chance of escaping capture.
I learned not to ever shoot at the bad guys. If you hit or kill one of their buddies, they will surely kill you when they catch you. Once you get away from the plane, don’t stop, split up and run, don’t try to hide close to the aircraft, run as far and as fast as you can. The biggest mistake people make is trying to hide- With fifty guys chasing your fat white ass you can’t hide- they will find you. These guys live in the jungle, they are in terrific shape and likely a lot younger than the average company pilot.
I knew where every Special Forces base in the entire rotten, snake infested, miserable country was. I knew the locations of every friendly town, hamlet, ville and of course, all the two hundred plus airports. We all knew all this and we all understood that if, or when, we went down, we could expect nothing good if we were caught. This was the principal reason that I tried very hard to get out of the Porter and intro something with two engines.
Unlike the guys who flew up north where the flying exploding telephone poles and AA stuff was everywhere, there wasn’t any of that down south. The very worst worry was having the bloody engine quit and only having one. My second engine failure in the Porter happened six or so months after the first one. This time, the engine just suddenly quit cold- immediately- like switching off a light bulb.
Anyway, it just quit cold, the prop feathered but this time, I knew I was in trouble- there were no airports within range. I called the company- again they said to stop screaming and tell them where I was. I headed back to the south and saw what looked to be a road that might work. I had a couple of helicopters near by who had heard my “may day” calls and there were some armed Army choppers on the way. The road I thought I had seen from more than two miles up turned out to be the flat top of a wide rice dyke. It may have been ten to fifteen wide and plenty long for the Porter even without reverse power.
I got it down OK and immediately four or five little guys in black PJ’s came up from the fields to say “hi.” They were working in the patty and weren’t toting AK’s, so I felt a little better. There was a gunship flying around and one of my company choppers was landing. I remember giving the coffee kit to the Vietnamese and whatever else they wanted out of the plane. I jumped on the chopper and flew back to Saigon. Later that day the local VC torched the plane and the company office poggies tried to blame me for not staying with the machine- idiots!
It turned out that the beastly French engine had a fuel control pump that had a drive shaft keyed to the engine accessory case such that if the pump sensed any resistance the drive shaft was designed to shear, thus hopefully saving the gear case or the fuel control unit (FCU) but, of course, causing the engine to immediately quit! This “safety feature” in a single engine aircraft was something of a problem, the engine survives but the plane crashes- go figure!
I remember one flight heading back to Saigon during the summer monsoons. I was at two thousand feet descending into heavy rains, trying to stay visual and not doing too well. The Porter was into some very rough air with absolutely no visibility and pounding rain. Suddenly, the pitot system failed and all the vacuum instruments went haywire. I was flying on needle and ball only. Somehow, we remained upright and busted out the north side of the storm. I never forgot that flight and learned that I could 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 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.”
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.
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
