SAGEBRUSH CESSNA
By
Ron Fox
As much as I liked the Cessna 402, a small sleek twin engine cabin class
airplane, it was not very well suited for the bush. Its wheels were small and
narrow and didn’t give very much support on dirt, especially soft dirt. Its
landing gear struts and supports were rather spindly and didn’t hold up too
well on rough terrain, especially terrain which was also rocky. I found this
out firsthand one morning with Bob Downs. We were victims once again
of Felix, our most unreliable receiver.
Felix had come to Brownsville just a week before with plans to open up
a “new” strip. One which, he insisted, would be safer than our established
landing strips because it was unknown and had better perimeter visibility.
This should have been the clue that raised the red flags in our minds, but we
were a very accommodating outfit, always eager to please our customers.
Trips were getting harder to come by since the peso had devalued, and our
can-do spirit brought us all the trips we needed when other outfits were
shrinking. We were shrinking too, but due to lost aircraft and pilots, not for
lack of business. Pilots and airplanes could be easily replaced, trips for
customers couldn’t.
It was always the norm that we used either airplanes worth less than the
revenue of ten trips or someone else’s airplane, whichever was available. In
this case, our Cessna 402 was owned by a dentist from Reno, Nevada who
needed a place to put it with revenue-generating work, it’s $110,000 value
notwithstanding. It was difficult to get more than about a ton and a half of
contraband in it due to its small cabin, so its revenue was restricted to about
$2,500 per trip. It was a joy to fly compared to most of the wrecks on the
border, so we had a soft spot in our hearts for it. The soft spot was really in
our heads, though. Like I said, it was no bush airplane.
Felix, leaning over a sectional chart stretched across Amy’s desk, placed
an X on the spot marking his new strip. It was the same spot marked the
previous November that I had tried to find when I crashed our T-Bone
coming out of the Hacienda strip. This new strip was about five miles south
of the southern ring of mountains which marked the edge of the high
plateau east of Mexico City. We were to come in from west to east and
land toward the headlights of Felix’s pick up truck, over the other car which
would mark the western edge of the strip. We would not need any other
lights or smudge pots as this would be a dawn arrival.
Bob Downs had recently come onboard our outfit and I was to show
him the ropes on how we operated. An ex Air Force colonel, Bob was the
adventuresome type who had come to the border to fly this 402, kind of
baby-sitting it for his Reno dentist friend. He had previously flown it in
freight operations for the dentist and had delivered it to Brownsville for Gus
to use flying contraband. As a seasoned freight dog, I knew he was better
suited to this type of flying than many of the pilots coming to the border to
try their hand at the bush.
Bob was very professional in his preflight planning, weather analysis,
satellite photo reading and aircraft preflight inspection. The conditions for
this mission couldn’t have been better. Clear skies, mild temperatures, and
just a little wind gave us confidence this one would go off without a hitch.
We took off near 0200 and headed south, directly out over the gulf in a
straight line for the Posa Rica mountains on top of which was a weak VOR
navigation radio we would pick up an hour or so out of our destination.
The location of the strip would be no problem as I was very familiar with
this area.
I pointed out to Bob all the visual points I could think of from which
pilots could check their position on the charts. I explained to him the
concept of controlled descent to a beach landing in case of an engine failure
in an overloaded airplane. There were the colored lights of Tampico. We
could even see the bright lights of the nuclear power plant on the coast east
of Jalapa, over one hundred twenty miles away.
As the black of night slowly turned to the azure blue of predawn, we
began to pick up the VOR at Posa Rica. When the needles settled down,
we picked up a bearing and flew it to the fix. Passing over it, we headed
right for the Jalapa mountains which ringed the high plateau. Passing over
the Hacienda strip, I pointed it out to Bob, describing its dimensions and
suitability for large aircraft like the DC-3. I also told him about the power
lines running along the dirt road going into the hacienda itself and about my
crash.
We passed over the southern ring of mountains and began a westerly
heading, looking for Felix’s vehicles on the flat terrain. We spotted them
almost right away, even from ten thousand feet and started descending. We
made a pass right over the strip at low altitude, not believing our eyes.
There was Felix’s truck all right. And there was the other car which
“marked” the strip. Only there was no strip. No strip, no road, not even a
foot path. There wasn’t even a flat area clear of sagebrush. It was open
range, just like the desolate open range that the highways pass by, mile after
mile throughout south Texas and Mexico.
We made another low pass, lining up just to the side of the “strip” to look it
over carefully. We were looking for holes, depressions in the ground,
rocks, pieces of wood and anything that might wipe out an airplane on
landing. It looked all right, but from thirty feet or so, doing over a hundred
miles an hour, we could have easily missed something. We couldn’t tell
how soft the ground was, but it didn’t look soft. We should have known
better.
