Читать книгу Flying Through Life - robert Psy.D. firth - Страница 9

THE DC-3

“I came to admire this machine which could lift virtually any load strapped to its back and carry it anywhere in any weather, safely and dependably. The C-47 groaned, it protested, it rattled, it leaked oil, it ran hot, it ran cold, it ran rough, it staggered along on hot days and scared you half to death, its wings flexed and twisted in a horrifying manner, it sank back to earth with a great sigh of relief - but it flew and it flew and it flew.”

— Len Morgan. The C-47 was the U.S. military designation for the DC-3.

After a several months flying the C-45, I was introduced to the idea of flying the C-47 by a good friend. Air America had a large fleet of these remarkable aircraft. Most had been leased to the company by the military. They were properly C-47’s and were certified for a take-off weight of 26,500 which is a thousand pounds over the original DC-3.

Back when they were new, my Dad flew the DC-3’s for Eastern Airlines up and down the east coast for thirteen years. As I already had the type rating from my days flying for Gulf American, all I needed was a recurrent ground school and a check ride. We flew the final check at Vung Tau, the site of my escape and evasion “stunt.’ The airport had an ADF radio beacon for one of the instrument approaches and the idea was to fly over the beacon and then fly outbound, make a 180 degree procedure turn and fly back on a designated bearing that would allow one to let down safely and land. This was a non-precision approach that had weather minimums of about four hundred feet and one mile. The idea was simple enough but these old ex- WW-II aircraft had fixed ADF cards, meaning that the top of the instrument read zero no matter what direction the aircraft was flying and some idiot designed the thing with only half a needle. This makes flying outbound or tracking inbound a little difficult.

Let me try to explain the idea here. The inbound bearing back to the Vung Tau degrees or the exact reciprocal ( 230 -180= 50 & 50 + 180 - 230) The aircraft flies over the station and turns outbound heading 50 degrees and the pilot tries to fly left or right in order to center the aircraft on the published outbound bearing. To do this the pilot sees only the half pointer in the bottom of a clock like round instrument . When he is steering 050 degrees, away from the airport and the half needle on the fixed compass card needle reads 170 degrees, he has to know that he is flying on the forty degree bearing from the station and is then 10 degrees north of the correct course and will have to fly to his right to center on the proscribed bearing as depicted on the published instrument approach.

The sample shows an ADF approach to a south east runway 14 or 140 degrees. The outbound bearing is 327 degrees ( 140 + 180 = 327) so that if one were inbound and the bearing needle in the Air America half needle bastard ADF instrument read 010, you would be 10 degrees off course to the north. This could be due to the winds or your navigation but in any event you would have to correct to the right of 140 and perhaps steer 150 until the bloody needle read 10 deg left and then you could turn back to 140 and it should center on zero. Of course if there was a steady cross wind you would have to fly a wind correction angle of 5 or 10 deg or more throughout the approach to maintain the correct 327 degree bearing to find the runway. Remember, the runway is at 86 ft above sea level and you can’t descend below the 520’ MDA (minimum decent altitude.)

All the while you’re trying to figure all this out, you have to wear this miserable plastic hood, so you can’t see outside, fly the aircraft, retard the throttles, descend as required, call for the approach and landing check lists and , in a proficiency check, you can be sure that the instructor will fail and engine on you in the procedure turn. Now you have to deal with engine out checklists and still fly the approach. The instructors knew very well how difficult this was with the miserable “fixed card” ADF’s and of course, at Vung Tau, the cross winds never stopped blowing. But, what the hell, “ who ever promised you a rose garden?”

Somehow, I managed to fool the check airmen and they turned me loose in the Diesel three. I just love this old bird. I was then twenty-eight and the aircraft had been built before I was born. Even today, years later, there are still a lot of DC-3’s flying and they will still be long after I’m gone.

The “gooney Bird,” is not the easiest aircraft to fly but she is a long way from the hardest. The trickiest thing is to learn to handle the tail wheel and cross winds. Aside from these areas, the DC-3 is the gentlest and finest flying machine ever built. Taking off, the pilot can’t see the nose and has to keep her straight by lining her up on the distant end of the runway. The pilot has to sense any directional deviation long before it is apparent and gently make almost imperceptible corrections. Once the tail comes off the ground, at about forty or fifty, depending on the wind, one “steers” the DC-3 with her ailerons, which are huge and positioned way out on the one hundred and five foot wings, are more effective than the rudder. If the aircraft is drifting left the pilot gently turns the yoke to the right and the starboard aileron will rise and drag more than the left one will dip and the old bird will drift right. There is nothing in the book that tells you this, you just have to learn.

We were paid hourly for flying “in-country,” which the company euphemistically referred to as “project pay” meaning anyplace you could get a bullet up your ass. This, plus the base pay and housing allowance, added up to a lot more than I would have made as a Navy lieutenant driving a plastic river boat getting shot at all the time. However, the very best deal by far was flying the DC-3’s to Taiwan for maintenance and then bringing one back. You were out of Vietnam for a few days and only were paid base salary, so how could this beat flying in country?

My co-pilot, a wily Taiwanese ex-fighter pilot, had political connections and wound up flying with Air America. He was twenty years my senior and a hell of a lot smarter. He said, “Rabert, I think the aircraft might break when we get to Hong Kong.” “Really,” I said, “Why, it’s flying great?” I understood him better when we landed and he paid the mechanic a hundred bucks. Magically, the right main strut went flat and had to be re-sealed.

We jumped on a hydrofoil and were in Macau in two hours buying gold. He had told me to bring as much real money as I could and I had about five thousand in “green” ( USD). We were supposed to turn in our dollars on entering the country and get MPC (military payment coupons,“funny money”) which the Vietnamese couldn’t exchange. The idea was to keep hard currency from the enemy as much as possible. I had been in Bangkok the month before and had brought the five large with me.

