SHORT CAREER FOR THE FLORIDA BOY
By
Ron Fox
As the months working for Gus rolled by, I
became more and more involved in the management of the
outfit, not by appointment to the job, but more out of
my own participation in making things work smoother. I
spent some of my free time involved in solving
operational problems for Gus because I liked him and I
wanted to make our little outfit a successful
one. I was ingrained with a sense of duty to any
employer and, just because our company was a little out
of the ordinary, it didn’t change this part of my
character. Besides, the airplane I helped return safely
one day, would carry me on a roung trip paying good
money another day. Our receivers in Mexico had several
border operators flying trips for them so if we became
more efficient, we would get more of those trips and
everyone would benefit.
I began working more closely with Amy, our
main point of contact with our receivers in Mexico. I
volunteered to Gus that I would spend some time rustling
up some more pilots for the outfit, would write a
training program for them, and take over the duties of
flight training. He began working on getting more
aircraft. In a few short months, our FAA Part 135
Operating Certificate out of Plainview, Texas, boasted
two new (old) aircraft and an approved flight training
program. Word was out on the field that we were looking
for new pilots. The smuggler’s news network on the
field worked it usual magic and pilot’s began stopping
by the hangar looking for someone to talk to about a
job. We certainly couldn’t advertise a smuggling job in
the newspapers. Even if we could have, we would have
been inundated with applications we had no way of
handling. The national economic recession of 1981 was
still in effect and there were thousands of pilots
looking for work. To say our screening process was
informal was an understatement.
As Chief Pilot/Director of
Operations/Flight Instructor/Checkairman of our little
border operation, I was the one who had to review the
“qualifications” of most of the pilots who came to our
office looking for work. I never asked to see a logbook
or a resume. I preferred to just listen to what a pilot
had to say about his flying career, what aircraft he had
flown and what he had done with them. Freight dogs of
Air America, bushpilots of the north, and crop dusters
who could describe in detail some of their favorite
flying activities would always rate much higher than
any other type of pilot where this job was concerned.
There’s an old saying in the flying business: “You can
always tell a fighter pilot, but you can’t tell him
much!” I couldn’t always determine whether every pilot
who walked in would be able to hack this job or not, but
I could usually spot a kindred spirit with a lust for
adventure. I could tell by listening whether a pilot
loved to fly or just did it for the money. I could tell
if a pilot had that sliver of craziness which permitted
him to love danger. Flying on the edge of the envelope
is not for armchair aviators who like to get their
answers out of a book. Hell, the book didn’t have
the answers to this kind of flying; the graphs stopped
at the edge of the envelope! If you relied too much on
books and good sense, you may not be able to make the
decisions necessary to get home. For that matter, you
probably wouldn’t leave in the first place!
The Florida boy, as I like to call him,
wasn’t really a boy at all, but he was young,… and
full of himself. I could tell in the first two minutes
of our discussion that he was pulling out all the stops
to puff himself up. I knew he really wanted to fly the
border and, as circumstances dictated, I did need to
start another pilot soon. I suspected his desire to fly
here was more derived from a sense of machoism than love
of the edge, however.
“I tell you what, Carl, I’m taking a DC-3
load down to Herrera’s strip tomorrow night and you can
ride shotgun, if you like.”
Carl was beaming with excitement and
pride. “Thanks, Mr. Fox!,” he said in a loud voice.
“One thing, Carl. Don’t call me mister
and don’t call me sir, and we’ll do just fine,” I told
him in a voice I knew betrayed my patronizing air.
“Meet me at the hangar tomorrow night at midnight and
we’ll give you a shot.”
Our outfit had recently gotten a beauty of
a DC-3 which one of the partners had bought for over a
hundred grand. It had an all metal floor, parachute
door, high horsepower engines, new props and a King
radio package. It was freshly painted arctic white and
had a fire engine red stripe down the side. I had
traveled to Plainview, Texas with the owner to pick it
up and bring it to Brownsville right after he bought it.
During a snow storm, he had to pour a coke bottle of
avgas down the carburetor air intake while I was
cranking the left engine to get it started. I hoped it
was hard to start only during real cold weather. It had
been starting and running well ever since we brought it
to Brownsville and I was looking forward to taking it
south.
Most days before a mission, I would sleep
from early afternoon until nine or ten o’clock. I would
get up, shower, eat some dinner and be well prepared for
my night’s work. I would usually stop by the local 7-
Eleven and get my usual fare. If I were flying for Mr.
C., I would get Julian a six pack of Lite beer, his
favorite. On the way to the hangar, I would stop by the
U.S. Weather Service office at the airport to look at my
destination area weather reports and the latest
satellite photos.
After accomplishing all these routine
chores tonight, I was satisfied that tonight’s mission
would be uneventful, at least as far as the weather was
concerned. With only one ferry flight and a couple of
familiarity flights in this new airplane, I was less
secure in it’s performance than I was in the weather.
My copilot tonight was another question mark. A pilot
can fly a DC-3 by himself, if he’s not overloaded and
he doesn’t lose an engine. I thought I knew the score
of one set of these conditions and I had doubts about
the other.
