THE HACIENDA STRIP
by Ron Fox
We were all in the office one afternoon at the beginning
of November, 1981. Gus was entertaining Amy, Ampado
and me with stories of his courtship of his young wife,
Carmen. She was a tall, raven-haired beauty of twenty two
when Gus first saw her on a chance meeting at the airport.
She had a formal, almost regal bearing about her, her clothes
were fashionable and immaculate, and Gus couldn’t take his
eyes off her. Carmen had very large, dark brown eyes set
well apart. Her habit of blinking those long, dark eyelashes
of hers drove Gus nuts. She had the high cheekbones of a
fashion model and beautiful did not begin to describe her
face and body.
Gus was old enough to have been my father, and old
enough to have been Carmen’s grandfather, but you couldn’t
tell it. His face was tanned and leathery, but it didn’t have
many deep wrinkles. Besides, it was hard to look at
anything on his face due to his piercing, pale blue eyes and
women found him very attractive. He drank beer, but he
didn’t have a beer belly like so many gentlemen his age. He
was a very active man and managed to usually wear a pair of
jeans with a 34-inch waist and carried himself well.
Carmen was in the office of Brownsville Aviation and
Avionics Company, B.A.A.C. as it was commonly known,
looking for a job. A recent graduate from college, she was
looking for something in the accounting field. When Gus
overheard her conversation with the receptionist, he
promptly hired her as his secretary and bookkeeper. He
owned B.A.A.C.
After only a month, Carmen became uneasy with the
way Gus would look at her so she quit. Those eyes of his
had a way of boring right through you and she didn’t
understand his ardor towards her. This sent Gus on a year-
long pursuit that resulted in his spending over a hundred
dollars in newspaper advertising in finally winning her over.
The classified ads – in which a “Mr. Wee Wee” proposed
that “Mrs. Wee Wee do the right thing by the kids” and
marry him – ran in the spring and were a part of a barrage of
letters, cards, and various gifts he sent her.
“I tried every way I could to get rid of him,” Carmen told
me one day. “I finally decided to give up.”
I suppose nowadays Gus could have suffered an
expensive lawsuit instead of a happy marriage as a result of
his persistence, but it worked. The both seemed very much
in love and very happy. No one in our little smuggling
operation every minded Carmen being around, but little
work ever got done when she was.
We were all laughing about one of the many funny
incidents that happened during their courtship when the
outer door to our warehouse opened and in walked two
casually but well dressed Mexican gentlemen. Gus
immediately recognized one of them as Felix, a long time,
but sporadic receiver who had done business with Gus in the
past. After a cheerful greeting and introductions all around,
Gus invited these gentlemen and me into his inner office.
They explained that they were opening a new strip
located south of the plateau which was about 60 miles east
of Mexico City. We called this plateau the “Hacienda
Plateau” because of the large hacienda which was located in
the southeast corner. It had a large dirt airstrip which was
about a mile long and 200 feet wide. I had taken several
DC- 3 loads into this hacienda strip for other receivers and
was comfortable with it. The plateau was ringed on three
sides by mountains which topped 9,500 feet and the
elevation of the floor of the plateau was about 7,500 feet.
Having been around for some time now, and flying
exclusively for Gus, I sort of took over some of the
managing of his other pilots without him ever assigning me
the responsibility. Since most of the other pilots didn’t care
to fly in the mountains, I usually flew these trips myself.
The high elevations could be tricky in bad weather with
limited visibility and turbulence, but I never pushed myself
past my own personal limitations or the limitations of my
aircraft.
Felix produced an old sectional aviation chart, and spread
it out on the desk. After orienting himself for a moment, he
placed an X on the map just south of the southern Jalapa
mountains which marked the edge of the plateau and told
Gus that this was the spot we were to use for a T-Bone
delivery. We rarely discussed the load with a receiver. They
usually arranged the goods with a supplier in town to be
delivered at the airport for our loading crews. Gus looked at
me and asked if I could find the spot and I said I could. I
was familiar with that entire area from my previous flights
and it would be no problem. I did ask Felix why we couldn’t
just use the hacienda strip but, after a discussion with his
partner in Spanish, he just shrugged and said he wanted to
open this new strip.
His ground crew would mark the landing area with the
headlights and taillights of their vehicles. I was to land over
the taillights and stop before the headlights at the other end.
He would give me at least 3,000 feet. Gus told him it was
no problem and asked him when he wanted delivery. It was
to be midnight in two days time, he replied, and that was
that.
The going rate for all freight hauled south at that time
was a dollar a pound. The T-Bone could comfortably hold
about 1,800 pounds with full fuel tanks, even though this
would make the airplane more than 1,000 pounds over legal
gross weight at takeoff. Most receivers tried to pack more
than that in the airplane. I had flown a T-Bone once with
2,000 pounds in it and it flew like a boat, bobbing up and
down. It had been very unstable and hard to control. I had
been on the line 4 months so I was considered experienced
in these matters and my limits were never questioned. I told
Felix 1,800 pounds was as much as I would carry and he
agreed.
When the two gentlemen left, Gus told me Felix was
very unreliable and it wouldn’t surprise him if the strip was
unprepared, open ground with sagebrush. He told me to
expect anything and to just come home with the load if the
strip looked too rough. I asked him if he knew why Felix
didn’t want to use the hacienda strip and he replied that he
probably didn’t want to pay the hacienda owner what he
charged to use his strip. This trip for Felix was making me
nervous, but I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t push it and
put any further concerns out of my mind. I didn’t know at
the time that this trip would use up one of the nine lives my
mother told me I must have had to do all the crazy things I
did in airplanes.
