In the Pilot's Lounge here at the virtual airport, the weather has been just plain foul. Our instrument-rated pilots have had the chance to shoot approaches pretty close to minimums. Talk has been an interesting juxtaposition of IFR procedures tied in somehow with the exploits of World War II bomber and fighter pilots who got the press and glory. It got me to thinking about the fact that weather in World War II would regularly get every bit as rotten as it does now and that the vast majority of daytime combat missions would be launched only if the weather forecast for the target area and the return was suitable for visual flight, especially as many of the fighters did not have the capability of making an instrument approach back at base. Yet, unsung and often ignored, those who were flying the transports to supply the glory boys in the fighters and bombers were routinely flying in the weather that grounded combat operations. And I thought of my good friend, Dave Hertel, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, now in his 80s, and compared his instrument operations in the 1940s to that of today, for I am afraid we have become complacent ... .

Today we rise from the earth in our machines, navigate using some of the most sophisticated technology known, and let down to a point 200 feet above the ground, when visibility is merely a half mile, spy a runway and alight upon it. Almost without exception, we then congratulate ourselves for our skill and daring without considering that the boxes on the panel will take us by the nose and lead us to the runway, and that any failure to arrive at the desired location is, in truth, probably because we err. To top it off, most of us proceed to pat ourselves on the back the moment the mains touch, because our machines have the steering gear in the front so, even on a windy day, it takes a feckless dolt to lose control once rolling along the ground.

We may have become proud and thus perhaps test the patience of the gods aeronautical. I suggest we remember those who preceded us in the skies and maybe acquire a bit of humility in the process.

Dave Hertel and his Army Air Force compatriots based in India provide sterling examples of members of our fraternity flying regularly in truly awful instrument conditions every single day while sometimes being shot at. As humble seekers of knowledge it might do us well to tread among those giants of a prior generation and listen to what sort of instrument flying they did, and learn from it.

World War II was well under way, and events and a determined enemy had conspired so successfully that the Allies fighting in China found themselves in the position of having to obtain virtually all of their supplies via airplanes if they wished to continue hostilities. Despite the remarkable advances in load-carrying ability of airplanes since the days of the Wrights, supplying a military operation via airlift had never been successful. The logistics of supplying a large group of people who both desired to eat and hurl mechanical invective at an opponent were simply staggering. Needed material was measured in thousands of tons per day in a time when few of the transports in existence could even carry ten tons of payload. The Army pilots also faced an additional, niggling variable: they would have to cart all of the needed bits and pieces over the highest mountain range in the world, itself a generator of some of the meanest weather imaginable.