Shoup Airlines

Cranking and Banking

This is a cool approach to a runway, at least from a pilot’s perspective, I’m sure some of you will squirm. It gets even better when I realized the airport looks familiar. This is Tegucigalpa airport in Honduras. I’ve been there AND I’ve been on that approach, sadly though only as a passenger.

We used to shoot a very similar approach into La Guardia that had you in a steep bank right over Shea stadium and then dump you less than a 1/2 mile from the end of the runway. If you didn’t nail it just right, you were going around. I was lucky enough to shoot it two weeks out of initial training. You can’t imagine the pucker factor on that one.

Remembrance

No Way Out

Let’s take a step back into the 80’s shall we. A rather large step. Back when Kevin Costner was still a bit of an unknown. You knew him as the B-17 captain in the best EVER episode of “Amazing Stories.” Your parents knew him as Elliot Ness. In other words, he was still a good actor. Back when Sean Young was still considered somewhat sane, before the Batman Returns train wreck that forever ensconced her as one of the battier women in Hollywood. Then again, I’m pretty sure that little incident cemented her chances of playing Ray Finkel. Back when Will Patton only got the right hand man roles. Oh…wait, I guess he still hasn’t shaken that typecast.

This movie smells heavily of the 80’s you’d like to forget. Gaudy, sequined ballroom dresses, Magnum P.I. shorts, pink Le Tigre polo shirts (with the collar popped I might add) underneath a beige Members Only jacket, and a heavily synthesized soundtrack that sounds like something Ferris Bueller put together on his 5 ¼ inch floppy driven Korg keyboard.

If you can get around those distractions, this movie is standard political deception fare but still pretty good. Gene Hackman plays the Secretary of Defense hiring Kevin Costner, a Navy commander, to advise on intelligence estimates in dealings with the CIA. Costner’s character hooks up with Sean Young who just happens to be Hackman’s mistress. Hackman becomes jealous of the unknown lover, squabbles with Young and then accidentally kills her. Playing Hackman’s right hand man/lackey, Will Patton covers the whole thing up and then sticks Costner on the role of finding the “real” killer. Of course, Costner knows who really killed Young, but evidence is surfacing that could actually pin himself to the murder. Here, the movie turns into a clock is ticking game of cat and mouse, trapped inside the Pentagon, with the obligatory heavies running around in those pale blue or brown three piece suits that Reagan always wore. The story has a very strong Clancy lilt to it. Hell, even Fred Thompson appears in the film!

The end is quite predictable as the story wraps up its loose ends but then the entire floor drops out from beneath your feet. You just sit there, jaw on the floor, trying to unbend your mind from the bending it just got in a mere 10 seconds of celluloid.

Clancy wishes he had written this book.

And right about now Ini is dancing a little jig around his laptop right now.