The Hardly Able Air Service was an infamous--er, well-known southwestern airline of the late Twenties and the entire Thirties. It consisted of a single tri-motor, which had crashed and was subsequently purchased and rebuilt (barely) by the airline. It was headquartered at Airport, Arizona, which was something of a local joke, since the municipality of Airport consisted of a short dirt strip and a rusting hanger, roughly sixty miles north of the Mexican border. It's speciality was "unauthorized" flights from the States into Mexico, or from the latter back to Arizona. With the exception of perhaps a dozen dirt strips in Mexico, most "stops" of the airline were small patches of desert only slightly flatter than the surrounding terrain. Mexican authorities refused HAAS access to any of their paved airfields, after a couple of serious accidents, threatening them with lawsuits if they ever came within a half-mile of any Mexican airport air space. HAAS was famed for "going where the customers are," rather than expecting them to come to Airport "International" to depart. The Hardly Able Air Service was hardly able to keep up with the maintenance upon the tri-motor; hardly able to keep the aircraft patched. (Don't ask WHY; you don't want to know.) They were hardly able to keep the aircrew sober enough to fly. This always was a matter of delicate balace; if you sobered them up too much, they would have refused to fly in the darn thing. HAAS was hardly able to land the tri-motor ("Let's give it the ol' Tri!") and barely able get the machine off the ground. It was HAAS that first came up with the idea of frequent flier miles, literally, decades ahead of the other airlines; but, as is often the case with such pioneers, the idea never worked out for Hardly Able. Most of their passengers were hardly able to keep from dying of fright and the idea of a return customer was very unusual for this airline. Therefore, despite the fact that HAAS frequent flier miles were far more generous than any other airline even up to the present time, no customer ever troubled themselves to use those free air miles. For a little over a decade, Hardly Able was hardly able to stay above the law (let alone the ground!), hardly able to surmount the pile of bills growing on the desk in the hanger office, or avoid staying out of court by dissatisfied customers threatening lawsuits. The airline's luck finally ran out one dark evening, while trying to land on ranch land near Roswell, New Mexico, on August 2, 1940. ("Lights? We don't need any stinkin' lights!") There has been much speculation as to what the plane was doing in New Mexico, since is was never known to fly anywhere other than Arizona and Mexico. Some wags claim there was no mystery about it; in addition to flying, they were barely able to navigate, too. Others, though, disagree. Whatever the reason, all that was left of the Barely Able Air Service was the scattered debris of the tri-motor. There are some old Roswell hands who claim that the famous Litte Men in a UFO incident in the late Forties, was just a lot of local folks getting excitable when a rancher, fairly new to the area, stumbled upon the charred remains of crew and plane, which had been missed during the earlier investigation of the crash site. Apparently, a legend died on that fateful August night, only to have a new legend born, like the legendary phoenix, from the ashes of the old.