“I’m currently majoring in general studies, but I’m planning to go into aerospace engineering and management. Aerospace is planes and space, and I’m interested in both.

“I dream about one day mass producing planes that can serve as personal vehicles. I’d like to see if that could be a viable thing. The goal, really, is to just make transportation better overall.

“I’m sure it would be controversial. But it’s all about political will at some point. You never know when people will move. You never know when everyone will all of a sudden agree to do something.

“There are a million things we could do, but we’re not doing them because not enough people are agreeing on it. But sometimes there are these points in history, sort of like golden ages, when everyone is like, hey, let’s actually implement these things. And they go on to become part of our technology.

“Looking back, sometimes it’s just circumstances. It’s when the need strikes. And sometimes it’s just because of one person. Think about Thomas Edison, and the thousands of inventions he had. He was this one person who inspired everyone to do certain things.

“I have this admiration for heroic people like that. They don’t come along very often. But when they do, they can make such a great impact on the world.”

— Linus Jingco

The post He has some grand transportation dreams appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I would fly out to Las Vegas to play in pool tournaments, and I would see people my age as flight attendants. I thought, ‘Man, this looks like a lot of fun. If I ever decide to go back to work fulltime after I retire, I want to be a flight attendant.’

“I’ve been doing it now for 13 years. I just turned 74 in August. We have one guy in Orlando who turned 82 in June. He’s still a flight attendant, and he works circles around younger people. I was on a flight one day, and there were four of us. One was 75. I think I was 71 at the time. The next oldest guy was in his mid-60s, and we had a youngster of like 46.

“I still love what I do. I really enjoy getting away and taking a three-day vacation. A friend of mine, a fellow flight attendant and retired preacher, said to me one time, ‘This is not a job. It’s a paid vacation.’ And that’s what it feels like.

“From the time I was a kid, I’ve always loved airplanes. There’s just something about them. When you’re young, you would look up in the sky and think, ‘Where are they going now?’

“And now, when I’m up in the sky and looking down at all those little cars driving around, I think, ‘I wonder where they’re going. I wonder what they’re doing in their lives.’ Looking out of airplane windows is so much fun. I love it.”

— Tom Shelby

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“When I was young, I built model airplanes. I always wanted to fly. During World War II, I joined the Army Air Corps.

“My last training flight was cross-country at night in a twin-engine plane. I was stationed in Pecos, Texas. When I got over Big Spring, one engine quit and we were losing about 500 feet a minute. I tried to make it into the airfield there. I could have made it, but then the other engine quit and we just went down.

“We clipped a couple of trees and braced ourselves for the crash. We hit about a mile from the end of the runway. Fortunately, as soon as we hit the ground and stopped, my co-pilot and I were able to get out of the plane and we weren’t hurt too bad.

“After nearly two years of training, we thought for sure we’d be eliminated from pilot training because anybody who had a crash was usually washed out. Luckily, I grabbed the logbook from the plane and had it with me when they took us in an ambulance to the hospital. The logbook saved us. It showed that both engines were way overdue for being overhauled. That plane shouldn’t have been flying.

“The guys back at our home base heard that we crashed and thought we had been killed. When we returned the next day, we went to sleep on our cots because we were so tired. When the other guys walked in and saw us there, they thought we were dead. We sure surprised them when we both sat up. It scared the heck out of them.”

— Orton Lamb

(Note: Orton Lamb passed away on Jan. 7, 2019, at age 93.)

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