Things were beginning to pick up in our little operation.
We were beginning to get more trips than Harry or I could
handle by ourselves, especially since Pete had been fired by
Gus for running the DC-3’s tail into our only turboprop, an
Aero Commander that was almost ready to put in service.
Soon after getting fired, about a month ago, Pete was
riding jumpseat in a DC-4 out of McAllen to get the feel of
Skytrain’s operation. They had lost their number 3 engine
on a go-around in the fog at Loma Bonita. 20,000 pounds
of four star Couvosier lit up the night sky for miles when
they hit a major powerline. It was said at the time that they
knocked a third of Mexico City’s power out for three days.
Whether that was true or not, I don’t really know. I just
know that what was left of all three pilots came home in a
bushel box. Charlotte and I had a hell of a time getting
Pete’s girl, Laura’s belongings out of the apartment they
shared in Brownsville. Laura was an ex-Air Texana flight
attendant who joined Pete on the border after the demise of
our airline. The few times I had seen Pete in the last couple
of months, he talked of starting a new life with a new love
and seemed really happy. After his death, it seems his ex-
wife thought he had a shoe box full of C notes somewhere
in the apartment and had obtained a court order to seal it
immediately. We had to get Laura a lawyer who
accompanied us all to the apartment under the supervision of
the Sheriff’s Department just for her to get her personal
belongings. Sad business it was. A little ironic too, because
Pete always carried his cash with him in a money belt. It
was never seen again.
To make our operation’s work load even worse, Harry
was starting to get wierd again. He would disappear without
a word to anyone and be gone for days. He would return
without an explanation as to his whereabouts and not be
concerned at all about his scheduled flights which had to be
canceled. It was something Gus had always put up with
because Harry was a good pilot. He got the loads through
and always brought the airplanes back in one piece, but it
was hurting our reliability with our receivers. One night,
during one of Harry’s more frequent absences in September,
Gus called me up to tell me Harry had disappeared. He
asked me if I thought I could handle a DC-3 trip from the
left seat.
“Think you can handle her, Fox?,” he drawled in that
west Texas, cowpuncher’s accent.
“Sure, Gus. Flyin’ the beast is no problem, especially in
good weather. There’s the little problem of a Type Rating
and an FAA checkride, though,” I said in a worried voice.
“Well shit fire, boy! I won’t tell anyone if you won’t!” he
countered good-naturedly.
It was always hard to say no to Gus. He was such a nice
guy and he always seemed to be in a good mood. If
something wasn’t fun, Gus wasn’t interested in doing it. And
anything he did, he injected fun into it.
I asked him, “Who’s flying the right seat?”
“A new kid that came into the office just a couple days
ago. Says he can handle a 3. He can probably handle the
other stuff we fly if he can handle a 3. He don’t look over
18, but he says he’s been crop dustin’ down in Louisiana for
a couple of years. Thought he’d take up safer work, Ha!
Kid seems to have some moxy. His name is Mike and he’ll
meet you at the airplane. You can show him the ropes and
see if he can hack it.”
“What the hell. It’s about time I got promoted anyway,” I
said. “When do I go?” I was already thinking of the ten one
hundred dollar bills I would have in my hand when I got
back.
“It’s a dawn arrival tomorrow morning at the Salinas
Lake Strip. The one just south of Vera Cruz”.
“Jeez, Gus. You don’t give a guy much warning.”
“Red lights are for warnin’, son! This here’s a
promotion!. Check the weather real good at the airport
weather station and meet Mike and the loadin’ crew around
one a.m. I’ll see you when you get back!,” and he hung up.
Just like that.
This is how I made Captain in the DC-3, just three
months after arriving in Brownsville.
This is also how I met Mikey. We called him that
because he looked like such a kid, still wet behind the ears.
But looks sure turned out to be deceiving, as they usually
are. Mikey had what it takes. He had nerve, was a good
pilot, was steady under pressure and was crazy enough to be
flying the border like the rest of us. He was one of the guys
who always brought his airplane back. Any of the guys on
the border could have been brought down by bad luck, and
often were. But it was always more than good luck that kept
bringin’ em’ back without fail.
It was Mikey that probably saved both our lives on this
particular trip for Felix. I was showing him the ropes again,
checking him out on the Hacienda Strip, since we’d be flying
right over it to get to Felix’s “new” strip just south of there.
It was customary for a new pilot to ride along with an old
hand to be shown the strips we used, the visual checkpoints,
and some of the tricks we used to find our destinations
without navigation aids in bad weather. An X on a map
could be tricky if you didn’t know the landscape pretty well.
This was bush flying and they didn’t call it bush flying for
nothing. It was something you didn’t learn from books.
I met Mikey this evening, November 4, 1981 at the
National Weather Service office at the Brownsville airport
around one a.m. It was a pleasant, mild evening in
Brownsville. The temperature was somewhere in the high
sixties with just a little wind out of the south. The sky was
clear and there was a quarter moon, my favorite on a clear
night. It gave you just enough light in good weather for
excellent night visibility from an airplane, but was not
enough light to move around comfortably or quickly on the
ground. I never knew what a “smuggler’s moon” was, but
this was mine and we had one tonight.