To say that Gus’s outfit utilized
standardized flight operations procedures on his
aircraft was a definite overstatement. We didn’t have
checklists printed up for each aircraft. We had a
collection of various checklists different crews liked
to use, (those crews which used checklists, that is),
laying about the various nooks and crannies of the
cockpit. Without recent experience in a DC-3, I doubted
Carl had any preferences for checklists. On most
occasions, I preferred the use of checklists, but, with
an untried crewmember in the cockpit, I preferred
checking the important items myself by memory. Carl was
not concerned with procedures. Had he picked up a
checklist and began calling off the items, I would have
felt a lot more comfortable.
I was very much relieved when the engines
started right up and growled that familiar rhythmic
growl. As our departure time approached, we taxied
slowly out to the runway. Carl was looking around the
cockpit as if he had never been in a DC-3 before. I
didn’t say anything. I would know soon enough when it
was time for him to raise the landing gear. It required
the movement of a locking latch and the pulling of a
long lever on the floor of the cockpit. Something the
uninitiated would probably not be able to figure out.
With every lurch of the taxiing aircraft, his head
started bouncing like one of those goofy bouncing dogs
you used to see in some car’s rear windshield. I
restrained myself from attaching too much significance
to this comic sight as I had learned in this business
you couldn’t judge a book by it cover. Whether a person
said ol or oil, yer or your, spit tobacco, or quoted
poetry; you couldn’t assess their performance under
pressure until the kitchen got hot. Our kitchen was
about to heat up considerably.
After a good run-up, mag check and prop
exercise, I lined up on runway 18 and advanced the
throttles, calling for takeoff power. I was pleasantly
surprised to see Carl backing me up on the throttles.
With ten thousand pounds of cargo and full fuel tanks, I
didn’t notice the extra power of this model of engines,
but they were running well. After a long but usual
takeoff run, satisfied with the center of gravity of the
plane, I smoothly pulled her off the ground.
It climbed well enough, so I called for
gear up. To my surprise, Carl raised the gear with no
trouble. At least he made all the right moves. The
problem was, the gear didn’t come up. They didn’t move
at all. As our DC-3 lumbered up into the night sky, the
landing gear remaining down added an awful lot of drag
to our already struggling plane. The airplane was
straining to climb at all under these conditions and I
knew, before long, I would have to reduce power or risk
blowing an engine. At a low speed and a low altitude,
my turn to downwind was, shall we say, quite gentle.
Arriving at approximately four hundred feet, the
screaming sound of the engines was beginning to bother
me and I knew I had better reduce power. I called for
METO power as I turned on a wide, low downwind but Carl
was just staring out into space, his face as white as a
sheet. As I reduced the power myself, I yelled at Carl,
“Carl! You can at least see if you can fiddle with the
landing gear handle and try to get the gear up.” He
continued staring out into space and didn’t respond. It
was the middle of the night and I was well out over a
residential area at low altitude and at very high
power. I must have been rattling windows all over town.
I don’t believe I ever got over ninety knots all the way
around the pattern. I couldn’t even call for flaps
until I had turned a shallow final, about two miles out.
Calling for flaps wouldn’t have done any good anyway.
Carl was in la-la-land. He didn’t look particularly
scared like I did. He just stared out the window with a
blank look on his white face, not responding to anything
I said; not that I was talking a lot.
With the runway assured, I decided to land
without any flaps. I wasn’t real keen on diverting my
attention from a very sensitive airplane to lower the
flaps myself and I really didn’t want any more drag on
the airplane than I already had. Besides, I really
wanted to pretend Carl wasn’t there anymore in the hope
that he wouldn’t suddenly come alive and begin to pull
levers and push buttoms. I wasn’t able to pull off any
power until very short final, and then I only pulled off
a little. The airplane sunk quite rapidly with only a
little more power pulled off. In fact, in my flare, I
had to pull the nose way up to avoid a hard landing.
It was hard enough, and not very pretty. I had expected
a bounce, but the struts were squashed so much with the
weight that there was no bounce in them. I was lucky
not to have blown a tire.
I finally had enough time to get pissed at
Carl and I asked him, “What’s the deal, Carl? Are you
all right? You kinda froze up a little, didn’t you?”
Not a word in response. He was at least moving his eyes
around a little bit, but I wasn’t sure he even knew
where he was. I taxied back to the hangar without
saying anything else. After shutting off all the
switches, I turned to him and said, “Man, that was a
close one. Most of our flights are not nearly that
exciting.”
“That was pretty exciting,” he said in a
hushed tone. I was glad to at least hear him speak.
“Well, maybe we’ll be able to try it again
tomorrow night, Carl,” I told him, knowing that wasn’t
going to happen. I doubted I would ever see him again,
and I surely wasn’t going to let him fly south with our
outfit. There were just too many things that could go
wrong with an airplane or the strip, our cover or the
Federales. If you couldn’t count on help from your
crewmate when the chips were down, it just wasn’t worth
going. Besides, if your crewmate can’t laugh at your
nervous jokes, and you can’t together build the bravado
that puts worry further back in your mind, you can worry
too much. I think that was half of Carl’s problem.
What the other half was, I don’t know. I never did
see him again.
Copyright 1998, BUSHPILOT, all rights reserved.