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Blind
Flyer
Captain Charles G. Fredericks is a twenty-nine-year-old expert in
blind flying and, like experts the world over, a serious man. That’s
the reason he isn’t smiling in the picture on our cover this month,
the second of a series of portraits of people in various professions and
occupations. When Harry Trede and James Lemmerz were battling high winds
to get his photograph at
Newark
Airport
, one of them leaned from his ladder to ask for a smile. “No,”
Captain Fredericks called back. “It isn’t that kind of a job.”
Sometime before that, he and Mrs. Fredericks were in Jack Dempsey’s
restaurant in
New York
. A waiter brought a message from another table, a message asking
whether he was Gary Cooper. Mrs. Fredericks, who comes from
New Orleans
, wanted him to say yes, but Captain Fredericks wouldn’t do that
either.
His job is twofold: piloting a TWA transport on the
New York
-
Los Angeles
line and instructing TWA copilots in blind flying. As a pilot he is
especially noted for his timing. Let him say he’s bringing his ship
into
Newark
at 10:30 a.m., only to arrive at at 10:31, and he’ll find people
standing around, shaking their heads and wondering what’s up.
His
blind flying work has earned him the term “Professor.” He’s one of
the pioneers in this, but it’s far too intricate to explain. He goes
up with a pilot, puts him “under the hood” where he can’t see a
thing, and he himself stays out in the open, talking to pilot by phone.
Sometimes Captain Fredericks teaches the pilot, sometimes he merely
gives him a test in blind-flying --
instrument-flying, as the airlines call it.
The
Captain has had 4600 hours aloft, 2000 of them blind flying. He was born
in
Chicago
and learned aviation at at the Great Lakes Training Station of the
Marine Corps. For a while he was in
New Orleans
, flying mail down to Pilotstown and ships going out to sea. Later he
taught blind flying in
Los Angeles
, where he attracted the attention of Transcontinental and Western Air ,
Inc. He has been with TWA since 1935, part of the time at
Kansas City
and more recently in the East. He and Mrs. Fredericks live in
East Orange
– in a house with a view of the
New York
skyline. Mrs. Fredericks flies a little herself, in good weather, but
her husband didn’t teach her. She got her flying lessons from Colleen
Moore’s brother – it seems that like bridge lessons they shouldn’t
come from husbands.
Captain Fredericks is a reserve officer in the Marine corps, which
thereby gets part of his summers. He goes in heavily for tennis,
swimming and golf, holds the bowling record at the Newark Athletic Club,
and plays a good game of bridge. He doesn’t play poker, for the reason
that he doesn’t like to gamble. To him, a precise aviator, it’s like
smiling for cameramen.
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