We looked at the weather service’s satellite photos of
eastern Mexico taken just the hour before and they looked
real good. There were few clouds anywhere near the Jalapa
Mountains and no weather systems or fronts moving within
300 miles of our plateau. It was clear as a bell. The forecast
for mid-eastern Mexico (such as it was, since it originated
from Mexico City) was for clear skies tonight and the next
day.
“Looks good, Mikey. Piece o’ cake,” I told him with a
swagger in my voice. I was trying to exude confidence so
Mikey would be relaxed. I suspected he had not gotten over
his initial nervousness in this business. I suppose I had not
gotten over mine as well, but I was playing a role here.
Come to think of it, all of us down here on the border were,
in one way or another, playing the role of the cigar-
champing, leather-jacketed, gun-in-a-boot, heavy- drinking,
bar-brawlin’, silk-scarved daredevil heroes of our favorite
aviation movies. To say we were not responsible, law-
abiding citizens is probably too harsh an assessment. We
may not have been your average, run-of-the-mill, reserved
and all together respectable Joes who were the models of
responsibility, but we were responsible for ourselves, our
aircraft, our loads and our crewmen. And we were
responsible to our Operators, Receivers, Airport
Commandantes, Tower Operators, Police, State Governors
and Federale agents in Mexico who all had their hand out
for the payoffs that made our business work. Most of us
didn’t shoot at people. We hauled TV’s. Not guns. Not
dope. TV’s. We respected all U.S. laws and U.S. Federal
Aviation Regulations as much as any aviation business does.
Mexican customs laws weren’t designed to protect Mexican
industry. Nobody in their right mind in Mexico would buy a
Mexican TV. Everyone wanted a Sony. It seemed the laws
were only on the books down there so the “privileged” class
could make money. And make it they did. They used to
come to South Padre Island with suitcases full of C notes
and buy condominiums on the beach for cash.
“Looks good to me, Fox. I’m ready to roll,” Mikey
replied, with somewhat of a swagger in his voice, too. He
was getting into it.
As we walked down the flight line towards our hangar
and line of aircraft, I was, as usual, reminded of the feelings
I had on my first mission. Excitement, apprehension, a little
fear, a little worry that I may not be coming back, but a real
sense of adventure! This was it! This was really happening!
Doing what we were doing with old, beat up overloaded
airplanes, flying into dirt or grass strips not meant for
airplanes at all, approaching unknown dangers was better
than watching any movie. I had dreamed of high adventure
my whole childhood, only to grow up and realize that most
adventure was in books, movies or people’s imagination.
Most adventure you read about involves dangers that get
people killed and responsible adults just don’t do those kind
of things. Call me irresponsible, I was doing it! The feeling
was exhilarating, an adrenaline high.
Mikey hadn’t flown the T-Bone much, so I took him
through a thorough preflight. ,I showed him the squat of the
tires and reminded him that densely packed car stereos can
weigh a lot more that TV’s and to look at the tires carefully.
I told him, if he ever thought there was too much weight in
the airplane, to tell the loading crew to take some weight out
and redistribute the rest. I showed him how we pushed the
tail down by hand towards the ground so the nose wheel
almost came off the ground and then let it go. If the tail
didn’t pop back up smartly, the center of gravity was
probably too far aft and the airplane might not fly. The nose
tire squashed too flat would tell you if the center of gravity
was too far forward. I always carried a tire pressure gauge
to make sure no one tried to fool me by pumping up the tire
pressures. Once in awhile that happened. These procedures
weren’t very scientific, but they could keep you alive.
I told him of the story of the pilot who tried to take off in
an overloaded Cessna 207. He had used up almost all of the
runway at Brownsville and had just barely gotten off the
ground at the end of the runway only to find the airplane
wouldn’t climb out of ground effect. Ground effect is the
cushioning of the air trapped between the wings and the
ground when within a wingtip of the ground. He crashed
off the end of the runway and was killed. When the FAA
weighed his load it was over 3,000 pounds! A Cessna 207
won’t fly with 3,000 pounds in it, especially with full fuel
tanks. His load consisted entirely of car stereos, wrapped in
brown paper and stacked from the floor to the ceiling, filling
up the entire cabin. He never had the chance to make that
mistake again. There were many mistakes you couldn’t learn
the hard way. This was one of them. I listed for Mikey my
personal rules for staying alive:
1. Don’t take more weight in your plane than you think
you can handle.
2. Don’t fly into heavy turbulence or even cumulous
clouds if your plane won’t cruise any faster than 1.4 of
your stall speed.
3. After you start your takeoff roll, always pull the nose
off the ground and let it fall. If it doesn’t fall, abort the
takeoff.
4. Don’t continue a takeoff past ten feet of altitude if you
can’t get the stall light to go out by lowering the nose.
5. Don’t descend in mountainous terrain if you can’t see
the ground or water in front of you. (You’d be surprised
how many pilots were killed ignoring this one).
6. Don’t descend to within 1,000 feet of what you know
to be the ground if you can’t see it.
7. Don’t jerk the controls in response to obstacles.
Accelerated stalls come easy when you’re overloaded.
8. If you don’t feel good about the weather, don’t go.
9. If you don’t feel good, don’t go.
10. If you go, and at any time feel uncomfortable about
the successful completion of your mission, come home.
