Me and my big brother in 1955 checking out our dad's semi-rare Morris Minor and not so rare Pontiac Chieftain. You could fit a Collins S-line in the back seat, and a couple of stiffs in the trunk of that beast. Alas..by the time I got my ham license cars were a lot smaller.

 

Me and my big brother in 1955 checking out our dad's semi-rare Morris Minor and not so rare Pontiac Chieftain. You could fit a Collins S-line in the back seat, and a couple of stiffs in the trunk of that beast. Alas..buy the time I got my ham license cars were a lot smaller.

But, in fairness, so were the radios (well, maybe not by the time you got your license).

 

I admit that I didn't recognize the Morris, but the Pontiac stood out light a beacon. The double chrome down the trunk did it.

As for stiffs in the back seat, I had a buddy pilot who was a mortician. He had a Cessna 172 and quite often buckled a stiff into the passenger's seat for transport to another (final) site. Never asked how many "souls on board" he filed for -- I suspect just one.

 

As for stiffs in the back seat, I had a buddy pilot who was a mortician. He had a Cessna 172 and quite often buckled a stiff into the passenger's seat for transport to another (final) site. Never asked how many "souls on board" he filed for -- I suspect just one.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't know if there is an actual rule (probably is), but the "souls on board" is meant to convey the total number of human beings on the aircraft (or ship) so as not to cause confusion compared to saying "93 passengers on board" and not knowing if that number was meant to include or exclude aircrew members. One of the primary reasons for being sure to include everyone is in case rescue/recovery efforts become necessary. So if you have a plane that has two living people transporting two dead bodies (often just in body bags), then if the plane crashes and search teams only know that there are "two souls on board", if they find the remnants of the two corpses they could conclude that they have accounted for everyone that was on the plane and leave the other two, possibly injured-but-alive, people out there. So I suspect (and it's only a guess) that aircraft carrying human remains include the remains in the total count of souls on board. But in looking around the net, the preponderance of the evidence appears to be that they are normally NOT include in the S.O.B. count. At the end of the day, search crews usually (not always) have more complete information by the time recovery efforts are underway and will likely know if, and how many, human remains were on board in addition to the living humans.

 

1) The bodies were not in bags. That's seems like a TV-inspired assumption.
2) If I were the pilot there would one SOB (if just me) and a comment about transporting a deceased in case of a crash.

No need to play games. That was circa 1970 and the FAA was far more "understanding." It even gave weather avoidance and vectors in flight.

 

1) The bodies were not in bags. That's seems like a TV-inspired assumption.
2) If I were the pilot there would one SOB (if just me) and a comment about transporting a deceased in case of a crash.

No need to play games. That was circa 1970 and the FAA was far more "understanding." It even gave weather avoidance and vectors in flight.

I said that bodies transported in flight are often in body bags (and the point was to distinguish it from bodies inside caskets, which is what most people would assume). I was NOT making ANY claim about how your friend did or did not transport bodies on his trips since I have absolutely no idea how he did or did not do that -- based on your description, I assumed that HIS bodies were NOT in body bags since you said that he just buckled them into the passenger seat. Since I have participated in loading body bags onto aircraft for transport, I can assure you that it is not some TV-inspired assumption on my part.

I'm not sure what the FAA giving weather avoidance and vectors in flight has to do with anything -- that's a large part of what the FAA does as far as interactions with pilots in flight and it was that way long before 1970 and it's still that way today. It has nothing to do with them being somehow more understanding then and, presumably the claim is, less understanding now. Personally, I've always found them to be quite understanding, including when I inadvertently busted the Stapleton Class B airspace one night while trying to establish radio contact with them - I was a new pilot flying an aircraft with an unfamiliar comms stack and I had the radios mis-selected such that they could hear me but I couldn't hear them and I was so busy trying to deal with that that I wasn't paying attention to my position until I suddenly realized that I had transgressed nearly five miles into their airspace. They could have gotten me in a lot of trouble since it is expressly forbidden for a VFR flight to enter Class B airspace without explicit permission from the controller (explicit as in "Cessna three four yankee, you are cleared to enter the Class B" type explicit), but instead once I finally made contact they just gave me a vector and told me to monitor their frequency until I was clear of the Class B.

 

Back to old car pictures.

Me with city cousins at the farm. Must be something special as we're all dressed up. No idea what car.

 

Me and my two brothers, circa 1947, California. The adult is an uncle born in the 1890's who migrated from Oklahoma to California in about 1920. The car is likely a GM Pontiac or Chevy. It was a 2-door coupe, possibly a Pontiac Streamliner or Chevy Stylemaster. I was always the one who got cropped.


Unfortunately, I do not have the original, so the quality of the copy of a copy is not great.

 

Back to old car pictures.
View attachment 160590
Me with city cousins at the farm. Must be something special as we're all dressed up. No idea what car.

Not that probably but similar to Chevrolet 51.