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Paid to Fly

On June 1, 1950, I was back at my summer job, working on the hangar floor at Wien when our chief pilot, Dick King, said to me, “Do you want to fly the DC-3?” I was flabbergasted. Dick gave me a few landings and signed me off as a qualified DC-3 co-pilot. The biggest airplane that I had flown up to that time was the Stinson AT-19 but the DC-3 felt good to me. The biggest problem I had was getting used to the World War II–technology brakes. I was now a full-fledged airline pilot on the seniority list of Wien Alaska Airlines.

The first captain I flew with was Fred Goodwin. I have been so fortunate to be able to fly with captains who made the effort to share their knowledge and experience. So many early captains in the industry told their co-pilot to just sit there and not to touch anything. Cockpit resource management (CRM) was not yet in vogue. But Fred was different. He gave me responsibility and didn’t over-instruct, letting me figure things out on my own as much as possible.

Fred kept me in the left seat most of the time but he did not make it easy for me. The first thing he did was to tell me I had to get a crew cut. Then he said that whenever I saw him patting his shirt pocket, I was to whip out the cigarettes that I was carrying for him and light one with the lighter that I also was required to carry. It was a small price to pay for such a great education. When I screwed up he made sure that I did not forget it. He was very accomplished in the scolding area but that resulted in cementing his teachings in my mind. He also had some fun with me. When Fred made a less than stellar landing, he would put his captain hat on me and say, “Go greet the passengers as they get off the airplane.” I flew with other captains that first summer but there is no doubt that of all of them, Fred taught me the most.

When I became a captain I always tried to be the same kind of captain that Fred was for me. I made a big effort to pass on my knowledge if a newer pilot showed the eagerness to learn and, like Fred, I let them fly most of the time. I made comments and subtle suggestions and when I noticed improvements, I complimented them. This seemed to stimulate more eagerness to learn and I loved seeing the results. From Fred’s example, I learned that the really good instructors know when to talk and when to let the students learn by making mistakes. If an instructor is talking all the time, it becomes a distraction and the student is not able to concentrate on flying. I also felt, as did Fred, that if a student made a serious mistake, it should be emphasized in no uncertain terms.

In the early days, the captain was the captain and there was no question about who was in command because he carried the final responsibility for the safety of the aircraft. In the summer of 1950 the airline decided to hire for the first time two trained flight attendants (we called them stewardesses back then) from a training academy in the states. They were well trained but one of them could get a little testy. During one flight with mostly tourists onboard, she decided that she did not want to go any higher because her tourists could not see the wildlife. She came to the cockpit and rolled the trim tab forward. I thought, Oh dear, she knows not what she has done. Fred Goodwin is the captain and he is not going to be willing to give up command of the ship. Fred jumped out of his seat and threw her out of the cockpit, locking the cockpit door behind her. She hollered and banged on the locked door in front of all the passengers.

I think that was her first awareness of how the chain of command worked. Apparently the training school did not cover that subject.

I like to think back to how things were when I first started flying. You did not see any NO ADMITTANCE signs anywhere in the airport. The cockpit doors were not locked, and we used to allow the tourists to come to the cockpit and sit in the co-pilot’s seat to get a good look at bear, caribou, mountain sheep, and wolves while flying through the John River Pass in the Brooks Range on the way to Point Barrow.

That summer was one of the worst I have seen for forest fires. We would sometime fly an entire trip on instruments due to heavy smoke. One day I was flying with our chief pilot, Dick King, and I was in the left seat as we were arriving back in Fairbanks. The approach was from the radio range station east of Ladd Field. It was necessary to proceed from the range station on a certain heading over Ladd Field until a certain amount of time was up. If we did not see the lights of the Squadron Club on Cushman Street, we made a missed approach. I saw the lights and then the runway and proceeded to set my final approach. All of a sudden I realized that we were too high and I used up a lot of runway at Weeks Field. I was embarrassed, but the next day the same thing happened to Dick as he landed in Fairbanks. I then discovered how smoke can cause a kind of refracted sight picture. Another lesson learned.

AS A NEW PILOT AT WIEN AIRLINES, I also started flying the bush in the Cessna 170, Cessna 195, and the Noorduyn Norseman. I loved to fly any kind of airplane and wanted to gain as much experience as possible. Like any young person, I’m sure I thought I was a better pilot than I was. On one of my first trips, my dad came to the airplane to check that I had properly tied down the load and that I had the proper emergency equipment onboard. Just before he shut the door he said, “Remember, always bring the airplane back.” I don’t think he meant on a truck either. Those words came to mind whenever I started to push the weather or wondered if landing conditions were good enough. I probably took some chances that I shouldn’t have and had some close calls but I was lucky and in time I became more cautious.