11. Listen to the little bird in your head, he may be trying
to tell you something.
These were the rules that had kept me alive so far, and I
felt it necessary to pass them on. Most of the pilots who
didn’t come back broke at least one of them.
Our takeoff was uneventful. A couple of quick blinks of
the big red stall light, and we were airborne. I explained to
Mikey that at this weight, if we were to lose an engine, we
would not be able to maintain altitude. We would be able to
maintain a slow descent at full power on our remaining
engine, but we had to be careful not to get too slow because
we would reach our minimum control speed early at this
weight. The book all about your airplane was good stuff to
know, but you had to be careful with the published
performance numbers. They were all calculated at gross
airplane weights which were much lower than we usually
flew. The lines on the charts only showed data within the
legal envelopes so a certain amount of adjustment had to me
made in your head. In its infinite wisdom, the FAA
restricted operating weights and speeds of aircraft it certified
as airworthy to be well within a safety margin of what the
aircraft could actually do. So you had a legal envelope and a
real envelope. Get outside the legal envelope and you broke
a regulation. Get outside the real envelope and the aircraft
broke you. The problem with real envelopes is that, the only
way to find the edge of the envelope is to feel it without
going over it. The trick was to get close enough to the edge
of the envelope to be able to feel it without going over the
edge and falling out of the sky. This was tricky business.
Flying “on the edge” always is. This is where it became very
important to determine the limits of your airplane coupled
with the limits of your own skill. Get the formula wrong,
and you had a good chance of dying. And, since it wasn’t a
formula you could figure out entirely on paper, this is where
the little bird came into the picture. When the son of a bitch
starts sqwawking in your head that something’s wrong, it’s
time to back off.
The airplane we are flying tonight is a 1955 Beechcraft
Twin Bonanza, affectionately known as a T-Bone. It was
the forerunner of the Beech Queen Aire, which was the
forerunner of the Beech King Air. It was first built as an
Army airplane and so has a very strong landing gear and a
rugged airframe. Gus had picked it up at a Sheriff’s sale in
Florida for the sum of $17,500. It had been a drug
smuggler airplane before we got it. I know this because
when Gus flew it from Florida, it still had evidence tape
across all the doors and windows and the plumbing for long
range fuel tanks. These happened to be 55 gallon drums of
gasoline carried in the cabin connected to the aircraft fuel
system with a length of garden hose and a marine fuel
pump. The only thing we did to it before placing it in
service was pull out the garden hose and connections and
change the spark plugs. The old ones were all rusty. The
old T-Bone would run on any kind of gas. I knew this
because, at the strip, our receivers would pour high sulfur
content, yellow Mexican car gas into our outboard tanks
right from drums. It was filtered by a chamois stretched
over the fuel tank hole. It was amazing that the engines
never missed a beat.
Some would say this is a crazy way to operate an airline
but one had to understand the economics involved. One
never used an aircraft in this business which exceeded the
revenue potential of more than about 10 trips because,
chances are, one wouldn’t get more than 10 trips out of an
airplane before it either crashed, got shot down or was
captured at one of the strips. Of course some airplanes
lasted hundreds of missions, but others never came back
from their first trip. The year I spent on the border, our
outfit lost seven airplanes and four pilots. I don’t really
know if it was a good year or a bad one, but I survived it.
Since I was beginning my fifth month on the line, I was
considered an old hand and I sure acted the part. For most
of the flight this night I was instructing Mikey on as many
details of staying alive as I could. I was talking a lot. Mikey
was a good student. He didn’t seem to mind my patronizing
manner. At one point on our trip I caught myself sounding
like the big rooster instructing the little chicken hawk and I
laughed out loud, apologizing to Mikey. He said he liked the
act and didn’t take offense.
“If it’s windy, Mikey, stay away from the valleys and
passes of these mountains. The up and down drafts can put
you into the ground fast,” I said, warming up my act again.
“It may take a little longer to get the altitude to go over them
all, but it’s worth it. If the cloud cover is too close to the
ground, don’t get caught in between. If you’re above the
clouds and find a hole, make damn sure you know exactly
where you are before your dive through it. This was all very
good advice which could keep a bushpilot alive. It was
advice I ignored myself on occasion and it damned near
killed me more than once.
When we arrived at the hacienda plateau close to
midnight, the air was smooth and clear. We could clearly
see the ring of mountains to the east and south as we flew
over the center of the plateau. Arriving just to the south of
the southern ring of mountains, we saw a continuous ground
cover of thick fog running all the way from the coast
westward past the plateau, covering our primary strip like a
blanket. We were orbiting at 11,000 feet, just 1,500 feet
above the ring of mountains and only 3,500 feet above the
floor of the plateau so we could clearly see the terrain.
While we were looking in the direction of our intended
destination, we noticed several cars and at least one truck
coming through a pass in the mountains. One of them was a
bright yellow Volkswagen beetle belonging to Felix that I
had previously seen him drive to another strip.
“There’s Felix’s car, coming through the mountain pass,”
I told Mikey. “Looks like he’s heading for the Hacienda
strip. I guess he’s going to open it up for us to land there.
We’ve got plenty of gas so we’ll just orbit until we see the
smudge pots,” I remarked with relief.
