​The record-breaking flight that started as a Las Vegas marketing gimmick



An old Ford pickup truck barreled down an empty highway full of sand, swerving to keep up with the single-engine, fixed-wing airplane puttering several feet overhead.

From the passenger seat of the truck, a man angled a bucket up toward another man who was dangling from the open door of the Cessna 172 aircraft with “LAS VEGAS: Hacienda Hotel” painted brightly on the fuselage.

On day 36, Timm dozed off for an hour during his shift. When he woke up, sweating, they were in a canyon, somewhere in Arizona, maybe California.

After the man yanked the bucket up to the plane by rope, he collapsed back into his crawl space and the plane crept a little higher, a little farther from the ground, circling Nevada, California, and Arizona, again and again and again, coming down only for supplies, twice a day.

By the end of their journey, in February 1959, the two men in the plane had accomplished a remarkable feat, and it nearly cost them their lives.

Fruitcake and mobsters

The whole adventure began with fruitcake. Apparently, Warren “Doc” Bayley, an eccentric travel columnist, liked fruitcake enough to buy his own fruitcake business.

The company did well, well enough that Bayley sold it for a sizeable profit. He used some of the money to buy land north of Fresno, California, where he built a hotel. He called it the Hacienda.

Bayley traveled a lot for his work. He had stayed in every kind and quality of lodging. For years, he had been imagining what the perfect hotel would be like. And he would build it. He knew it.

The hotel business suited him, and he quickly turned the Hacienda into a chain.

Soon, he was eyeing a much bigger, much riskier property in Las Vegas: a hotel on the then-unpopulated south side of the Vegas Strip called Lady Luck.

At that time, the Strip was an isolated, undesirable area, far from the rest of the casinos and hotels. Halfway through construction, the financing collapsed. Suddenly it was becoming too big a hassle. Everyone gave up on the hotel. They assumed that it was too far out of the way and too lavish to ever make its money back.

Undeterred, Bayley signed a 15-year lease at $55,000 a month. To succeed, he would have to make a big move. He would have to rebrand the Vegas experience.

At the time, Vegas needed it. Most casinos were still firmly in the grip of the Mafia, and the wiseguys were increasingly unable to hide the funny business, which often included murder.

Selling the Strip

Bayley's Hacienda would be Mexican-themed, a family-friendly casino and hotel in direct reaction to the seedy, salacious excess of old Vegas.

Putt-putt golf course. Go-cart track. A massive swimming pool. All at reasonable prices. Retirees from all over America would flock to the Hacienda’s iconic sign: the horse and rider in neon. And he was right. But in those early days, it was all dust and empty rooms.

All he needed was a gimmick. He’d tried the usual avenues: coupons, advertisements, faux word of mouth. He even hired attractive women to hand out flyers to passing cars.

It was time for something more drastic. Like any good salesman, he appealed to our imaginations.

Come fly with me

Human beings have always wanted to fly. We’ve always looked to the sky for hope. It’s where we’ve always wanted to go.

In his lifetime, Leonardo da Vinci wrote over 35,000 words and drew more than 500 sketches about flying machines and the nature of air. He was obsessed with bird flight. He wrote: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Da Vinci could never have foreseen the industrial revolution, not the way it came about.

The first commercial liquid-fueled internal combustion engine was invented in 1872. Aviation began 31 years later, on December 17, 1903, with the Wright brothers, who after four years of research and design efforts, made history with a 120-foot, 12-second flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — the first powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.

We’ve gotten used to flight by now, so it’s easy to forget that it’s only been a little over 100 years. Easy to forget that every time a plane takes off or lands, it’s a miracle. It’s unbelievable that a 300-ton Boeing 747 can fly through the sky, safely, full of passengers and stale pretzels.

Still, miraculous as flight is, most of us find air travel tedious, mind-numbing, and claustrophobic. An hour on a plane is enough to irritate many people. Twelve hours is unimaginable. Any longer than that, the flight attendants better have an endless supply of tiny wine bottles, or else people will start snapping.

