END OF AN OPERATOR
By
Ron Fox
During the vacation which allowed Charlotte and I to spend some
time together, driving the Land Rover to Texas, we decided that maybe this
smuggling game wasn’t as much fun as it was before the peso crashed.
Having returned home with eight bullet holes in my T-Bone, we began
having doubts and it was on this trip that we decided to bring my border
career to a close. Gus was not happy with our leaving. I had become the
Chief Pilot and Director of Operations of our small outfit and he relied on
me to coordinate our flying activities and handle the ever-growing
paperwork which was necessary to stay in compliance with federal air
regulations. Several of our pilots had already bailed out due to the
diminishing number of trips we were able to fly. Gus was having great
difficulty getting paid for the trips we did fly due to the impossibility of
getting dollars out of Mexico. Paid in pesos in Matamoros, their value could
drop by half by the time Amy could get them to the bank in Brownsville.
The peso was dropping like a rock. In December, 1981 you could get a
dollar for 12.5 pesos. In January a dollar would cost 25 pesos. By mid-
January it would be at 50, then 100, then 150. The peso’s collapse sent
such a shock through the smuggling business that many operators stopped
flying altogether. When the business finally picked up again, there were
fewer and fewer flights to pass around and the competition was getting
fierce.
Operators began cut-throat dealing, often supplying information to
mexican customs about a competitor’s flights. Sometimes this would result
in planes getting shot down or sabotaged. Sometimes this would result in a
pilot getting jumped at a strip. By the middle of summer in 1982,
Charlotte and I decided to call it quits with the smuggling game. She had
just gotten a job in Dallas with a startup airline, Muse Air and she wanted to
go. I had to admit that it was time.
With Texas still in a full-blown recession, flying jobs were scarce
everywhere. After trying to find a flying job for a few months, I finally
gave up and started driving a limousine for $4.40 and hour plus tips. Talk
about culture shock. After my first month, looking at my paycheck I
realized that I used to work one night for more than I was earning in more
than a month of driving limos and hearses to funerals. Had I not lived like
there was no tomorrow while engaged on the border I would have been
better prepared to face my post-border situation.
After months of driving and looking for flying work I managed to get
hired by a local freight outfit, flying a single engine Cessna carrying
canceled checks and film. It wasn’t much for income, but it beat a limo.
The following September Charlotte and I tied the knot. I realized that
she was the best thing to ever happen to me and if she could put up with me
for as long as she already had I had better not let her get away. I also
realized that she was the one and only stabilizing influence in my life. She
had not only nursed me back from a broken back, but she was always there
through thick and thin. There are not many women who could go through
all the things we had and still want to make a life with someone of such
poor prospects. So far, love has conquered all and, through more thick and
thin we have been happy. Having settled in to married life, an apartment
near Love Field in Dallas, and both working in the airline business, we
were shook up to receive a phone call from Gus’s wife, Carmen the
following June. She told us that Gus had been killed in a plane crash in
Mexico.
After things fell apart on the border and remained depressed for over a
year, Gus was beginning to get opportunities for trips again. He had been
spending his time trying to make a go of an avionics repair shop at the
airport, but it wasn’t going well. I spoke to him several times about his
increasing opportunities for getting back into the smuggling business, but
would not agree to come back to it. He claimed he was not able to afford
paying pilots to fly the first few loads he was able to get so he was going to
fly them himself. I tried to talk him out of doing that because I knew the
type of pilot he was. He was a good pilot, but he was a general aviation
pilot, not a professional. His limited flying experience and proficiency did
not prepare him for the difficult flying he was trying to do. He had flown
two trips to Mexico in the T-Bone. He spoke of what a bear the T-Bone
was when overloaded. He knew of my difficulties with that airplane with
more than eighteen hundred pounds in it. That’s why I was surprised he
had taken off on his third trip with over two thousand pounds of electronics
onboard. He didn’t make it.
Gus broke too many of the rules we had lived by in this business. The
rules he broke were specifically: too much weight for the airplane to fly
properly, flying past the point of no return without enough fuel to get
home, descending too close to the ground without seeing it,
getting too slow with too little power close to the ground, and reacting with
yoke instead of throttle to avoid a collision with an obstacle.
The entire year I had spent on the border with Gus, we never flew much
further south than Vera Cruz because it was beyond the return range of the
aircraft without additional fuel. Pilots who flew further south were
committed to land somewhere and get fuel in order to get home. They had
to be awful sure they could get into their strips. Unexpected visitors to
their strips or unexpected fog or bad weather could ruin their whole day. It
was very risky landing at unknown airports with a load of contraband to get
fuel. Many pilots were captured this way.
The only way for a pilot to find out how much weight was too much for
their airplane was to carry too much and learn how the airplane handled.
The one time I carried two thousand pounds in a T-Bone, I flew into a
small cumulous cloud and the bottom dropped out of the airplane. I
dropped over two thousand feet before I could regain control of the
airplane. At max cruise power, I was only flying about fifteen knots over
stall speed and any large control inputs would send the airplane out of
control. On that trip I was lucky enough not to encounter any more clouds
and I brought the airplane into the strip hotter than a firecracker with a lot
of power to be able to continue flying down to the ground. After that I
always limited the load to eighteen hundred pounds and I was always
careful to insist the load be placed to get the center of gravity in the middle
of the airplane. Uninitiated pilots used to laugh at our procedure of pushing
down on the tail of the airplane until the nose came off the ground and then
releasing it to see if it would come back up on its own. It worked.
