victoria jackson – saleintothe90s

337. 88 Things About 1988 Part 6

43. Baltimore School Violence

44. Aloha Airlines Flight 243 Breaks Open

KAHULUI, HAWAII, APRIL 29 – Aloha Airlines flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing was in the first-class section of Flight 243, at 24,000 feet 20 minutes out of Hilo en route to Honolulu.

“She was just handing my wife a drink,” said William Flanigan, a 54-year-old aerospace engineer from St. Davids, Pa., who was on a 21st wedding anniversary trip to Hawaii.

“She had stopped and told us this was the last call. We were going to be descending. And then, whoosh! She was gone. Their hands just touched when it happened.”

A gaping hole had opened the roof of the Boeing 737-200 jet with an explosive sound as pressurized air in the cabin blasted into the atmosphere, apparently pulling Lansing, 55, to her death, and exposing the aircraft and 94 others aboard to a tornado of wind that quickly peeled back the top of the cabin from the cockpit to the wing, one witness said, “like a banana.” 2

I feel like I remember watching a reenactment of this on TV growing up. I just remember a show sometime in the early 90s where a flight attendant flew out of a hole in the plane. Clarabelle’s body was never found.

45. First women elected to the Friar’s Club

46. Sears caught selling lawn darts (in Puerto Rico)

If you want to learn more about a young girl who died from a Lawn Dart, this 60 Minutes piece is informative.

47. Mystery Science Theater 3000 Premieres. (11/24/88)

(source)

Of course, this was back when Joel & the Bots were on public access in Minnesota. My favorite MST3K from the year they were on KTMA is “City on Fire”, a made for TV Earthquake! knockoff. I like SST Death Flight too, it has Billy Crystal and John DeLancie in it!

48. First World AIDS Day (12/1/1988)

49. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson get married (4/30/88)

**50. Casual Sex?**

This movie would air on Comedy Central sometimes back in the early 00s, and I just remember one scene where one of the girls breaks the third wall and is relieved that the guy she was going to hook up with was going to use a condom, and she didn’t have to worry about sponges? Foam?

51. One of the earliest recorded car chases (2/9/88)

Philip Hutchinson had robbed a bank in Denver, Colorado, hit and killed a police officer with his car, and then ditched his chase car and abducted a man in a pickup truck.

A former police officer, and Vietnam veteran, Mike Silva was in a helicopter filming arial shots for a local news station. He heard about the car chase, and proceeded to follow Hutchinson’s actions up in the air. While the police could not find Hutchinson, Mike was right on top of him. Mike finally parked his helicopter in front of the truck to stop the madness and to alert the cops. The cops swooped in and Hutchinson was killed.

**52. Supercarrier un-endorsed by the U.S. Navy**

Producer Charles Fries said he and ABC thought action-adventure was the way to go with the new “Supercarrier” series. But the Navy didn’t think the scripts accurately portrayed it or its people.

And so, even though it had no objections to last Sunday’s opening episode, the Navy last Friday yanked its support of “Supercarrier” because of differences over future plots in the six other episodes still on tap.

The problem, a Navy spokesman said Wednesday, is that in the remaining shows the Navy “just becomes a backdrop” for action-adventure stories having little or nothing to do with the Navy or its mission.

The parting was not acrimonious, and there still is a chance that Navy support will be reinstated if there is a meeting of naval and Hollywood minds on future scripts for the series, emphasized the spokesman, Capt. Michael Sherman, director of the Navy’s West Coast information office.

He declined to be specific about plots the Navy had found objectionable, but laughed at a report that officials were disturbed at one in which the captain of the show’s aircraft carrier falls in love with a female jet pilot. “I never saw a story line like that,” he said. 4

The show was canned after eight episodes.

1. Gatley, Gary,

Shootings Hurting Baltimore Schools, New York Times, November 6, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/06/us/shootings-hurting-baltimore-schools.html

2. Walter Wright and Ed Tanji, “’AND THEN, WHOOSH! SHE WAS GONE’,” Washington Post, April 30, 1988. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/30/and-then-whoosh-she-was-gone/a4da02d6-c8c3-47f7-a4e4-da2097a73b2a/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3a5d796f5984

3. Wheelan, Joe, “FAA Clears TV Copter’s Pilot Of Complaints In Cornering Suspect,” Associated Press, February 10, 1988. https://apnews.com/471dbdd2aa7db502050d0aa24c52f534

4. Sharbutt, Jay, “’Supercarrier’ Torpedoed by the U.S. Navy,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1988. http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-10/entertainment/ca-1494_1_navy-personnel