What kind of lunatic would test the limits of sanity by staying on a plane one minute longer than needed?

A lunatic's bet

That lunatic was Robert Timm, one of the slot machine mechanics at the Hacienda.

Timm was a bear of a man. He’d been a bomber pilot during WWII, and he had a passion for flying. He convinced Bayley that an endurance flight was exactly what the Hacienda needed to make a name for itself.

Cleverly, Bayley designated it a fundraiser for cancer research. It was gambling, but for a good cause: People would guess how long the plane would stay in the air. The person who guessed the closest time would win $10,000.

It would take a year or so to build and customize the Hacienda Cessna 172. Now an aviation icon and the most-produced plane of all time, the Cessna 172 had only been available since 1955.

Timm and another mechanic installed a 95-gallon Sorenson belly tank on the plane. That way, they could refuel midair with the help of a Ford truck and an electric pump. They also rigged the plane so that they could change the engine’s oil mid-flight.

Roughly the size of a Toyota Camry, the cabin of a Cessna 172 can snugly seat four people (but not a toilet). They removed all the seats except for the pilot seat and converted the rest of the cabin into a tiny makeshift living area.

Timm had tried marathon flights three other times, but never stayed in the air longer than 15 days.

His second attempt came to a halt with a massive boom. As he wrote in his journal, “at 4 a.m. one morning the entire sky lit up." He had been in the air during one of the 57 above-ground atomic bomb detonations set off during 1958 in the Nevada.

To complicate things further, there was a brand-new flight endurance record to contend with. To beat it, the men would need to remain in flight for over 50 days.

Medallion status

Timm and his co-pilot, John Wayne Cook, took off from McCarran Field in Las Vegas at 3:52 p.m. on December 4, 1958. To ensure that the men couldn’t land the plane surreptitiously, a chase car painted white stripes on the aircraft’s tires from below. These would scuff should they touch down before their official landing.

Most of the time, they refueled in Blythe (a desert town on the California-Arizona border) or swung out to Yuma, Palm Springs, or Los Angeles — where they made the occasional radio or TV flyby.

Confined to that cramped space, their everyday life resembled that of a prison inmate’s: lots of aimless reading and repetitive exercise and never-ending games — anything to pass the time as they buzzed around the sky. They had a little sink back there, and they “showered” by pouring bottled water over their heads.

They refueled twice a day, mid-flight, as a hose from the Ford tanker truck latched to the belly tank.

The two men piloted in four-hour shifts and did their best to sleep whenever they could, on a four-by-four cushion made of thick foam. It was hard to sleep, with all the rattling and mechanical groaning.

Asleep at the wheel

On January 9, day 36 of their flight, Timm dozed off for an hour during his shift. When he woke up, sweating, they were in a canyon, somewhere in Arizona, maybe California. Luckily, the autopilot had done its job.

Years later, he told a reporter: “I flew for two hours before I recognized any lights or the cities. I made a vow to myself that I would never tell John what had happened.”

Though he never said anything to Timm, Cook was aware of the near-disaster.

“… it was 2:55 a.m. and he [Timm] was fighting sleeplessness. On autopilot fell asleep 4000 FT over Blythe Airport found himself ½ way to Yuma Ariz 4000 ft. Very lucky. We must sleep more in the day time.”

All their food had to be mashed into thermos jugs, which were hoisted up with their daily supplies. Every other day, they got a quart of bath water, a large towel, and soap.

Darkness visible

A little over halfway through their journey, the plane’s generator went out. It had powered the plane’s interior lights and heating and was used to pump the fuel into the wing tanks. After that, they had to use a hand pump to move fuel up to the wings.

When it got really cold, they wrapped themselves in blankets, shivering. They had flashlights and had strung some Christmas lights through the cabin, but other than that they flew in the dark, a beautiful, endless darkness.