For night arrivals, our receivers would line up highway
smudge pots, those cans of kerosene with wicks that the
highway departments used for marking road construction
before they started using battery powered blinking lights.
Our receivers would set them up around the edges of the
strip to mark it in the dark. At night, they were very
effective at marking the landing area. With nothing but
surrounding darkness, they reminded me of the deck of an
aircraft carrier at night.
After about 10 minutes or so, I began to get worried that
something was wrong. We didn’t see any pots being lit and
we were starting to run low on fuel. We had almost three
and a half hours of flying to do to get back to Brownsville
and we were fast approaching the point of no return. I had
been preaching to Mikey for hours on all the rules of staying
alive and here I was starting to push a completion when I
knew our primary strip was impossible to get to and
something was wrong with this one.
“We’d better head back, Mikey. I’m starting to get
uncomfortable with this one,” I said, obvious concern in my
voice.
“There’s a light!,” Mikey said with excitement, looking
out the window.
“What the hell took him so long,” I wondered out loud. I
continued to orbit at low power, looking at my watch. “I
hope he brought fuel with him,” I said, remembering how
unreliable Felix was purported to be.
“There’s another one,” Mikey reported, confidence
building in his voice.
As we continued to orbit, we observed several more pots
being lit in a narrow line running east and west. Whenever
we had used the strip in the past, the hacienda was always
dark, but we could see it.
“Something is wrong,” I told Mikey. “The strip is north
of the hacienda and runs north and south. He’s lighting the
dirt road going to the hacienda! Shit fire, I hope it’s not full
of holes, we might punch a landing strut right through the
wing at this weight.” I found out why the regular strip was
blocked much later – a bulldozer was parked right in the
middle of it. Seems like Felix had neglected to pay the
owner for the last few times he had used the strip.
I was pissed. Looking at my watch, I knew we were
committed to land now. From the smudge pots, the road
looked long enough. The little bird in my head who, since
we first spotted Felix’s car heading for the hacienda, had
been peeping continuously, now began to squawk.
Coming out of our circular orbit, I began descending into
a left downwind for the road.
“Speed’s important now, Mikey. We want 30 to 40
knots over stall for our base leg turn to end up only about 10
to 15 knots over stall on short final with full flaps. We make
a high sink rate approach, aiming at a point just past the
approach lights and bleed off our remaining flying speed in a
full back pressure flare started about 10 to 20 feet off the
ground. When we hit, we get the flaps up fast to get the
weight on the main gear tires and brake like hell. Cinch her
up, Mikey,” I said in reference to his seat belt. “It’s a good
day to die.” I couldn’t help but blurt out this final bit of
bravado.
As we began our base leg turn, now within about 400
feet of the ground; we both noticed the telephone poles
along the road. They were dark and, against the dark
ground, had been invisible up to now.
“Can we clear those telephone poles?,” Mikey asked.
His voice was full of concern now.
“Looks like plenty of room, Mikey. Relax, no sweat,” I
responded as I started sweating bullets. “You keep an eye
on them, and if they look too close to you, let me know
before I get as low as they are and we’ll wave off.” I knew
there was room. I also knew we were going to land and get
some gas.
Coming around to a low final approach, we lined up on
the smudge pots and got close enough to see the road and
poles, visible by the fire’s light. The road looked smooth
enough and we cleared the poles by at least a wing’s length.
I set the T-Bone down hard, switched up the flaps and
braked to a slow taxi well clear of the hacienda. I taxied up
to the clearing in front of the hacienda and turned the
aircraft around facing the way we had come in and shut off
the engines. Both Mikey and I heaved an audible sigh of
relief and climbed out onto the wing to greet a grinning
Felix. I waved at him an said hello. I knew he didn’t speak
very much English, so I never tried to talk to him but in the
most rudimentary way. This is why he didn’t use FM radios.
Mikey and I jumped off the wing and got out of the
ground crew’s way as they began taking off our load of
electronics. Mikey and I both lit a cigarette and looked up
into the night sky. We noticed what had been a clear sky
just moments before had begun to show a thin layer of haze
at a fairly low altitude. It was starting to inhibit our view of
the stars and moon. Feeling the chill in the air and the lack
of wind, I realized that it was a good chance that fog would
soon condense out of the air and could blanket the whole
plateau in minutes.
“We’d better get out of here, Mikey. Looks like fog
could sock us in here real quick.”
We turned around to find Felix and noticed the ground
crew had not even started to pour gas in our wings yet.
Finding Felix, we exhorted him to get us gassed up and
unloaded as fast as he could. Pointing a finger upward and
waving it in a small circle, I could only say, “Andele,
Andele!” to try to speed things up.
In just a few minutes, our thin haze layer was obviously
thickening up, but we could still see the moon through it.
By the time we were unloaded and gassed up, the layer had
thickened some more. The moon was now only a diffused
source of light in the starless dark sky.
“Well, it’s still clear on the ground, Mikey. We’re gettin’
outta here just in time,” I told him as we jumped up onto the
wing and entered the airplane. As soon as we belted
ourselves in, I started setting switches for the start. When I
pushed the starter buttons, the engines fired right up. After
a short warm up and a glance around to make sure there was
no one behind us, I advanced the throttles to full power as I
waved goodbye to Felix. When I released the brakes, the
now empty T-Bone quickly roared down the road. Men
were busily dowsing smudge pots along the side of the road,
moving off to the side to get out of our way as we zipped
past.
