street, he must have realized how stupid his career choice was. Pan Am went out of business while all the North Central pilots were flying captain on 747’s for North West.
I had rented a small one room apartment in Minneapolis and, after the security and first months rent, had enough left over for a blanket, a pillow, a box of dry milk , some cereal a bowl and a spoon. The next door neighbors, two flight attendants, made the days off through the long winter interesting. Both gals were blue eyed blondes with Scandinavian heritage and had grown up in Minneapolis. In the case of Janet and Patty it was lots of snow, no where to go, a warm room and rum and coke.
Winter months flying the DC-3 was interesting- The -3 will carry a lot of ice- probably more than most modern aircraft. The wing has a significant lift component created by the differential pressure that makes any aircraft fly. Air moves faster, sliding as it does, over the curved top of the wing than the flat bottom where is moves at a speed only equal to the forward speed of the plane. This creates a differential pressure of a fraction of a pound per square inch with the lower pressure being on the top surface. With the aircraft’s huge wing, 105 ‘ long, it only takes a small difference in pressure over those many hundreds of thousands of square inches of wing to lift the planes 25,200 lbs into the air at just sixty knots.
One day, flying directly into the face of a monster Canadian blizzard, we flew for an hour and didn’t move a mile - the company ordered us to return and we whizzed back to Minneapolis with a 300 knot ground speed which I think is some kind of all-time, over the ground speed record for a DC-3. When we landed the wind was really kicking up with gusts to sixty knots. The aircraft touched down at about twenty over the ground. Truth be told, we shouldn’t have taken off at all- That was dumb.
I bid on a lot of three day trips with North Central, Bemidji, Brainerd, Thief River Falls and on into Minot North Dakota where we spent the night. The next day we made our way south to Omaha and the next day back to Minneapolis through Hibbing, and a lot of other tiny Midwest towns that I have forgotten.
The Captain on the North Central birds had a little 8” x 4” electric anti- icing -panel fastened to his windshield to keep the ice from completely covering his view and give him some forward visibility. The co–pilot didn’t have this luxury- not like the heated windshields of today’s modern aircraft. In really bad icing conditions the co-pilot had no visibility. We flew like this many times all winter long. The cabin and cockpit were heated by a gasoline heater (janitrol) which was a truly cranky, temperamental and dangerous device. The First Officers job was to keep it running- watching the ram air and adjusting the controls. If it quit and couldn’t be started, this was an emergency. You had to land and soon, before you and the passenger’s froze to death. A co-pilot in the North Central DC-3’s who couldn’t keep the dammed thing running was worthless.
North Central did something that, in 1965, was different than any other airline that I am aware of. They taught their pilots how to fly the “Range Adcock Approach.” Minot ND was the only US airport that had one of these cranky cumbersome and decidedly difficult approach systems still operable. In the 40’s and 50’s they were more common but in 1965, with ILS and VOR’s, the “Range” had had its day. Why this one was still running in a mystery. I think it was just to torture North Central FNG’s.
Anyway, the idea is that there are four radio defined legs that can be identified by compass headings and flying several types of approaches. One is the “fade parallel” that tells you if you are flying toward or away for the center of the signal ( airport) by steering a heading matching one of the legs, preferably, the one you think you’re nearest to and seeing if the signal fades or strengthens. Once you determine more or less, where in the hell you think you are, you then fly a “fade perpendicular” which calls for a turn to a heading ninety degrees to one of the legs. Continuing this heading, you will hopefully ( theoretically) hear a “dit” or a “dit da,” ( morse for “N” dit or a single dot or dit da , a dot followed by a dash, for an “A.” After hearing one of these followed by a steady buzz, you knew that you were passing through the center line of one of the 4 legs of the approach and because of your heading you should know which one. Now, you can fly a heading toward the station, as you get closer, the steady buzz becomes stronger and any drift to the left or the right delivers the “A” or “N” to tell you which way to correct. If you hear an “A”, turn a little right for the steady buzz of the center line and if you hear the “N,” correct left. I think!
I learned how to do this, we all did- but it is not easy and very confusing. The older North Central captains delighted in torturing new co-pilots by making them fly this approach in driving snow storms into Minot North Dakota.
On one charter flight from Minneapolis in the DC-3 the Captain decided he was going to screw the Flight attendant (I’m sure she also decided that would be OK). This was also Ok with me- she was a little long in the tooth for me anyway. The problem was, if you can call it a problem, was that I had been flying for North Central for only a few months, and the Captain didn’t know me, this was my first flight with him. It was snowing like hell. We were returning empty from dropping off a High School basketball team. It was my leg, the captain had flown the team home.
I remember that the FA came up to us saying that the “boys were making too much dammed noise and drinking beer and could we do something about it.” The Captain slowly climbed the old bird up to 11,000’ and most of the kids, the ones who had been drinking the most and making the most noise, went nicely to sleep… The FA was immensely pleased and whispered sweet things in the captain’s ear.
After dropping the kids, we were flying home at eight thousand feet and maybe fifty miles west of Chicago heading back to Minneapolis’s into the teeth of a heavy snow storm. The DC-3 will carry an impressive load of ice but, thankfully, it was too cold for ice and the wing lights showed no buildup on the boots. The props were deiced by an electric pump slinging alcohol on the blades from a twenty gallon tank- so far we hadn’t had to do this.
The Capt left his seat, patted me on the shoulder and said “OK, you’ve got it.” I did, but how did he know that? The DC-3 has no auto-pilot so it has to be hand flown. The instruments were the standard WW II ancient stuff that had been around for thirty plus years. The artificial horizon was just a black circle with a set of white bars connected to a vacuum powered gyro that showed you the position of the ships wings relative to the earth below. The pilot, to fly the DC-3 by hand in a raging snowstorm, had to be a damm good instrument pilot, one who could concentrate on the altitude, attitude, direction and airspeed while navigating at the same time. This night that was me. I also had to communicate with ATC, check the wings for ice and keep the carburetor heat adjusted, the props de-iced and keep the dammed gasoline fed janitrol cabin heater working. This was, to say the least, a handful and ten times the workload of the average 747-400 pilot, who occasionally watches the instruments as the autopilot flies the aircraft and navigates itself through clear skies. ( there’s almost no weather at forty thousand feet)
After an hour or so, the captain strolled forward, tucking his shirt in and zipping up his fly, and sitting down, said, where are we……? The snow storm was behind us, the skies were clear, and we were maybe an hour from home……. He was happy guy……
I flew for about a year for North Central. Things had been getting hot in Vietnam and South East Asia and in 1966 I wasn’t surprised when the Navy sent me a telegram requesting my illustrious pretense to kill some Asian strangers. I was surprised that they found me- I certainly never told them where I was. How do they do that?
I was definitely even more surprised when I got a call the next day from a guy in Washington, H.H. Dawson, asking me if I would like to fly for a government organization that wasn’t supposed to exist. This sounded like more fun than the Navy and they said that they could get me off the Navy hook. Ensign Benson, one of my Navy classmates, had called me to say that the recall wasn’t good. According to Eddie, we weren’t much use to the Navy not being “ring knockers.” All they thought we might be good for was what they called the “brown water navy” which meant driving forty foot fiberglass boats up and down nasty brown