One of my dear friends and a great source of information for “Rearview Mirror” died Nov. 22. Alan S. Lloyd was 87 and led an interesting life.

He was an engineer with Hawaiian Electric Co., joining the company in 1953 and retiring in 1998 after 45 years.

Before that, Alan was likely the youngest employee and flight attendant at Hawaiian Airlines. During World War II, in the summer of 1943, he got a job as a baggage boy when he was just 13 years old.

The airline president asked him one day how old he was. “Thirteen,” Alan replied. “I was already 6 feet tall and looked older.”

“Don’t tell anyone until you’re 14,” the boss advised.

One day, when he was 15, several flight attendants were sick and Alan was asked to fill in. “I was happy to do it,” he told me. “I think that made me the youngest steward in their history.”

Alan flew the Honolulu-to-Puunene, Maui, flight, which was bumpy due to the tradewinds coming over Molokai.

Half the passengers became airsick and he realized being a steward was not as glamorous as he had believed.

“After the war,” Alan said, “nine of Hawaiian Airlines’ planes were sold to the Japanese. The new owners, inspecting the planes, noticed eight aluminum patches, riveted into place, and asked what they were.”

“Those are from your bullets,” they were told.

PILOT AND AVIATION RESOURCE

Alan earned his pilot’s license and was proud to have landed at nearly every airstrip in the state — except for a few used by crop-dusters. Many no longer exist.

When a reader swore she remembered an airport in Kailua, she said everyone thought she was crazy.

“The problem is that I appear to be the only person who has this memory!” Sylvia Baldwin wrote in 2014. “Could I have been hallucinating all these years? If it turns out there is no record of this alleged Kailua airfield in anyone’s memory but mine, well — let’s hope it doesn’t come to that!”

Alan was my go-to guy for anything aviation. I called him up. “I probably landed there 50 times or more,” he recalled. “It was called the Kailua Sky Ranch and was privately owned by Bob Whittinghill, I believe. It was in operation sometime after World War II until the early 1960s.”

Kailua Sky Ranch was on the makai section of what’s now Aikahi Loop, behind the Aikahi Park Shopping Center and along the Marine Corps Air Station fence. Today it’s a residential street.

STRATEGIC ERRORS ON DEC. 7

A World War II historian, Alan lectured about it, particularly the Battle of Midway, all over the globe. In 2011, he told me the errors he believed Japan made on Dec. 7, 1941.

“The Japanese concentrated on sinking our battleships in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor and left our dry docks and repair shops relatively undamaged,” he said. “As a result, we were able to refloat and repair many ships relatively quickly.”

The Pearl Harbor fuel reserves were also largely untouched by the initial attack. The Japanese did this to prevent smoke from obscuring our ships. A planned third wave had targeted them.

“U.S. fuel reserves turned out to be essential to our success in the next year. Some historians believe the elimination of those fuel tanks and repair facilities would have hurt the Pacific Fleet more than the loss of battleships,” Alan said.

Additionally, the submarine base at Pearl Harbor had only minimal damage. The U.S. submarine fleet went on to sink more than 50 percent of the Japanese ships sunk in the next three years.

Japan estimated the U.S. Pacific Fleet would be put out of action for six months, but instead our carriers and submarines were engaging them in a matter of weeks. “Six months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy defeated the Japanese carrier fleet at Midway, marking the turning point of the war,” Alan said.

The survival of the shipyard repair facilities allowed us to quickly get back in the game. In June 1942, we engaged them at Midway and sunk four of Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo’s carriers.

“Their miscalculation at Pearl Harbor allowed us to turn the tide of war by mid-1942, and they were on the defensive after that,” Alan said. “It also allowed us to concentrate our forces in Europe and, many feel, shortened the war there.”

FAREWELL TO A FRIEND

At 16, Alan was captain of the Punahou School rifle team, which was also Company E of the Hawaii Territorial Guard Rifle Team. “We were bivouacked at Mid-Pacific golf course and tasked with protecting Lanikai homes from vandalism following the April 1, 1946, tsunami,” he told me.

“The tsunami had moved some of the beach houses 50 feet mauka. We patrolled the beach and guarded the area.”

Nothing much happened until they caught a truck trying to leave Lanikai with several stolen refrigerators.

Alan and I shared a few interesting coincidences. We were both born on June 15.

He drove a 1966 baby-blue Mustang. When I met my wife, she was driving a (different) 1966 baby-blue Mustang. And my wife, a research nurse when we met, knew Alan’s mother, who was in her blood-pressure research study.

Alan often left story suggestions on my voicemail and would often sign off with a British-accented “Cheerio!”

Cheerio, Alan. We’ll miss you.

Bob Sigall, author of “The Companies We Keep” series of books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories of Hawaii people, places and companies. Contact him via email at sigall@yahoo.com.