From one of the cousins on a family web-site, a retired pilot, his
friend Hal Cranmer sent this out.Would be interesting to find out
who else was in those planes with Kerry at that time and went
through this same negative experience.
Writes Hal Cranmer:
I would like to add my two cents about my John Kerry experience.
During my career as an Air Force pilot, I spent two years flying a
small twin-engine prop plane around the Pacific from my base in
Okinawa, Japan. On one trip we had to fly Senator Kerry, his
congressional aide, and a Navy Captain (Vietnam, A-4 fighter pilot)
who was also in Kerry's party to various locations in Vietnam and
Cambodia as part of theMIA/POW talks.
When I met Kerry, he was wearing a shirt with a picture of his
sailboat on it. I told him I had a small 27' sailboat in Okinawa, he
remarked 'Oh I never sail on anything less than 135 feet'. I laughed
to myself and realized this guy was no sailor.
When we first flew him into Phnom Penh, he went to the back of the
airplane and grabbed the pizza that was put aside for the crew and
passed it around to his staff. He was never offered any pizza
because they were supposed to have lunch with the Cambodian
government once we landed. The pizza would have been our only meal
that day. He just never cared to ask.
Then when we picked him up in Cambodia, he was an hour late getting
to the airport. We could not start the engines and therefore the
air conditioning until he arrived. Phnom Penh at that time was over
100 degrees with 95% humidity and we were basically sitting in a
greenhouse behind the cockpit windows. When he finally did arrive,
we were wringing out our clothes from the perspiration. He walks out
of the air conditioned car, into the airplane and asks us 'Could you
guys get the air conditioning running, I'm a little warm." The other
pilot had to physically restrain me from going back there and
picking a fight.
Then we took him into Noi Bai airfield in Hanoi. After we picked
him
up the next day (he stayed the night in Vietnam, we stayed in
Bangkok) we taxied out, ran up the engines for takeoff, and noticed
that our prop rpm was vibrating all over the place. We taxied off to
the side to look at it, but there was a good possibility that there
was an engine malfunction and the engine may fail if we took off
with it. Well, Mr. Senator sticks his head up in the cockpit and
says 'this plane WILL take - off, I have a press conference in
Bangkok in three hours!"(Maybe this is an indication of how he will
run the FAA). We ran the engines again, and did not have the
problem, so we took off and made it back.
During the flight, he told everyone how he had taken a Cessna (a
small General aviation plane) up with a fighter pilot, and the
fighter pilot remarked that Kerry was one of the best pilots he had
ever seen. I don't know about other pilots out there, but it's hard
to imagine a little, single-engine prop plane pilot being able to
show the 'right stuff'.
After Kerry left the plane, the Navy Captain came up to us,
apologized and said basically that he knows Kerry is a jerk and that
we should be glad we don't have to deal with him every day....
Or will we?
WE HAD BETTER GET OUT AND VOTE!! 