We usually used landing lights on our departures since
the chance of getting caught when leaving was remote. The
lights gave us a clear view of the road ahead and we quickly
reached flying speed. Pulling the aircraft off the ground, I
quickly raised the landing gear, holding the aircraft on a
steady course, mindful of the telephone poles off to the left.
When I reached an altitude above the telephone poles, my
attention was shifted to our impending entrance into the
layer of fog just above us.
At this point, I should mention the method Beech used in
the T-Bone to illuminate the flight instruments. Two
ultraviolet lights were imbedded in the overhead panel which
shined onto the instrument panel. The markings on the
instruments were painted in fluorescent paint which made
them very visible to the pilot in low light conditions.
Unfortunately for us, the paint on these instruments was
over 25 years old and had faded somewhat. Ordinarily, with
good night vision established, this posed no particular
problem. Tonight it would prove most embarrassing.
As we climbed up into the fog bank, the landing lights
reflected back into our eyes destroying our night vision
instantaneously. Seeing the instruments became very
difficult. Immediately, I lowered the nose of the aircraft to
descend below the fog bank and leaned forward to turn off
the landing light switch which was located on the knee panel
below the yoke. As I did so, I must have pulled the yoke
unintentionally to the left slightly, just enough to make the
aircraft drift imperceptibly to the left. The little bird in my
head was screaming and seemingly bouncing off the walls
inside my skull.
These events happened quite rapidly in only a matter of a
few seconds. Having shifted my attention from the
telephone poles, it did not return to them as we descended
and drifted to the left toward them. My night vision had not
yet returned and my immediate concern was keeping the
airplane flying while unable to see my primary flight
instruments.
Suddenly, the aircraft’s left wing dropped. I countered
with right aileron to no effect, then with maximum right
aileron, turning the yoke all the way. Now, with amazing
clarity, time slowed down to a crawl and I knew we were in
deep shit. The familiar epithet escaped my lips at the same
time, without any conscious effort on my part.
Our left wing had caught a telephone or power wire
between two poles and couldn’t rise. As we drifted further
left, the prop hit the wire and it became the 4th of July out
our left windows. The brilliant shower of sparks that
exploded to our left bathed the interior of the cabin in bright
white light and further vision abruptly ended. We could feel
the prop chopping up the wire, making a lot of vibration and
noise.
Blinded, with the shower of sparks over, it was dark. I
knew we must still be between two poles but I didn’t know if
we were right side up or upside down. The airplane was
jerking first one way then the other and the noise was
increasing to a crescendo.
Frozen in position in my seat, staring wide-eyed into
blackness, I pulled straight back on the yoke as hard as I
could and released the pressure immediately. I was not
aware that Mikey, without a word had put the landing gear
handle down. Without a pause, I once again pulled back on
the yoke as hard as I could and released the pressure. I
suppose in my mind, I was trying to stop the fall of the
aircraft because I could tell by the seat of my pants that we
were falling.
Then we hit. It was a violent smack on the ground which
must have thrown the aircraft back into the air because, for
a second or so, we were thrown weightless into freefall, still
strapped into our seats. It’s easy to tell when you’re
experiencing a freefall or zero-G condition. Your stomach is
in your throat. At the first impact we both experienced the
numbing sensation of no feeling of pain at all. Then we hit
again.
It must have been a pretty good second impact, because
there is no memory of any more of the crash. The next
thing I remember, someone was pulling me out of the
wreckage by my arms. I remember a severe pain in my
lower right leg and thinking to myself, “Oh shit. When they
drag me off this wing, my leg is going to fall about three
feet and hit the ground and hurt like hell.”
I was too out of it to say anything, and I braced myself
for the pain as my foot left the wing. To my surprise, it
didn’t fall at all. The wing was sitting on the ground.
I remember people dragging me over the ground and
then carrying me a short way to the road. They lifted me
and put me partially on the floor and partially on the back
seat of Felix’s yellow Volkswagen. My head was on Mikey’s
lap and I remember looking up at him through blood soaked
eyes and asking him, “You OK, Mikey?”
“My back hurts, but I think I’m OK, Ron,” he said,
staring at my bloody face as if I was going to die any minute.
“How the hell are you doing?”
“I’m OK too,” I remember saying, just before I entered a
dreamlike state of shock. I remember seeing shapes
occasionally going by from my view upwards out of the
windows of the back seat. I remember the car swerving left
and right as we were driving through the mountains and how
that made my back and leg hurt. I remember putting my
hand on my face to wipe the blood out of my eyes and
feeling a mass of scab and partially dried blood covering my
entire face. My left eyebrow was sort of hanging loosely
like a pocket due to the inch long cut just above it. It was
continuously wet with fresh blood as was the top of my head
from another cut in my scalp. The pain was intense only
occasionally and, by and large, I felt pretty good. I must
have been dropping in and out of consciousness, however,
because I found out later that we drove over 50 miles
through the mountains to Jalapa to Felix’s house in town.
The next thing I remember, I was being carried into
Felix’s living room and was laid down on a couch with a
pillow under my head. After a few minutes, a woman came
in to the living room and handed Mikey and me a cup of
Nescafe coffee and left. Mikey and I were left there alone
for the rest of the night. Mikey was in an overstuffed chair
in front of the couch and we began to relive the crash. He
kept asking me how I felt. I kept telling him I think my back
was screwed up and that my leg was probably broken and
that my face must look like the work of Lizzie Borden. He
laughed at that. I told him the pain in my back came and
went, but, for the most part, I was not feeling too bad.