It has been written that Noel Wien was sometimes called a fair-weather pilot. He did occasionally take calculated risks but his philosophy was that it was much easier to explain why he did not get his passengers to their destination on time than to try to explain to friends and relatives why the passengers were killed or injured. He was among the few early pioneers who survived while accomplishing many historic firsts.

THE AIRLINE HAD RECENTLY ACQUIRED HARRY CRAMER’S LINK Trainer and it was in a Quonset hut by the hangar. Before Wien Airlines had arranged for a place to set it up, the trainer was stored in the basement of our house. This was an opportunity for me to put in many hours flying simulated instruments and I made the most of it.

Because I had my Link instructors rating, I became the approved operator for the required Link time for our pilots. Harry Cramer had taught me the new way to use the automatic direction finder (ADF) azimuth for approaches. The old way was to keep the rotatable azimuth on zero and mentally calculate the bearing to and from the station by adding the heading to the relative bearing and then subtracting 180 degrees if it was over 360 degrees. The new way was to rotate the azimuth to the compass heading, which meant that the needle then pointed to the bearing to the station, and the tail of the needle was on the bearing from the station. All you had to do was look at the needle instead of doing all the mental arithmetic. It was much simpler but the captains I worked with resisted learning this new procedure. They were very experienced, very competent pilots but as the saying goes, it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Every time I reached for the rotatable knob during flights, the captains would slap my hand.

The original ADF instrument had a rotatable knob because the route structure on the maps originally showed the courses in true north. In order to convert that to compass headings, you had to move the knob to the magnetic variation that showed on the maps for your location. In fact, the knob had VAR (variation) marked on it. After the mapped routes were changed to the magnetic courses, the rotating azimuth was slaved to the heading indicator so you did not have to keep rotating it. I still have one of the old ADF instruments and it is a treasure to me.

Even with my skills in the Link, the captains made sure I knew that just because I was a hotshot in that area, I still had a lot to learn. But I already knew this and it became even more clear to me as winter came and I continued to fly part-time in much more difficult conditions. On one trip, the captain put me in the left seat for the entire flight. The weather was terrible at Kotzebue and the night approach required a circle to the landing runway because of the wind direction. We had a big load of ice on the windshield so we had to open the sliding part of the windshield (called the clear view window) to see. The air noise in the cockpit made it hard for me to hear the captain’s airspeed call-outs. I started my left turn from downwind and because I lost sight of the runway, I just had to hope that my lineup with it would be close. When the runway reappeared, the lineup was good. Just before crossing the approach end, I barely heard the captain call 85, which was too slow with the load of ice we had on the airplane. I had forgotten to carry extra airspeed for the ice so when I eased the power off to flare, the airplane stalled a few feet above the ground. I just sucked the wheel all the way back and, surprisingly, the airplane made a nice three-point touchdown. But because we had a strong quartering crosswind and the braking action was poor, I had to keep jabbing the left throttle to keep it straight. My foot was shaking badly when I tried to apply the brake for directional control and we just barely got stopped before the runway ended. I could not figure out why my captain did not give me some advice or lend me a hand. I had clearly been way over my head in those conditions and had no idea why he let me make the approach in the first place. It was not normal for a captain to put a newer pilot in a situation like that and I can’t explain what he was thinking.

IN THE SPRING OF 1951, MY PARENTS’ GOOD friend and former Wien Airlines pilot Herm Joslyn came to visit during one of his trips to Fairbanks. He was now a Pan American captain based in Seattle. During the visit, he said Pan American was having trouble finding pilots and asked me if I would be interested in flying for them. I was dumbfounded at the thought of possibly being a Pan Am pilot flying the DC-4. I expressed interest and a short time later I had an interview and received a job offer from Ralph Savory, the chief pilot of the Seattle division. My only concern was that I had two weeks left in my sophomore year and would lose my draft deferment if I quit school. Ralph emphasized that they would be hiring more pilots in that time and that seniority would be very important. He assured me that he could get a deferment for me because Pan American was crucial to the support of the Korean War. It was a tough decision to quit school early but I did, and left for Seattle. It turned out to be the wrong decision but sometimes fate calls the shots for a reason.

