Flying Through Life. robert Psy.D. firth

rely on myself to remain calm and do the right thing under pressure. Once back on the ground, I was not so sanguine, that’s for sure…….

      I didn’t know it then but my career was already changing. The stunt I had pulled during the escape and evasion training did not go un-noticed by my employers. The training personnel had to write evaluations and mine certainly stood out from the rest.

      I was assigned to embassy flights more or less exclusively and met some interesting guys who, it turned out later, were top CIA spooks and who were interested in me for future work. More about this later, for now, I had survived and was pressuring the head shed to get me into something with two engines. They must felt sorry for me, After all, at twenty six, I was their youngest Captain. They assigned me to the C-45 program, the venerable twin beach. I had completed the ground school already in Bangkok, so a quick review and off I went for a few days of flight training and a check ride.

      Changing aircraft with Air America wasn’t like the Mel Gibson movie. It took about thirty to sixty days to get checked out in a new piece of equipment and then you were assigned the lowest paying flights until you had some seniority to bid better ones. Luckily, I stayed on the embassy ops, so I was still flying eighty to a hundred hours a month. I didn’t see it then but clearly, someone was pulling strings for me and it had to be the “customer.”

      One memorable flight, and one I will never ever forget, was flying the scheduled embassy courier trip from Saigon to Tay Ningh then Phan Thiet on the coast. I looked down to my right from my usual twelve thousand feet and noticed the remarkable artillery barrage exploding in the green jungle canopy. I remember thinking how many cannons it must have taken to do that, when, I saw to my left, another perfect explosion pattern parallel to the first one. In a split second, it dawned on me- Holly shit! I was flying right in the middle of a B-52 carpet bombing run!

      There were five hundred pound eight foot bombs falling from the clouds, being dropped from thirty thousand feet over my head. I was suddenly cold and sweating at the same time- How frightened can you be- I was waiting for one to hit the overhead – it wouldn’t even slow up or go off- just cut us in half and we would fall two miles in pieces.

      My single passenger, the Embassy Courier, had also figured out the problem, Three Fingered Louie, so called because he had lost two fingers on his right hand, reached into the leather briefcase and pulled out a bottle of JACK – it took him both hands to get the bottle to his mouth! (Photo Beech C-45)

      I understood that somehow we were flying right between the bombers, a turn to the north or south would put us through the falling rows of hell we were unleashing on heads of the poor monkeys and elephants.

      In moments it was over and the B-52’s, flying at five hundred mph, were far ahead of us. Louie, let out a very shaky long breath and put his bottle back into the courier pouch. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were briefed every day on the locations of the artillery and bombing ops. Somehow, they messed up and it was close, as close as it can be!

      The C-45, on the ground can be a squirrelly beast, very temperamental and needs a strong minded pilot. You have to make the aircraft do what you want and not what it wants. It will test you every time you give it the chance. Once in the air, the Beech is a true thoroughbred with not a single bad characteristic. She is remarkably stable and will trim up so well you can fly her with your fingers.

      Of course, the way we flew them was a little different from what Olive Beach’s genius husband had in mind when he designed it. We flew them into very short PSP (pegged steel plank) greasy and wet bumpy hastily constructed strips. You had to hang them on the props with full flaps and gear and plant them on the first 10’, getting the tail on the ground hard with the stick pulled as far back as you can, steering with brakes, sliding and skidding to a nasty, semi-controlled stop before rolling off into the trees, hills or whatever.

      We carried freight of all kinds and all kinds of passengers. Many Vietnamese rode Air America and we never knew who they were- friend or foe. The story was that in the daylight they were all friendly rice pickers but at night, they picked up AK’s and ran all over shooting up round eyes. The village chiefs were supposed to only place friendly types on our flights but, who knows. If you tell a guy that you will chop him up if he doesn’t give you a travel pass- what are you going to do?

      CHAPTER 7

      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