After talking it over a short while we decided to touch down and see how it
felt. What the hell, there were no power lines, buildings, ditches or any
other obstructions larger than a three foot sagebrush to hit. If we folded a
gear we would probably survive, so we went for it. We could have bit into
soft dirt and been pulled down with the drag, but we didn’t think so. I told
Bob about one of our pilots landing on a grass strip going up a hill along the
coast. His only problem had been four-foot tall grass which ate his Beech
Baron whole, resulting in a collapsed nosewheel and two bent props.
I came in on a long straight in, rather flat, going as slow as I dared with
this much weight, about ninety knots with full flaps carrying power. As I
passed over the car at the close end, I set her down gently on the ground. It
was a surprisingly soft landing, most of the noise coming from the
sagebrush that whipped around the plane, thrashing against its shiny paint
job. About half way to Felix’s truck, the terrain got a little rougher, with the
airplane starting to buck up and down like a bronco. I was pumping the
brakes which seemed to add to the bucking, but up ahead we saw a slight
depression with some rocks in it. It looked almost like a small pool, the
water in which had dried long ago. It was hidden from the air by several
sagebrush bushes, but we were looking at it from below the arms of the
plants. I stood on the brakes and almost got her stopped before we hit it.
We weren’t going very fast when we hit it, but when we hit it, the airplane
came to an abrupt halt.
Holding my anger at Felix, probably due to my own responsibility for
making the decision to land, I jumped out of the plane right behind Bob.
Upon examination of the nose gear, everything looked fine. The tire was
not cut and nothing seemed out of place. The light winds made it possible
for us to attempt a takeoff going the other direction so we had the ground
crew help us push down the tail to turn the aircraft around after we
unloaded it.
I tried to ask Felix why he hadn’t at least cleared a landing area of
sagebrush and rocks, but with his lack of understanding of much English I
don’t think he understood me completely.
Bob and I climbed back into the plane and fired her up. Everything
checked out all right so I applied full power, holding the brakes until takeoff
power was achieved. Releasing the brakes, the empty airplane literally
lunged forward for a short distance. After that, it was still lunging, but not
forward. We had begun turning in a gentle wide circle to the left against all
of my efforts to straighten the plane with opposite rudder and even taps on
the right brake. By the time I realized I couldn’t straighten the plane, we
were already going pretty fast, about half the speed we would need for
liftoff. I yelled to Bob that I couldn’t straighten the plane but that since we
were going so fast I would continue the takeoff. He yelled back, “Go for
it!”.
Felix and his crew must have thought we were crazy to be tearing off
across open range like that. The airplane was jumping up and down with
the terrain, its nosewheel off the ground as I was holding it off as best I
could to avoid it digging into the ground on the downswing. We were
picking up speed rapidly as we crashed through one big sagebrush after
another, half expecting to hit something solid at any time. I yelled at Bob to
give me full flaps and, as I saw the switch go to the down position, I yanked
the airplane off the ground in a shudder. We were airborne!
With the adrenaline coursing through our veins, we were both grinning
from ear to ear, congratulating ourselves on our remarkable luck. The trip
home was uneventful but we were worried about our landing back in
Brownsville. We talked it over and elected to use a crosswind runway
which would help correct our left-turning tendency. I held the nose off the
runway as long as I could. When it came down, I commenced maximum
braking with the right brake which held us straight for a short while. When
the aircraft started to turn toward the left side of the runway, I stomped on
both brakes and we skidded to a halt, close to the edge.
The tower had advised our ground crew to prepare a tow for us into the
customs hot inspection area where we quickly cleared customs and were
towed to the hangar.
It turns out I had indeed bent the nose strut assembly requiring its
replacement. It also turns out that this was to be my last flight for Felix. It
was a line finally drawn which I was to never cross over again.
Unfortunately it was a line that Bob crossed over one more time which, as it
turned out, was to sing our beloved Cessna’s swan song.
It was only a short time after my one and only circular takeoff that our
Cessna met its end, and it was, of course, at the hands of Felix. Bob had
agreed to fly a trip for him into what was described as a much better strip
than his last one. It turned out to have indeed been a much better strip than
his last one, but Bob was just a little less lucky than we had been on our last
one. He hit a depression in the ground, shaped in just such a way as to
place a twisting moment on the right main landing gear that caused it to
fold. Bob was not going very fast when he hit it, so there was very little
aircraft damage when the gear collapsed. The right wing just sort of
descended gently to the ground and rested on its slightly damaged wing tip-
tank.
After a discussion with Felix, over Bob’s objections, Felix burned it.
After retrieving the FM hand held radio, (the cheapest piece of gear in
the entire plane), Felix put the torch to it and its funeral pyre was the last
ever seen of our sleek little sportster.
Bob was taken to a nearby town where he caught a bus to the border
and then walked across the bridge into Brownsville. It would be the last trip
Bob flew for Felix, but it wasn’t our outfit’s last. That last trip for Felix,
taken by Gus a few months later, after Bob and I had left the border, cost
the outfit more than just another plane and pilot. It was the end of Gus, our
friend.
Copyright 1998, BUSHPILOT, all rights reserved.