Streetcar, Do You Read Me?

Others have noted the great part of this episode that tells us a lot about SAC as it existed and worked 57 years ago now. Within that framework, we have the story of a co-pilot (Martin Milner) so nervous about taking any responsibility for anything that he won't try to qualify as a pilot even though SAC needs them, and he won't even give his wife a child.

The pilot he works under (Richard Long) has been trying to get Milner to qualify as a pilot, to no avail. In this case, it means that Long has to pilot a flight to Spain over the North Atlantic even though his wife is in the hospital having their third child. Disaster strikes hundreds of miles from land when there is a fire in an electrical panel on the plane that the extinguisher won't put out. Long jumps down, grabs through the fire to pull the wires free, and the fire goes out, but he is badly injured with burns and shock and becomes an unconscious logjam in the crawl space. He is also left unable to pilot the plane as fuel is running out and refueling while in the air from a tanker - the job Milner is most afraid of - has to be done.

I still remember this episode from its original telecast because the refueling scene scared the bejesus out of me. How the heck two pilots can maneuver two planes 30,000 feet in the air to connect what amounts to a large gasoline pump hose from one to the other so that the fighter plane is refueled is beyond me.

Sure, the conclusion is predictable, but the trip to it is scary and tense. All the actors (all now deceased) do a fine job, and all these years later it's good to see what the technology was like in the early 1960s (interesting trivia note - Richard Long was born only months after Lindbergh flew that crate that could hardly be called a plane over the Atlantic, and here he is in the 1960s, not even 40 years later, in a film with incredible technology).