He Flew to Tune of ‘Blue Skies’

--Pilot Robert Schornstheimer said it was his lifelong curiosity about machinery that helped him land his Aloha Airlines jet last month after a section of the cabin blew away. “In some ways, I’ve prepared all my life, in that sense, for that situation,” Schornstheimer said, referring to the April 28 accident in which a flight attendant was killed. “One of the impressions I had was that everything was so normal, and a fraction of a second later everything seemed slightly unreal,” he said in an interview from his home in Hawaii published in the Marietta Times in Ohio. Schornstheimer was graduated in 1963 from Marietta High School. After the section of the fuselage blew away, Schornstheimer said, he looked out the door of the cockpit and saw blue sky. “That was a really disturbing impression,” he said. He slowed the plane to about 200 m.p.h. and adjusted its wing flaps for a controlled descent. The plane shook when he tried to slow it more. “Somewhere right in that area, it went through my mind that we wouldn’t make it,” Schornstheimer said. However, 13 minutes after the accident, he landed safely at Kahului.

--In the tradition of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” 1938 broadcast that had many people believing that Martians had landed in New Jersey, radio station WGRX-FM in Baltimore sponsored a fantasy rock concert over the weekend that many listeners took seriously. The rock concert broadcast “live” by the radio station from fictitious Livestock, a takeoff on the legendary Woodstock concert in New York state in 1969, featured some performers who are deceased, including Jimi Hendrix. Other headliners were disbanded groups such as Led Zeppelin, the Eagles and the Beatles. One man stopped at the state police barracks in Hagerstown to ask directions. “He came into the barracks, right to the front desk. ‘I’m up here for the concert. Can you direct me to Livestock? I been listening to it on the radio all the way up here,’ ” Sgt. Kenneth Frick said. Livestock doesn’t exist, Frick told the man, who sheepishly got back into his car. About two dozen people called the Hagerstown barracks about the concert, Frick said. Others called state police in Cumberland.

--The grocer’s shop where British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was born is being transformed into a restaurant. Magistrates granted permission for the corner shop that Thatcher’s father once ran in Grantham in northeastern England to reopen next month as a restaurant called “The Premier.” Thatcher, Britain’s longest serving prime minister this century, was born there on Oct. 13, 1925.