All the while you’re trying to figure all this out, you have to wear this miserable plastic hood, so you can’t see outside, fly the aircraft, retard the throttles, descend as required, call for the approach and landing check lists and , in a proficiency check, you can be sure that the instructor will fail and engine on you in the procedure turn. Now you have to deal with engine out checklists and still fly the approach. The instructors knew very well how difficult this was with the miserable “fixed card” ADF’s and of course, at Vung Tau, the cross winds never stopped blowing. But, what the hell, “ who ever promised you a rose garden?”
Somehow, I managed to fool the check airmen and they turned me loose in the Diesel three. I just love this old bird. I was then twenty-eight and the aircraft had been built before I was born. Even today, years later, there are still a lot of DC-3’s flying and they will still be long after I’m gone.
The “gooney Bird,” is not the easiest aircraft to fly but she is a long way from the hardest. The trickiest thing is to learn to handle the tail wheel and cross winds. Aside from these areas, the DC-3 is the gentlest and finest flying machine ever built. Taking off, the pilot can’t see the nose and has to keep her straight by lining her up on the distant end of the runway. The pilot has to sense any directional deviation long before it is apparent and gently make almost imperceptible corrections. Once the tail comes off the ground, at about forty or fifty, depending on the wind, one “steers” the DC-3 with her ailerons, which are huge and positioned way out on the one hundred and five foot wings, are more effective than the rudder. If the aircraft is drifting left the pilot gently turns the yoke to the right and the starboard aileron will rise and drag more than the left one will dip and the old bird will drift right. There is nothing in the book that tells you this, you just have to learn.
We were paid hourly for flying “in-country,” which the company euphemistically referred to as “project pay” meaning anyplace you could get a bullet up your ass. This, plus the base pay and housing allowance, added up to a lot more than I would have made as a Navy lieutenant driving a plastic river boat getting shot at all the time. However, the very best deal by far was flying the DC-3’s to Taiwan for maintenance and then bringing one back. You were out of Vietnam for a few days and only were paid base salary, so how could this beat flying in country?
My co-pilot, a wily Taiwanese ex-fighter pilot, had political connections and wound up flying with Air America. He was twenty years my senior and a hell of a lot smarter. He said, “Rabert, I think the aircraft might break when we get to Hong Kong.” “Really,” I said, “Why, it’s flying great?” I understood him better when we landed and he paid the mechanic a hundred bucks. Magically, the right main strut went flat and had to be re-sealed.
We jumped on a hydrofoil and were in Macau in two hours buying gold. He had told me to bring as much real money as I could and I had about five thousand in “green” ( USD). We were supposed to turn in our dollars on entering the country and get MPC (military payment coupons,“funny money”) which the Vietnamese couldn’t exchange. The idea was to keep hard currency from the enemy as much as possible. I had been in Bangkok the month before and had brought the five large with me.
We received the gold in light canvas belts sewn into pouches. When we got back to the Peninsula hotel, where the company kept rooms and had an office, we were told to report to the Chief Pilot in Taiwan ASAP. The next day, magically the old bird was fixed and we landed in Tainan at the Air Asia maintenance base in the afternoon. We were told to board a C-46 CAT scheduled flight to Taiwan and report to the chief pilot.
The next day we presented ourselves at his desk and were told we were summarily fired. “Not to worry, all will be OK” said my loyal but devious and duplicitous Co-Pilot.
We were ordered back to Taiwan and then told to fly a repaired aircraft back and if we minded the rules, we could keep our jobs.
Back in Saigon, we went to the Indian book store on Tudo street and exchanged our five thou in gold for ten thousand in MPC. The following week, we were again scheduled to fly another DC-3 back to Taiwan. On leaving the Saigon airport, we stopped by the Army money exchange office and received ten large in green for the military funny money (MPC). The mechanic in HKK got another “honey bee” ( hindered dollar bill), found a bad cylinder, we bought another five grand in gold, got fired again, got rehired and did this two or three times a month for another eighteen months. I came home with three hundred thousand and never did figure out who, if anyone, got hurt. The Indian later went to Paris as a millionaire. In the end, the Army wound up with several million more dollars in hard currency that they began with and God knows where the lost MPC wound up.
Flying up the Vietnamese coast one day, I noticed that my illustrious Chinese pal, having eaten a big C-RAT three thousand calorie lunch, and, with the soothing engine noise and warm South china afternoon sun, had fallen fast sleep. I slowly headed the aircraft west, over the empty sea, crept out of my seat, tuned all the radios to nothing, trimmed up the old bird, placed my big .45 pistol under the compass and turned off the left fuel valve.
I tiptoed to the back and, opening the over-wing emergency exit, caused a terrific wind noise,waking the snoozing Chinaman with a fearful start! Just then, the left engine, running out of gas, started coughing and sputtering. It was beautiful, he was terrified. Looking around, he could see no land, the compass was spinning wildly due to the large chunk of Ferris metal laying under it, the radios pointed to nothing, the ADF needle was slowly spinning in circles. The aircraft was beginning to fall off into the dead engine. He must have thought that I had parachuted without waking him. He looked back into the empty cabin and saw me leaning up against the cockpit door with a stupid American grin. When he finally realized what I had done was just another stupid round-eye joke, he was absolutely fucking furious. He muttered and squealed Chinese epithets for hours and never did see what was so dammed funny. However, after telling a few of his pals what a rotten SOB I was he finally saw that it was, after all, a pretty good joke and stopped being so darned mad at me. He never did ever go to sleep in my cockpit again.
.
Typically, we would pick up the aircraft in Saigon or Vientiane Laos, fly over to Danang, gas up and head across the South China Sea. There weren’t any en-route navigation beacons so one had to fly the correct outbound bearing from the Danang radio beacon ( NDB) , trying not to fly to close to Hainan Island in China and then after several hours, pick up the inbound Hong Kong beacon at the correct waypoint. The reason for avoiding Hainan and not getting to much off course, is because the Chi-Coms were liable to shoot you down- which is a pretty good reason to me.
In July of 1954 they did just that. A Cathay Pacific Douglas DC-6, registration VR-HEU, on a regularly scheduled flight carrying eithtyeen passengers was shot down off Hainan Island by the Chinese. In April of 62 a Curtis C-46 flown by Air America was shot down by Communist forces over the Plain of Jars in Laos killing all aboard and an Air Vietnam C-46, departing Quang Ngai was shot down killing all 38 passengers and crew. Point being, the area was “hot” and you had to be careful.
The passengers were sick and we could smell vomit in the cockpit. We were bouncing around the sky and, to be honest, we had no real idea where we were within fifty miles. There’s no auto pilot in the DC-3’s so we were hand flying the beast, depending on the incredible strength of the Douglass wings to remain bolted to the fuselage and the dependable, 14 cylinder Pratt & Whitney R1830-92 engines to somehow swallow all that water and keep running. How they did this, I have no idea but they did and we flew out of the worst of it about an hour out