on my boat.
One of our Captains, a retied American Airlines pilot named Elkin Floyd, was a member of the “Silver Eagles” and the OX-5 club. He was so old- how old was he?” well, he was older than the DC-3’s we flew, which is saying something. He was older than all of our pilots added together. No, that’s not true, but he was old. His hands shook when he advanced the throttles. One day we were flying in some really stinking weather and I got to see why he was still flying and how good he really was.
The rain was coming down in buckets- the hatch in the cockpit roof was leaking and we were circling around some ugly clouds that were like a dark shimmering green in the early evening skies. Elkin flew the plane on instruments around the weather picking his route like he had been doing it all his life, which of course he had. We broke out about ten miles from the Cape Coral airport and make a perfect text book landing on the still wet and very narrow runway. The Old pilot set the brakes and, looking over at me, took his hands of the yoke and said, “well Robert, even an old hog will find an acorn some times.” The reason he kept flying, despite having retired from WW I and II and American Airlines, was because he just had to get out of the house. His wife was hell on wheels, a devout born-again and a real pain in the ass. They had been married for centuries and his generation just didn’t believe in divorce.
As nuts as this sounds today none of the DC-3’s we flew had radar. We flew every summer though what pilots call “thunderstorm alley” dodging and guessing which cells were the least dangerous. This area is over the everglades between Miami and the Gulf coast. The storms, often towering over fifty thousand feet, have powerful vertical currents moving huge shafts of air and rain. Cloud to cloud and cloud to ground lightening flashing and crashing all around us, we would scoot down to 1000’ scud-running under the roll clouds, trying to stay visual while dodging the bigger cells.
On February 12, 1963, a North West Boeing 720, flight 705, an incredibly strong plane, flew into one of these cells and was torn apart, coming to earth in pieces, killing all forty three passengers and crew. The aircraft crashed thirty seven miles west-southwest of Miami after penetrating a thunderstorm and encountering severe turbulence. The aircraft initially entered an area of updrafts followed by downdrafts which put the aircraft into a high speed dive. While trying to pull out of the descent, the aircraft broke apart from excessive G forces. The crew probably tried to maintain airspeed in extreme turbulence instead of flying attitude and just keeping the “dirty side down”. In doing so, excessive stress was applied to the wings which separated from the fuselage. The weather was considerably worse than forecast. Isn’t it always?
One guy I knew told me that he was on the crash scene an hour after the accident. He saw a flight attendant sitting up, leaning on a short palm. He thought she was alive, there wasn’t a mark on her, her hat was still on an she looked perfectly ok until he got up to her and saw that she had been cut completely in half - only her torso, arms and head were there. It took him a long time to tell me the story and even longer for him to try to forget it- if he ever did.
There‘s no air conditioning in the DC-3 and at low altitudes the rough air, humidity and heat all contribute to a very unpleasant ride for the passengers. They get sick and we would open the cockpit windows to let the stink out. The DC-3 is un-pressurized and pilots open the sliding windows just like a car, to let fresh air in and cabin air out. We often flew back to Miami’s Opa Loca airport at night. Imagine how much fun this was, picking your way through monster storms, flying through the rain towards those areas with the least amount of lightening. Armando showed me a good trick- tune both of the ADF’s to frequencies between 1400 and 1900 kc and the needles tend to point to the areas with the strongest electrical discharge- I guess it worked because I’m here.
After flying the DC-3 for some time and finally logging the required twelve hundred hours, I got my type rating and the ATP, Airline Transport License, which is the PhD of pilot’s licenses. The year was 1965. Tony Sanson was my instructor. We flew the plane for the rating because there is not and never was a simulator built for the DC-3’s. We took off from Opa Loca in the afternoon and flew up to 5000’ west over the everglades, near where TNT (the training airport) is located which, in those days, didn’t exist. (DC-3 COCKPIT, LEFT)
At that time, one of the required maneuvers for a rating was the “canyon approach” This is where the pilot, wearing a cumbersome plastic hood, so he can’t “peek” flies on instruments over a radio beacon (imagined or real) and descends for sixty seconds to a pre-determined altitude, makes a procedure turn and flies inbound on the same bearing for a minute, letting down to minimums and then, with no airport in sight, executes a missed approach which is a climbing turn back to the reciprocal of the inbound heading. The approach is supposed to simulate a flight into an airport located in a valley between mountains or in a canyon. The instructor pulls one of the engines in one of the turns and the pilot has to go through the engine shut down litany while still flying the approach solely by reference to instruments. I still remember the call outs. “Mixtures rich, props up, power up, flaps up, positive rate, gear up. “ dead foot, dead engine, feather, confirm feather, check for fire, engine shut down check list, complete.” After this last command, the non-flying pilot whips out the check list and helps securing the engine. Of course, we didn’t really shut down the engine in training- We used what they call “min-thrust” a reduced power setting that simulates the feel of the aircraft on one engine. In the DC-3 this is about 15” of MP (manifold pressure) and 1500 RPM.
Gulf American Land Corporation folded in the late 70s but not before becoming a real airline called Modern Air transport which had belonged to a guy named Becker who had based his commercial certificate in Trenton NJ. Gulf American had the money and bought the company, moving it to Florida along with a few old DC-7’s and a lot of unhappy union pilots. Modern survived the demise of Gulf American, moving up to jets with the Convair 990 which was a terrible choice, having four big engines and only 144 seats. The company eventually ceased operations in Germany after a few years of flying vacation charters for LTU and other European Tour Operators.
One of the 990’s was flown into the ground in Mexico with considerable loss of life. Jeff Avery was the Captain. I had flown with Jeff in the DC-3’s and remember how nervous he would get when the weather turned nasty. This was the first time in my flying career when I knew crew members involved in a fatal accident. I thought about it a lot. Today, we call this kind of accident “controlled flight into terrain” and have recently mandated a system to prevent these kinds of accidents called TAWS, or “Terrain Awareness Warning System.” Of course, the system is years too late to save hundreds of passengers and crews but, there you are- to get a traffic light some kid has to be flattened.
Follows a poem I wrote some years back about the DC-3. This one has been around the world and published in numerous magazines and on several web sites. I include it for the readers to garner some idea of the respect and love we pilots have for the old bird.
CHAPTER 5
NORTH CENTRAL
“Some newspapers have an adversarial approach to the Boeing Company that actually nauseates me and I've stopped reading them. I spent fifteen years on the Boeing crash investigation committee, and I learned first hand the difference between what gets reported in the paper and what the facts are. I concluded that there was almost no relationship between what was written there and the facts, and it kind of made me nervous about reading anything else. I just quit taking the papers.”
— Granville "Granny" Frazier, The Boeing Company.
The DC-3 was my first