For the next hour or so we talked excitedly about the
crash, about what we thought had happened, about how
lucky we were to survive. It was then that I found out he
had put down the landing gear, probably saving our lives.
“Landing gear absorb a lot of energy when they tear off,” I
told him, and we laughed. Mikey’s back was a little sore, but
he was otherwise unscathed.
“Ow!” I gasped. “It really does only hurt when I laugh,”
I told him, and we laughed again.
The next thing I remember was the front door opening
the next morning. There were several men in the living
room. The person who entered must have been a doctor
that Felix had brought to his house. He took one cursory
look at me and, from what I could make out, demanded I be
taken to a hospital. I heard the word, L’hospital and
shouted, “No hospital, no hospital.,” as loud as I could.
“Federales, pour favor, no l’hospital!” I couldn’t be sure
what they were going to do, but I insisted that Felix call Gus
in Brownsville.
After awhile, Felix and Mikey helped me limp to Felix’s
car and I was driven to a private clinic somewhere in town.
With Felix on one side and Mikey on the other holding me
up, I walked into the clinic and was put into bed. A nurse
came in and gave me a shot of morphine and I was on cloud
nine without a care in the world. Another nurse came into
my room and washed the blood off my face. Then she cut
my hair with scissors before shaving a significant portion of
my head. A doctor came in and sewed up the cut on my
head with thick blue thread. Then he sewed up my eyebrow
with bright red thread. After that, I was X-rayed and my
right leg was put into a calf-length plaster cast. Then I was
stretched out onto a contraption on the floor which arched
my back and I was put into a plaster body cast from my neck
to my hips. The doctor, speaking broken English, told me if
I was lucky I would be out of the body cast in about four
months. The morphine had me so high, it didn’t seem to
matter too much. I was wheeled back to my room and put
in bed. Later that night I was spoon fed some clear soup
which tasted pretty good and I slept very well. The
morphine worked wonders.
When I woke up the next morning, I was given another
shot of morphine just before breakfast and I spent the
morning in a fog. Later that day who walked through the
door but Julian, Mr. C’s son from Vera Cruz. He was
barking orders like he owned the joint, and soon I was
transferred to a gurney and put into an ambulance. I was
driven about two hours or so to Vera Cruz International
Airport where Gus and his son-in-law, Larry met us. What’s
important to this part of the story is to know that Gus was a
general aviation pilot of limited flying experience. Larry was
an ex-fireman on total medical disability and he helped Gus
run our little operation. They had flown down in our Cessna
402 to get me out. Julian had to buy the gurney from the
ambulance crew because there was no way I could sit in the
aircraft. I remember, as they were putting me in the
airplane, Julian leaned over the gurney and put 10,000 pesos
in my hand. “See you, Ron,” was all he said.
It’s hard to describe how I felt being loaded onto that
Cessna. It was sort of like the feeling I had of graduating
from high school, or getting a new job, or moving to a new
place. Still under the influence of morphine, I was feeling
pretty good, with few real concerns at the moment. But I
remember the sense of enormous relief I felt, knowing I was
heading home.
Gus was at the controls and Larry was sitting to his right
up front. I was lying on the gurney with my feet towards the
back of the plane and, without much trouble, I could look
over my shoulder and see the backs of their heads as they
busily ran through checklists and started the engines. Our
taxi to the runway and takeoff were uneventful. The 402’s
engines sounded and felt strong as we climbed out over the
gulf heading north for Brownsville. The steady drone of the
engines was helping me drift off to sleep so I had no idea
how much altitude we had gained when the engines stopped.
I had been getting used to slipping in and out of
consciousness over the last couple of days and sometimes
had difficulty distinguishing between reality and dreams. I
suppose I was a little annoyed at first, losing the pleasant
drone of those engines. At night, in the clinic it was very
quiet and sleep came easy. In fact most nights, when normal
people usually sleep, it’s usually pretty quiet. But it was day
now and one usually hears things going on around oneself,
even when alone during the day, so the silence seemed
strange. My bed was moving too. These drugs are
something.
Reality began encroaching on my dreamlike state. Just
before I opened my eyes I thought that I remembered being
in an airplane just a little while ago and one thing I knew for
sure; silence and propeller driven airplanes don’t go together
at all. Now positive that I had dreamed Julian coming to get
me and taking me to the Vera Cruz airport, I knew that I
couldn’t be in an airplane, either. But when I opened my
eyes and saw I was in an airplane surrounded by absolute
silence I relaxed because I knew I was dreaming. Airplanes
that are in the air are noisy.
I don’t know how long I laid there staring at the ceiling
and watching clouds drift by in the blue sky before I began
to hear the faint sound the airplane made slicing quietly
through the air. I have heard that sound before and, just like
the other times I have heard it, a shot of adrenaline shot
through me like a bolt of lightning.
My head whipped around to the front of the cabin and
the sight which greeted me will remain frozen in my mind as
long as I live. Gus was flipping switches, pulling and
pushing on throttle, prop and fuel mixture levers, and
switching fuel selectors in a chaotic manner. Larry was
frantically rummaging around in the glove compartment
looking for an owner’s manual which would have the answer
to the airplane’s problem as if it were a car. Had I not been
so scared at the time, I would have laughed hysterically.
