 50's.
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  36. That has to be the most irritating radio jingle ever. I guess it was considered pretty cool before we got into the robotic voice era.
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  37. Ironically, assuming this was actually filmed in 1946, 20mm guns started being removed from ships less than two years later. The 20mm was too light for the new, heavier jet fighters and bombers. The Navy was moving to all radar directed gunfire, and the 20mm gun wasn't set up for remote firing. In addition, each gun required a crew of two, and two more armorers were required for each battery of four guns to reload the ammo drums and repair and maintain the guns. A cruiser was generally armed with about sixty 20mm guns. That required about 150 crew, and that was a lot of berthing and messing space for guns that were increasingly ineffective. The rearming of destroyer size and larger vessels with twin 3"/50 automatic, radar controlled gun mounts and removal of all the 20mm and 40mm guns provided much more effective AA protection for only about half the required crew. Within fifteen years, many of the 3"/50 guns were removed in favor of 20mm very rapid fire, fully automatic Phalanx gun mounts and surface to air missiles. Time marches on.
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  38. Not quite true. A Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, similar to the USAF C-97, ditched in the Pacific on October 16, 1956. Through a series of skilled maneuvers. a Coast Guard cutter standing by to pick up survivors, not one of the 31 crew and passengers abosrd died.
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  39. There were no jet powered passenger planes in 1940. The opening scenes are of the interior and exterior of the Douglas DC-4E. It wasn't related to the smaller but successful DC-4/C-54. The DC-4E was classed as an experimental version of the DC-4 but almost nothing except the tricycle landing gear was reused in the later DC-4. The DC-4E was too large for airline passenger demand n 1938 at 52 seats, was unreliable., complex, and slow, with a cruising speed slower than the twin engine DC-3. The single example was sold to Imperial Japanese Airways in late 1939. The Japanese government invented a cover story that the aircraft crashed into Tokyo Bay shortly after delivery. It was actually being reversed engineered into the Nakajima G5N bomber, as unsuccessful as the DC-4E.
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  40. Holy cow! A car that could burn rubber? Swell! Make a note of that too, would you, Pat? Don't worry about the nausea from trying to write in a moving car. It will go away within a couple hours after we stop, Pat. And get us out to that polo field, Pat. The average 1953 American watches polo every weekend!
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  41. So how many cars carried them part of the way there? How did they get all those bedrolls and food and supplies in one '46 Ford? They cooked supper over an open fire...in a fireplace? Who did KP duty? Then they had a nice clean cabin with their own beds, not cots or bunks? No pup tents, no bugs, no sleeping bags, no having it pour all night until your tent was flooded and everything you owned was wet, so you spent most of the night shivering? Where were things like canteens while there were rambling around making a map with on compass? And who made those flapjacks in the morning? Camping with the Girl Scouts was sure a lot different than camping when I was in the Boy Scouts.
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  42. The series was produced by Airborne Productions Inc. California National was the company that packaged the show and sold it to the TV networks and stations.
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  43.  @kingduckford  True, but I think a lot of that technology has been the cause of the other degeneracy I mentioned.
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  44. The revised movie was released in 1952. Most of the stainless steel cars are post WWII. The New York Central E-7 locomotives with the large number boxes weren't built until 1949. Most of the cabs are 1948-9 Chryslers with very few pre-war Checkers. The UN building was just under construction in 1948 and completed in 1952. The SS United States. the large liner shown several times, wasn't christened until 1951. The radio station section and experimental TV were both from the 1942 film. It would appear that large sections of the 1942 movie were junked and 1952 footage substituted. Most of the NYC passenger fleet was still heavyweight cars and many of the trains were still pulled by streamlined steam locomotives. I suspect that the movie had the misfortune of being released just before Pearl Harbor. No NYC tourism movie was going to get any theater time after Pearl Harbor. Once the war was over, all the train footage would have to be reshot since the NYC management wanted to show off the new postwar trains. They also had to be reshot a lot of the street footage since 1q941 cars looked old by 1948. They used the 1942 footage when they could but it must have been an expensive undertaking to shoot new film and then intersperse the new footage with the old. The NYC was unfortunate again because, in that same ten year period between the old and new move, many of the passenger trains had ceased to exist, and the NYC was getting reading to merge with the Pennsylvania RR to form the Penn Central, another disaster for the NYC. The NYC then ceased to exist, at least the end of their long string of bad luck.
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  45. Zoran (are you Slovenian), I think I answered your question on how the system handled calls. There was a capacity of six or twelve channels and everyone else had to wait. The phone company would cut you off after five minutes unless you had a good reason you needed the line longer and had permission from the operator. Cars were bigger then and, even though you needed a big trunk, the control head under the dash was generally small enough to fit. As to making it work today, no, not possible. Cell phone frequencies are much higher today so there's no operator to take the call. Worse, there are police and fire departments that were allowed to use the old MTS frequencies when they migrated to higher frequencies. If you found one of those old radios that still worked and was hooked to power (a very unlikely thing, I'd add), pushing that button on the handset might interfere with emergency traffic, something that theoretically could get you a couple years at Leavenworth if you kept playing with it.
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  46.  @arthurmartins5495  If that's true, you have no excuse for pushing an historical falsehood. However, I've met many Portuguese living Brazil. I have no idea how you could buy into this lie without some family connection to Brazil.
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  47. Yes, well, so did Sweden,Brazil, Japan, France, and Columbia, to name a few. It just makes more sense to credit Sweden in the title since Bofors, as Swedish company, what the developer of this rocket system. The Bofors system was most widely deployed in the Japanese navy with 20 launchers and the French navy with 17 systems, compared to 6 for India.
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  48.  @small_ed  Sure. Information from a noted antisemitic, racist, and neonazi site is sure to have the "real" story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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  49. There was never was a USS Montana. in WWII. There was a planned USS Montana, an enlarged Iowa class battleship, but it was canceled in 1943 when it became clear it wouldn't be ready before the likely end of the war. I assume they used the name of this fictional vessel so it wouldn't reflect badly on a real warship.
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  50. Stuart Legg was quite a famous documentary filmmaker. He did work for the British and Canadian governments from 1933 until the end of WWII, winning the first Oscar for a Documentary Short Subject for "Churchill's Island in 1941 and was nominated for his 1944 production "Warclouds in the Pacific". He continued to produce documentaries after the war, including this one for Shell in 1937. He also wrote "The Barbarians of Asia" in 1970. He died in 1988 at the age of 77. Legg was the uncredited narrator of the film and was undoubtedly responsible for the high production values of what was essentially a long commercial for Shell.
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