Interview conducted by Mauree Jane Perry on March 23, 1999.
Edited by Captain Cutting 3/13/2000.
Finalized, printed, and bound May 2019.
The interview describes Captain Charles Cutting’s career at Pan American World Airways as a flight engineer, flight instructor, co-pilot, and pilot from 1956 to 1990; education in aviation; military service with the U.S. Navy Air Corps from 1951 and 1953; work as a flight test engineer at Douglas Aircraft Company; earning his commercial pilot’s license during his military service; initial hiring and work as a flight engineer; ground school for Pan American; furlough in 1957 that led to his interim work as a flight instructor; description of paper trainer he designed for instruction of new pilots; fired in 1961 following a strike by the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA); conflict between pilots and flight engineers during that strike; eventual rehiring by Pan American as a pilot; brief discussion of training sessions in the Pan American control tower at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in 1956; airplanes he flew: Douglas DC-6 and DC-7C; and the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, 707, 727, and 747; Pacific Division routes from San Francisco to Honolulu and Juneau; Honolulu to Canton Island, Fiji, Australia, Wake Island, Guam, London, Istanbul, Tehran, Tokyo, Saigon, Da Nang, Hong Kong, and South Korea; and Berlin to Frankfurt and Munich; working conditions at Pan American; impact of jets on his career, including furloughs; effect of seniority on his career path; experiences while flying Pan Am Flight 101 from Tehran to Rome with stops in Damascus and Beirut on March 17, 1976, including a close call on takeoff from Damascus; encounters with Lt. General James “Jimmy” Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, Donald Douglas (of Douglas Aircraft), Grover Loening (of Grover Loening Aircraft Company), and President Lyndon Johnson.
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