Cook wrote in his journal: “Hard to stay awake in dark place — can’t use radio — can’t use electric fuel pump. Pump all gasoline by hand, using minimum lights. … Don’t realize how necessary this power until all of a sudden — sitting in the dark — no lights in panel to fly by — flashlight burning out — can’t see to fix the trouble if you could fix at all.”

By the end of the marathon flight, they’d lost the tachometer, the autopilot, the cabin heater, the landing and taxi lights, the belly tank fuel gauge, the electrical fuel pump, and the winch.

Several times weather interrupted their refueling, and they had to scramble for a new opportunity, eyes shifting from clouds to fuel gauge, over and over.

They broke the record on Jan. 23, 1959, but kept going for another 15 days, until the spark plugs and engine combustion chambers became loaded with carbon, weakening the plane’s engine.

64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes. They’d flown over 150,000 miles through the air, roughly six trips around the planet.

The record stands to this day.

After the flight, Cook said: “Next time I feel in the mood to fly endurance, I'm going to lock myself in our garbage can with the vacuum cleaner running. That is until my psychiatrist opens up for business in the morning.”

Secretly, however, I’m sure he missed that feeling, the way he lived in the clouds, in the blue of the sky, high above everything, soaring like a bird.

Luigi Mangione and 'magic bullet' medicine



Why did Luigi Mangione allegedly target UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson?

The original consensus was something like: He had chronic back pain that surgery didn’t help (or even made worse) and that his insurance company wouldn’t pay to fix.

It’s possible the 'system' had a share in derailing Mangione’s life, but surely there are many other factors, including the belief that all pain requires treatment.

But apparently the surgery, which he had no problem paying for, was a success. On Reddit, he raved about it and even recommended it to others. There is no record of him complaining about back pain after the surgery.

We do have a record of Mangione complaining of other maladies: Lyme disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and brain fog — all relatively new conditions often regarded as having a psychosomatic component.

Chronic endless pain

I have a good understanding of this because I come from a family of doctors, and my mother is one of these chronic endless pain people. I also worked in Big Pharma branding for two years, as well as for other creepy, well-funded Silicon Valley health start-ups on the agency side.

Via these experiences, I have come to basically the same conclusion that RFK Jr. has. The American for-profit health/pharma system is the most evil single institution on earth. It's also the most powerful.

This should've become obvious during COVID, where it literally took over the world. It should also be obvious given that it currently has the power to mutilate our own children, sometimes against our will, and to addict them to expensive drugs they will have to take for a lifetime.

I'm dubious that what we're seeing with UnitedHealthcare and Luigi Mangione is the whole story, but I'm more interested in the glaring contradiction at the heart of the alleged killer’s motive, seemingly expressed in the message left on the shell casings: “Defend, deny, depose.”

Among Mangione’s online sympathizers, even those who don’t go so far as to applaud the assassination claim, believe there’s a coherent political message behind it. But that rests on a faulty assumption about pain: that it must always be "treated" via medicines and surgeries.

Physical diagnosis, spiritual condition

This assumption certainly benefits the pharma industry — the more patients with chronic and consistent pain, the better. The only limit is what their insurance is willing to pay. As rapacious as insurance companies may be, some claims actually should be denied.

It’s not uncommon to get a physical diagnosis for a spiritual condition. I've seen my mother go through this her entire life, always with some new pain somewhere or some all-encompassing bulls**t diagnosis like "fibromyalgia" that gives pharma open access to her insurance funds.

Literally millions of aging single women suffer from various versions of chronic pain. They have been told, not by insurance companies, but by pharma companies and the media, that this pain is the result of treatable illnesses. Yet, somehow the more profits are made, the more “treatable” new illnesses pop up in need of cures.

But when none of them work, which is actually a quite common occurrence, what exactly is an insurance company supposed to do? Just pay endless claims forever, knowing that nothing will work? Denying the claims at least communicates that it’s time to try something else besides paying pharma companies with perverse incentives.

