An extremely nice and talented duo, Abra Schnur and Jacob Flores, are engaged on doing an oral history about Braniff.  They are doing voice interviews with former employees and family members of Braniff and then transcribing and archiving these interviews with the University of North Texas.

I’ve written about their project before.

They need subjects to interview.  I believe they have had no problem in getting numerous interviews with pilots and flight attendants but they need interviews with people who worked or interacted with the airline in other areas.  That means people such as accountants, baggage handlers, managers, salesmen, mechanics and others.

It’s a worthy cause and it costs you nothing to participate but a small amount of time.

I’ve done an interview with them and found it be a terrific experience and it surprised me how much I had to say.

Why should you do this?  Because the history of Braniff is unlikely to ever be documented in an authoritative book.  The authors who did such writing are largely gone and the acknowledged king of airline histories, Robert Serling, has passed away.  (Serling produced authoritative histories of airlines including Eastern Airlines, TWA and American Airlines.)

More importantly, if this history is not captured now, it may never be captured.  The truth is that people from Braniff are aging and there is probably a 5 to 10 year window to capture this history at best and, frankly, I fear we may have already lost some in the deaths of certain Braniff icons.

What can you do?  Contact FlyingVoices on their Webpage or their Facebook page and offer to do an interview.

Go ahead, do it now.  We’ll wait patiently while you do so.

Do you think you don’t know a former Braniff employee?  Maybe you don’t.  But forward this blog post on to others and try to spread the word anyway.

Do you have questions or wonder about the legitimacy of this?  Contact me by commenting on this blog post and I will answer whatever concerns you have.

A project being executed objectively and without agendas is rare and FlyingVoices is trying very hard to get it right.  Without participation and even sponsorship (they need money!), these kinds of projects fail and history is lost.

So go save some history and participate in FlyingVoices.

Filed under: Airline History by ajax
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