Without a current altimeter setting after almost four hours of flying, you
couldn’t trust the read-out on the altimeter to tell you precisely how close to
the ground you were. If you were not familiar with the elevation of the
terrain of your strip environment or anywhere along your route, it was
easy to crash into the ground if it was obscured with low clouds or fog.
My personal rule was not to descend to within a thousand feet of the
ground or water without seeing it. If I reached a thousand feet without
seeing it, I just returned home to fly another day.
Another rule which kept me alive was to always hold extra airspeed and
have the aircraft under excess power whenever I got close to the ground.
Once an airplane gets close to its stall speed and close to minimum power
on the engines, sudden control inputs can put it out of control quickly.
With extra airspeed, your controls are more responsive and you can always
convert extra airspeed into altitude. With extra power on the engine at high
rpm, it produces power quicker.
As with instrument flying, when a pilot must overcome the natural
tendencies of his body to react to feeling from the balance in the inner ear
and rely on his eyes to give him inputs on his attitude from his instruments,
so must a bushpilot overcome his natural tendencies to react to
hazardous situations close to the ground or obstructions. He must always
be aware of his airspeed and constantly compare it with the actual stall
speed of his aircraft. As mentioned before, airspeed gives the control
surfaces of the airplane (ailerons, elevator and rudder) their ability to
maneuver the airplane. At stall, the wing is not producing lift and it will
fall. Near stall, the control surfaces, have little capacity to maneuver the
airplane. The higher the airspeed, the more effective these control surfaces
are, so it is usually smart to carry a little extra airspeed in case the need to
maneuver abruptly arises. Without extra airspeed it can be fatal to react to
an obstruction by pulling on the yoke. Power must first be added to
increase speed and this takes time. Yoke input can help change the
direction of engine thrust, but it is lift of the wings and control surface
effectiveness which are the main movers of an airplane. This is why extra
airspeed is so important. Since the stall airspeed of an airplane increases
dramatically when overloaded, it is important to know how much airspeed is
needed to both keep flying and to maneuver. You won’t find the answers to
these questions in the books. The lines on the charts only go up to the
allowed weights of the airplane. You have to develop this knowledge by the
seat of your pants assisted by a good stall warning system. The T-Bone had
a big red light on the instrument panel right in front of the pilot’s line of
vision. When stall speed was approached, the light would begin to blink.
Near stall speed the light would stay on.
Gus had tried to take too much weight in the airplane. He had flown
past the point of no return trying to make Loma Bonita. He had descended
too close to the ground without seeing it. He had gotten slow close to the
ground. It was said by witnesses that he broke out of the fog right above
some houses and he immediately pulled back on the yoke to bring his nose
up. The aircraft immediately stalled and his plane crashed nose first into the
ground. He hadn’t had time to push the throttles forward for more power.
The news saddened Charlotte and me a great deal. Gus was a loveable
guy to everyone and I loved him like a father. I couldn’t accept what
Carmen was telling me through her sobs of anquish. I was in denial. I was
angry at Gus for taking such chances and I was angry at myself and feeling
guilty for saying no to his request that I return. My mind was whirling in its
irrational desperation for something I could do to make him alive again; and
I was crying.
Gus had looked out for me. He hadn’t left me in Mexico like so many
of the border operators would have when I crashed and broke my back. He
never questioned my reasons for canceling a mission and he worked hard
for everyone in our outfit. He left a son just a few months old who would
never get to know his father. And Charlotte and I lost a good friend.
One often learns proper behavior by observing the behavior of those
deemed proper. This has often been, at least for me, a confused process
because I too often observed what turned out to be the wrong people, or at
least the wrong behavior. With most of the guys I hung with, both in the
Navy and out, what our heros did and what we thought as a group was
cool, thay’s how we behaved. With most of the women I had been involved
with, what often seemed to be selfless, caring people turned out to be more
interested in their own welfare at the expense of anyting shared between us.
At least that was my experience before I met Charlotte.
Charlotte taught me the experience of true love by how she loved me.
There was no reservation of feelings, weighing the benefits of career moves,
assessments of the probability of success, or metering of emotion tit for tat.
There was only a constant feeling of adoration not dependent upon
anything else. Those feelings were easy to return and I knew I was onto
something I had never experience before.
It was these kinds of feelings which made it easy for me to leave the
border, that and a few bullet holes reminding me what a lucky guy I was.
In many ways I was trading one adventure for another, from one with a
dubious future to another of enormous potential for happiness. Of course,
nothing was guaranteed; that’s where the adventure came in.
“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid;” to borrow a line from an old movie
about early jet test pilots, (“Chain Lightning,” Warner Bros, 1950,
Humphrey Bogart, Eleanor Parker), “Those who come back from their first
mission are living on borrowed time. Well, how much can you borrow?”
Copyright 1998, BUSHPILOT, all rights reserved.