We received the gold in light canvas belts sewn into pouches. When we got back to the Peninsula hotel, where the company kept rooms and had an office, we were told to report to the Chief Pilot in Taiwan ASAP. The next day, magically the old bird was fixed and we landed in Tainan at the Air Asia maintenance base in the afternoon. We were told to board a C-46 CAT scheduled flight to Taiwan and report to the chief pilot.

The next day we presented ourselves at his desk and were told we were summarily fired. “Not to worry, all will be OK” said my loyal but devious and duplicitous Co-Pilot.

We were ordered back to Taiwan and then told to fly a repaired aircraft back and if we minded the rules, we could keep our jobs.

Back in Saigon, we went to the Indian book store on Tudo street and exchanged our five thou in gold for ten thousand in MPC. The following week, we were again scheduled to fly another DC-3 back to Taiwan. On leaving the Saigon airport, we stopped by the Army money exchange office and received ten large in green for the military funny money (MPC). The mechanic in HKK got another “honey bee” ( hindered dollar bill), found a bad cylinder, we bought another five grand in gold, got fired again, got rehired and did this two or three times a month for another eighteen months. I came home with three hundred thousand and never did figure out who, if anyone, got hurt. The Indian later went to Paris as a millionaire. In the end, the Army wound up with several million more dollars in hard currency that they began with and God knows where the lost MPC wound up.

Flying up the Vietnamese coast one day, I noticed that my illustrious Chinese pal, having eaten a big C-RAT three thousand calorie lunch, and, with the soothing engine noise and warm South china afternoon sun, had fallen fast sleep. I slowly headed the aircraft west, over the empty sea, crept out of my seat, tuned all the radios to nothing, trimmed up the old bird, placed my big .45 pistol under the compass and turned off the left fuel valve.

I tiptoed to the back and, opening the over-wing emergency exit, caused a terrific wind noise,waking the snoozing Chinaman with a fearful start! Just then, the left engine, running out of gas, started coughing and sputtering. It was beautiful, he was terrified. Looking around, he could see no land, the compass was spinning wildly due to the large chunk of Ferris metal laying under it, the radios pointed to nothing, the ADF needle was slowly spinning in circles. The aircraft was beginning to fall off into the dead engine. He must have thought that I had parachuted without waking him. He looked back into the empty cabin and saw me leaning up against the cockpit door with a stupid American grin. When he finally realized what I had done was just another stupid round-eye joke, he was absolutely fucking furious. He muttered and squealed Chinese epithets for hours and never did see what was so dammed funny. However, after telling a few of his pals what a rotten SOB I was he finally saw that it was, after all, a pretty good joke and stopped being so darned mad at me. He never did ever go to sleep in my cockpit again.

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Typically, we would pick up the aircraft in Saigon or Vientiane Laos, fly over to Danang, gas up and head across the South China Sea. There weren’t any en-route navigation beacons so one had to fly the correct outbound bearing from the Danang radio beacon ( NDB) , trying not to fly to close to Hainan Island in China and then after several hours, pick up the inbound Hong Kong beacon at the correct waypoint. The reason for avoiding Hainan and not getting to much off course, is because the Chi-Coms were liable to shoot you down- which is a pretty good reason to me.

In July of 1954 they did just that. A Cathay Pacific Douglas DC-6, registration VR-HEU, on a regularly scheduled flight carrying eithtyeen passengers was shot down off Hainan Island by the Chinese. In April of 62 a Curtis C-46 flown by Air America was shot down by Communist forces over the Plain of Jars in Laos killing all aboard and an Air Vietnam C-46, departing Quang Ngai was shot down killing all 38 passengers and crew. Point being, the area was “hot” and you had to be careful.

We cranked up one rainy day during the monsoon season and headed over to Hong Kong HKK, the old Kai Tek airport, with 15 non-rev passengers, a collection of USAID workers, Red cross doughnut dollies and assorted civilians. They were sitting on aircraft tires, crated engines and tied down parts. We climbed to ten thousand feet trying to pick out the least bumpy skies. Two hours into the flight, which is about half way, it was like flying underwater. The rain was leaking in the overhead hatch and we were flying on instruments trying to track on the correct bearings to keep the Chinese fighters off our tails.

The passengers were sick and we could smell vomit in the cockpit. We were bouncing around the sky and, to be honest, we had no real idea where we were within fifty miles. There’s no auto pilot in the DC-3’s so we were hand flying the beast, depending on the incredible strength of the Douglass wings to remain bolted to the fuselage and the dependable, 14 cylinder Pratt & Whitney R1830-92 engines to somehow swallow all that water and keep running. How they did this, I have no idea but they did and we flew out of the worst of it about an hour out of Hong Kong.

The HKK radio beacon was identified and the signal strength excellent. The needle centered up and remarkably, we were only a few miles off course. We begin letting down, following the directions of the HKK approach controllers and lining up for the CC (Charlie, Charlie) approach into Kai Tek. Hundreds of pilots from all over the world know this approach and have a great deal of respect for it. The pilot has to be on precisely on altitude as the apartment buildings just across the street from the airport with their TV antennas are passing only feet below the main gear. The final decent to land , after clearing the buildings, seems and is steep because the airport was built on a narrow artificial island extending from the shore out into the waters surrounding the island. All that’s aviation history now. There’s a new airport across the bay that’s a lot easier to land on.

On the ground, the passengers crawled down the stinking slippery cabin deck and departed for their R&R and other business. We, true to form, “paid off” the mechanic, he broke the plane, we had two days off, flew back to Nam and did it all again the following week.