Whose profit?

It’s true that companies like UnitedHealthcare shouldn't exist in the first place. Even Adam Smith, father of market capitalism, said specifically that certain products were too elastic to be handled by a market, and medicines would certainly fit that category. The fear surrounding a person's health, and the desperate reliance on authority, warps the market and creates a terrible potential for very deep, evil, and pervasive abuse.

This is exactly what has happened, and it's eaten the globe. But in this instance, it doesn’t seem that UnitedHealthcare's "profit motive" had much to do with Mangione’s struggles. Of course, Mangione’s alleged manifesto encourages us to see his motivations as purely political rather than personal. He is targeting the “parasites” to blame for America’s extremely expensive yet extremely ineffective health care system.

As a diagnosis of what needs to change, the manifesto, if you could even call it that, is unsatisfactory. It ignores the bad actors upstream of the insurance companies: the doctors who offer unnecessary surgeries for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the pharma companies that run commercials telling everyone that chronic pills are the solution to their chronic problems.

Bad pharma

It’s mind-boggling that such commercials are so prevalent. Pharma has become the single biggest advertiser in all media by a massive margin: It literally keeps the mainstream media alive. A culture that heavily restricts cigarette ads should ask itself why it gives free reign to legal international drug cartels to spread their sales pitches. What impact does that have on public health?

We saw the impact during COVID, where people abandoned family members to die because the TV told them to do so. And who was the TV being controlled by? Pfizer (pharma) and Fauci (public health). Not by the insurance companies who had to foot the bill.

It’s possible the “system” had a share in derailing Mangione’s life, but surely there are many other factors, including the belief that all pain requires treatment. Maybe in a less stubbornly secular society he would’ve been able to understand his suffering as a necessary — or at least inevitable — consequence of being alive. Maybe then a father would not have been murdered in cold blood.

But our society has no concept of beneficial pain. In fact, we’re obsessed with eliminating pain entirely. That’s why our medical ideal is to match cause and cure so precisely that one treatment can eradicate a disease with maximum efficiency — and without any collateral damage.

This power such treatments promise is so seductive that it’s easy to succumb to wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. It’s right there in the name we commonly use for them: magic bullets.

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Selling the new Kamala



The reintroduction of Kamala Harris, her transition from a nationally disliked vice president to a transformational political savior, has been truly remarkable. All it took was Democratic desperation at the prospect of Joe Biden running in 2024.

Popularity is difficult to replicate. If you lived through the campaigns of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and the excitement and buzz surrounding their respective messages, then you understand that Kamala isn’t like them.

You get the feeling that part of Kamala’s 'joy' tagline is a way to explain the laughter, though it is painfully obvious that the laughter does not come from a place of joy.

Both Clinton and Obama had “hope” and the promises of change. Kamala has “joy” and the continuation of an unpopular presidency. The packed house at the Democratic National Convention earlier this month doesn’t change things; it’s like the extravagant birthday party for the kid nobody likes. Large crowds of partisans don’t necessarily equal broader excitement, though you are asked to believe otherwise. It’s like saying flannel makes you a man of the people.

The redefinition of Kamala Harris is not an easy task. She has adopted politically unpopular positions in the past, from supporting open borders to ending private health insurance and shutting down drilling and fracking.

She is known, weighed down by the policies and mistakes of the Biden administration: inflation, lagging wages and a slowing labor market, the Afghanistan withdrawal, illegal immigration, the wars in Ukraine and Israel. She has zero significant achievements as vice president.

Part of the difficulty in moving forward from Biden’s failures is the fact that Kamala struggles to define herself apart from the Biden administration. The campaign’s official websitestill doesn’t address her positions on the issues.

One reason for the silence is political calculation, the thought that the less she says about the issues, the more she can campaign on platitudes: diversity and liberalism, freedom, democracy, whatever.

