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 of Hong Kong.
The HKK radio beacon was identified and the signal strength excellent. The needle centered up and remarkably, we were only a few miles off course. We begin letting down, following the directions of the HKK approach controllers and lining up for the CC (Charlie, Charlie) approach into Kai Tek. Hundreds of pilots from all over the world know this approach and have a great deal of respect for it. The pilot has to be on precisely on altitude as the apartment buildings just across the street from the airport with their TV antennas are passing only feet below the main gear. The final decent to land , after clearing the buildings, seems and is steep because the airport was built on a narrow artificial island extending from the shore out into the waters surrounding the island. All that’s aviation history now. There’s a new airport across the bay that’s a lot easier to land on.
On the ground, the passengers crawled down the stinking slippery cabin deck and departed for their R&R and other business. We, true to form, “paid off” the mechanic, he broke the plane, we had two days off, flew back to Nam and did it all again the following week.
CHAPTER 8
HONG KONG
“And if you screw up just this much, you'll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong.”
— Air Boss Johnson in the 1986 movie, 'Top Gun.'
I met up with some interesting characters in Hong Kong, one night I wandered into a little bar called the “Ship Inn” it was run by a three hundred pound white Russian woman and her equally fat son. There was a bunch or British Soldiers in the place and one of them said, “sit down yank and I’ll buy yr a pint!” Never one to walk away from a free beer, I accepted. He gestured to the fat lady by pulling down an imaginary handle. She drew the draft and set it in front of me. “Hope yr’ likes warm beer mate” said the Soldier. I’d had it before, so nothing new. I noticed that anyone who wanted anything was making these queer hand signals. I saw that one that looked like drawing a pint and then, holding the imaginary glass, wiping his hand over the top. The fat proprietor filled the glass and then dumped a slug of green lime juice in it. The Brits, called this horrible concoction “Tops” and love it. I tried it and didn’t. Another hand signal was to wipe the foam off an imaginary beer and then make a quick dumping signal into the brew, this it turned out was asking for a shot of whiskey in the beer, a boilermaker. It took me a while to figure all this out, but after the second pint, I got it. Both the fat lady and her son were deaf and dumb. If you wanted a drink you had to use hand signals. Good grief!
Next Door was the “Hasty-Tasty” a hole in the wall selling fried Hong Kong Harbor fish wrapped in yesterdays newspaper- perfectly horrible sober but passable when knee-walking drunk which was the condition of 90% of the Ship Inn’s clientele after a few hours.
Across
