I am 84 years old(on July 2 2009) and am in one piece…no crushed limbs, an intact head, and a thin but functional body.

That’s all the more exceptional when you add-up my hours in the air as a passenger.  I find the number of miles to be just over one million!

  There is a mundane reason for that…for years I was a “courier” for the United States, which meant that I took and received messages from Washington, D.C. and the Presidency and the Department of State to I think all of the major countries in the world, amd ,and many of the tiny ones.

  But the air business started in World War II, when I was on my way home from WWII and a job as guard to General Eisenhower to atttend officer training school at Princeton University.  I went aboard a C-52 aircraft  in Scotland, and was one of three passengers on board…the rest of the space was occupied by a huge radar system bolted to the floor.

  We stopped briefly at Lisbon Portugal where Nazi planes were parked next to us..it was a “neutral” country…then we took off for the 800 miles to the American base of Terceira in the Azores.

  That base was upon a high cliff 800 feet above the ocean, so our pilot, not having been there before, flew below the cliff then gunned up to land at the end of the runway;  my next consciousness was waking up in the base hospital, knocked out but not hurt.  The plane was destroyed, rolling over on landing.  The pilot, crew, and other two passengers were also bruised survivors.

  Add  up number One of many for the Air God!

Next crash was to take place between New York and Boston many years later…we were flying from NYC to the big bean pot when halfway there, the pilot announced the death of one of the two engines.  He started looking for an airport, but found none, so settled for a long beach in Rhode Island.  The other engine quit!

  This plane was a British jet assist two engined thing, and though it flew to pieces on contact with the sand, we thirty-eight passengers and the crew were only bruised.

  Chalk up two to the Air God!

    The next bad flight was in a single-engine Hurel-Dubois, with me as pilot.  I was alone with diplomatic mail stowed in the tiny one-engine plane behind my seat.  I was attemptng to land at Sidi Bel Abbes in Africa, when a large transport plane appeared by me and usurped my space.

  The outside temperature was 130 degrees centigrade, and the cooling system on my Gnome -Rhone engine collapsed as I prepared to land.

  But the airliner was in the way and there was only one small runway!

  With no engine, no power, I glided as best and landed just behind the DC 3 plane, crashing into its tail system.  It was already on the ground, and stopped but that crash did us both in!  I was bruised and the two rear passengers in the other plane had broken arms.  No deaths!

  The air god cackled for the third time!

    Getting out of the aid station at Siddi Bel Abbes, I resolved to not ride in any aircraft again.  Three was enough!

  But that was a bit of chagrin to the Air God!

    Standing firmly on the ground at the end of an airstrip in France, now a non-flyer, I saw a DC 7 approaching…just as he reached the end of the runway to land, his wheels were not down and he belly landed on top of me!  I threw myself to the ground and only received the “shock of passage”.  A French heroic teenager rushed into the destroyed plane and pulled out the two man crew as the plane burst into flame.  As an afterthought, he pulled me from behind the wreckage, and except for bruises, once again the Air God had missed me!

  I could go on entertaining you with crashes and flames from Peking to Paris, from Addis Ababa to New York…but enough is enough!

  When I TRAVEL now, it is in my antique Diesel Mercedes, and I putt-putt along at  a reasonable 60 miles per hour, and look up and shake my fist, yep, at the Air God!  Over a million airmiles, and now alive and happy on the ground!