It took weeks for her to speak on the economy, and when she did it was proposals for more spending and modest tax cuts, with inflationary down-payment assistance (and she doesn’t know who will foot that bill), all while blaming businesses for inflation: “I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not.”

This leaves the public asking: What specifically is Kamala for, and what does support for Kamala mean?

You might know the answers if you’re informed, if only based on her history. According to The Hill: “Based on her roll call voting record, Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.” The average voter has much more difficulty in deciphering Kamala. They’ll have to vote to find out.

Kamala must be sold, and the media will do the heavy lifting. Dare we state the obvious? Their favorable coverage of the Democratic nominee is a campaign for the Democratic nominee.

The New York Times reports that “Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign.” Says who? The Kamala campaign. You’d think the media might want an objective source on that.

Are we to believe the campaign is not fueled by the desire for power? The fuel — what allows the campaign to go forward — isn’t millions of dollars in donations by corporations and special interests?

After her appearance at the DNC, the media gushed about Kamala’s choice of fashion: “A tan suit!” shrieked one New York Times writer.

Axios is defending Kamala’s plan to stop "price-gouging" at grocery stores — her attempt to deflect the causes of the Biden-Harris inflation — and reminding its readers that “Harris’ economic proposals, broadly speaking, are meant to help middle-class Americans deal with a higher cost of living.”

To that we ask: What policies?? Forget any analysis of why the middle-class is struggling or a discussion of the root causes of inflation. Voters don’t need to know.

All the while, the media isn’t pushing back on Kamala’s refusal to sit for interviews or take questions. It seems Kamala’s campaign and the media have the same strategy: Keep the public uninformed, lest they find out just who Harris and Walz really are.

But try as they might, her history will be known and the more radical parts of Kamala’s agenda will come out, no matter her attempts to moderate. Price controls are just the start.

There is also her support for taxation on unrealized gains — the profits that a person has yet to realize. This plan “calls for the creation of an annual 25% minimum tax on the unrealized gains of individuals with income and assets that exceed $100 million.”

This is a “radical departure” from the norm that subjects Americans to arbitrary valuations on arbitrary dates and imposes “double and triple taxation.” Once adopted, it is likely that it will apply to us all. Nobody will be safe; the government can’t constrain itself. Good luck with your 401(k) or your Schwab account or your home.

Can Kamala shake her liberal past, the statements she made in the 2020 race (supporting a fracking ban, for starters), her responsibilities as VP for the border, and the failures of the Biden administration?

Consider that Kamala doesn’t have the confidence to step out and establish who she is and what she believes. She lacks boldness — especially in comparison to her predecessors, evidenced by agreeing to only one debate despite the close race. But she also lacks something else: authenticity.

The proposals she previously advocated are disclaimed today. The central message of her campaign — aside from running against Trump — is lacking, perhaps because she is insecure in her own skin, anxious to the point of needing untimely and inauthentic laughter to ease her tension. You get the feeling that part of Kamala’s “joy” tagline is a way to explain the laughter, though it is painfully obvious that the laughter does not come from a place of joy.

The insecurity explains what might be her biggest mistake thus far: the choice of Tim Walz as vice president. She needs a follower because she isn’t a leader.

Kamala, the reluctant choice of the Democratic establishment, couldn’t afford to be upstaged by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or California Governor Gavin Newsom. Whatever their problems might be (and they are many), their intangibles far outweigh hers. Shapiro could have delivered Pennsylvania, but Walz is the true subordinate, one without aspirations beyond the vice presidency. He isn’t Kamala’s replacement or her competitor.

Instead, Walz is happy to play the minstrel, the cartoon of a white rural Midwesterner sold to suburbanites (credit to Walter Kirn for that one, I think). He’ll serve as the phony soldier, both literally and figuratively, in the phoniest campaign in recent history.

Editor's note: A version of this essay originally appeared at the Reactionary.

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