Word: patterson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though he has learned to fly in the 1,200,000 miles he has ridden airlanes since 1929, Patterson looks, talks, and dresses more like the banker he started out to be. Small (5 ft. 5 in.), pale-faced, with sharp brown eyes, he usually dresses somberly in grey or black pin-striped suits, lets his dreams fly no higher than his staff of air economists permits...
...helicopter-in-every-garage school which flourished during the war, he says "nuts." When the talk (emotional thinking, he calls it) was perfervid of a sky black with planes-and no one riding the railroads-Patterson snapped: "If all the hot air on the subject circulating today were stored, it would create enough energy to fly all the planes in the U.S. without gasoline...
Blow Cold. Patterson thinks the airplane is still in the taxicab stage, and that the day of cheap mass transportation is years away. Nor does he think that some magical new discovery will hasten things much. He believes in inch-by-inch progress all down the line-starting, for example, by cleaning up the washrooms in airports. The recent squabble over whether airlines shall use G.C.A. (Ground Controlled Approach) or I.L.S. (Instrument Landing System) seems silly to him. Says he: "We need them both, one to check on the other. And we shouldn't use them until we learn...
...followed. They will not be able to use it for months, till I.L.S. ground equipment is installed in enough airports. But when it is, the lines will be ready to use it. If everyone sweats enough, and the new planes and safety devices work as well as expected, Pat Patterson expects that air travel will be as regular and safe as train travel in about three years. Then the air age will have arrived...
...Blow Hard. As a prophet, Patterson has acquired much honor, but he has not become cocky. Once, a little over a year ago, he nearly did. He was talking about United's safety record (no fatalities in over 3½ years). "Why," he boasted in a speech, "even if we had an accident tonight, I would still believe that it is a good record." That night United did have a crash on Elk Mountain, Wyoming (21 killed), the worst in United's history. Pat has never forgotten that lesson. Despite his habit of being right, he gets...