After two weeks of ground school in Seattle and two days flight training, I was checked out as co-pilot in the DC-4. I turned twenty-one a few days before I started flying and thought I was the youngest pilot Pan American had ever hired. I later found out that Jack Burke, who was one of my instructors, was actually the youngest, having been hired at age eighteen. The Pan Am stewardesses seemed to be intrigued by the “boy aviator” and I got a lot of attention from them, though I will admit I was very bashful amongst so many beautiful girls.

I flew two trips to Honolulu and two trips to Alaska a month and I was making three hundred dollars a month—one hundred dollars less than I was making at Wien but I supposed that flying a DC-4 to Hawaii was worth it. I flew with some excellent captains at Pan Am, particularly Jack Burke, Jimmy Stewart, Dick Ogg, Dick Hawley, Roy Holm, Frank Fuller, and, of course, Herm Joslyn. Herm was a wonderful mentor to me. Very often when I flew with him, he would give me his leg in addition to mine. He was also captain on my first flight to Honolulu. There were four legs on the Seattle-Portland-Honolulu route and four pilots so we each got a leg in the left seat.

When I first walked up the stairs into the Moana Hotel in Honolulu, I could not believe my eyes. Looking through the lobby, I saw that it had no wall on the ocean side and to me, a young man from Alaska, the palm trees and the beautiful surf made it look like a fantasy land. I could not wait to get to the beach. Not too long after getting settled on a beach towel in the sand, I heard Herm say, “Well, Merrill, I think you have had enough sun for the day.” After arguing about it for a while, I reluctantly went back to the hotel. In a few hours I developed the most painful sunburn that I had ever experienced. Even on the ground I had lessons to learn as a new pilot.

On one of my flights with Herm Joslyn, it was my shift in the left seat, maintaining the heading directed by the navigator as we flew from Honolulu to Portland. As usual two crew were on duty for two hours while the other two slept. During my shift, Captain Joslyn was asleep on his cot. It was a beautiful night with a full moon and the stars were shining brightly. Scattered clouds below reflected the silvery moonlight. I could not believe that I was so fortunate to be where I was. I suddenly realized I had been staring out the window and shook myself from my daydream. Checking the instrument panel, I noticed that the number four auxiliary tank had quite a bit more fuel in it than the other seven tanks. I thought that it would be nice to make the tanks more even so I put all four engines on the one auxiliary tank to get it down to an equal level. It was such a beautiful night and I soon returned to daydreaming. Then, guess what? All four engines quit. The number four auxiliary tank had emptied in no time. I hurriedly pulled the throttles back, put all four engines back on the main tanks, and turned on the respective boost pumps. The engines gradually came back to life as I eased the throttles back to cruise power. About that time, I turned around to see Captain Joslyn standing in the aisle looking through the curtain. He looked around long enough to see that everything had returned to normal and then crawled back into his cot. He did not say a word. Kinda wish he had.

GROWING UP IN FAIRBANKS, FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES had to be canned for winter consumption. My grandparents had a huge garden and greenhouse and canning took place in earnest every fall. We had a limited supply of fresh milk, which we mixed with powdered milk from the dairies. Often we simply drank powdered milk. After being in Seattle I could not get enough of fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables. Whenever I was able to bring fresh food and milk home from Seattle, it was a big hit.

The first time I brought a suitcase full of milk cartons home, I did not pay attention to how I packed them. Shortly after takeoff, the stewardess came up to the cockpit to say that there was a lot of white liquid draining down the aisle from where the crew bags were. I thought, Oh, no. I went back to the crew baggage storage and saw that the milk was flowing out of my suitcase. As we climbed, the reduced pressure in the cabin had caused the milk to flow from the top of the cardboard containers and the other crew bags piled on top did not help. That was very embarrassing and it took me a while to mop it up. Another lesson learned.

AFTER I HAD BEEN WITH PAN AM FOR a while, I had a few days off so I went to Fairbanks and rode around with Fred Goodwin on a tourist flight to Nome and Kotzebue. When we departed Kotzebue for the flight back to Fairbanks, Fred said, “Take the left seat.” It had been about four months since I had flown the DC-3 but I knew Fred would keep me out of trouble. As I got in the left seat he put the jump seat down and sat in it. I could not believe my eyes. I don’t know if he was confident in me or confident that Gerry Bolms, the co-pilot, would be able to correct any deviations. The DC-3 felt good but like a much smaller airplane after flying the DC-4. At this time in my life, I was in hog heaven at Pan Am but circumstances can change very fast, as I was soon to discover.