Ten years later, I still laugh when that image strikes me, but I
wasn’t laughing then.
As I lay there watching this Keystone Cops-like episode,
I realized that we were in the Cessna. I remembered that a
month or so ago, Gus and Larry had installed an illegal fuel
tank in the nose compartment of the airplane to give us more
range. Inside the tank was a submerged electric marine fuel
pump which pressurized the fuel. The only problem with
this arrangement was, when the nose fuel tank ran out of
fuel, this little fuel pump would continue to pump like mad,
pumping air into the fuel lines causing the engines to quit.
Airplanes are complicated machines made up of thousands
of complicated parts. Unqualified mechanics are never
supposed to back-yard engineer modifications such as this,
but it did give us extra range. All the pilot had to do when
the engines quit was to just turn off the pump and, after just
a few seconds, the fuel would return to the engines from the
regular fuel tanks. Gus had not flown this airplane since this
modification had been made and had forgotten all about this
little quirk. In order for qualified airplane mechanics to
overlook just this kind of modification, the on/off switch for
this fuel pump was hidden underneath the instrument panel
in an obscure place. He didn’t even think about it.
When I realized what had happened, I yelled at Gus,
“The nose fuel pump switch! Turn off the nose fuel pump
switch under the dash!”
“Shit!,” Gus bellowed, as he quickly found the switch
and flipped it off. “I forgot all about that damned thing!”
Since I could see the power quadrant levers in disarray, I
yelled, “Throttles halfway back! Mixtures rich! Props
halfway back! (Gus had feathered them both so they
wouldn’t drag us down windmilling). Electric fuel boost
pumps on! Ignition on both mags!”
Gus completed each task as I yelled it. The props came
out of feather and we could feel the drag of them
windmilling as they sped up to a mid-range rpm. The
engines weren’t producing power because they were still
fuel-starved. What seemed like a wait of minutes was
probably only a few seconds, but the engines finally roared
to life when fuel reached them.
“Let em’ warm up!,” I yelled. “We don’t want to blow a
jug now!”
“We don’t want to crash into the water, either!,” he yelled
back at me and began to smoothly push the throttles
forward.
I found out later that we had at least a couple of
thousand feet to go before the water, but that’s not much
when you consider that we were descending without power
at about 1,000 feet per minute.
Safely in the climb, we all started whooping and
laughing. What is it about pilots that makes brushes with
death humorous? I suppose one could either laugh or cry.
Might as well laugh, I guess.
I settled back into my gurney and returned to my
dreamlike state, back into the arms of morphius. The next
thing I remember was my gurney being taken out of the
Cessna and put into an ambulance for the ride to the Valley
Community Hospital. Charlotte was there to meet us. Amy
and Ampado, our secretaries, other pilots and mechanics
from other outfits were there as well.
My usual custom was to call Charlotte when I returned
from a mission if she was out of town so she wouldn’t
worry. She had been visiting her mother in Nederland, just
outside of Beaumont, Texas and she had not received my
returning call from yesterday morning. When she called our
apartment, there was no answer. When she called Amy,
Amy told her I had crashed in Mexico. Charlotte got on the
next plane for Brownsville and had arrived before I did.
When I was wheeled into the hospital, the morphine was
starting to wear off and I was in a lot of pain, especially my
lower back. The doctors told me they couldn’t give me any
painkillers until they had X-rayed my back and assessed my
condition concerning possible internal injuries. Waiting in
the hallway, still on my gurney, I began yelling that if they
didn’t get this body cast off of me I would tear it off myself.
That is exactly what I began to do, bit by bit with my
fingernails. That first hour or so I was a bad patient. After
their assessments, I was given a shot of Demerol and things
were fine again. They told me if I would promise to be still
in bed, flat on my back, they would take the body cast off. I
readily agreed. What a relief it was to get that thing off of
me. I told them that the doctor in Mexico had told me that I
would have to wear that thing for four months and they just
laughed.
“You had a compression fracture of your first lumbar
vertebrae,” the doctor told me. “If you lie still for a few days
you’ll be fine. After that, we can fit you with a back brace
that you’ll probably have to wear for a few weeks. Complete
recovery will just take time. You’ll have to take it easy for a
long time.”
I spent the next four days in the hospital and then the
next two weeks in bed at home with Charlotte. She had had
some previous geriatric nursing experience and she sure took
good care of me.
After two weeks, she would help me out of bed and into
my back brace. We would then hobble to the bathroom
together, dragging my leg cast, and somehow get me into the
shower. I would put my foot with the cast onto the toilet
and Charlotte would wrap the shower curtain around it. I
would balance myself there and take a shower. It was quite
a comical undertaking.
On Thanksgiving, Gus was throwing a big party at his
house for the entire outfit and I was the guest of honor. Too
many of our pilots had not returned from such episodes, so
there was reason for celebration. My colorful stitches had
been removed and I was able to hobble around on my own
with a walker. By that time I was being weaned off of the
drugs, too.
On December 4th, just four weeks after crashing, I was
back in our DC-3 flying south again. I had my old navy
leather flight jacket over my back brace and my right foot in
a cast so my copilot’s confidence was not high, but Mikey
was a tough little guy.
Copyright 1998, BUSHPILOT, all rights reserved.