|
Page 1 of 2
Fly with this novice maverick as he putters his plane into the Montana night with only the reflections of the stars glimmering off the Missouri river to keep sanity and direction intact.
The desperate phone call came late on the evening of November 30th 1959. “Hello Gerald, this is Jerry Swanson, I am in Yakima and I desperately need to be in Wolf Point Montana by 7:00 PM tomorrow evening, can you pick me up early tomorrow morning fly me there?”
Now let me explain a few things. I was living in Seattle and had a 1953, 135 hp Piper Tri-Pacer known as 1167 Charlie. My only credentials at age 22 were a private pilot’s license and the fact that I was alive. My logbook showed less than 150 hours.
“Let me get out my charts and check the weather forecast and I’ll call you back in a few”. I had never heard of Wolf Point Montana, in fact I had never even been in Montana. When I finally found Wolf Point on my chart, it gave me pause because Wolf point is way up in the northeast part of the state, a long ways for a little Piper to fly in one day. It was the middle of winter. I was checked out for night flying but had never attempted a night landing at a strange airport. The chart showed a beacon at the Wolf Point airport, no radio…nothing else to ease my trepidations. We would need to start at daybreak and if we arrived at all it would be after dark.
“Okay Jerry, I’ll meet you at the Yakima Airport at 7:00 AM and we will fly to Spokane where we will need to fuel up before we head out across the Rockies.” You are paying for the gas, right? It’s a deal!
My early morning solo flight from Pain Field in Everett over the Cascades to Yakima was spectacular in the early morning winter sun. Jerry was anxiously waiting when I taxied up to the terminal in Yakima and we threw in his bags and hastily took off. I set the little Narco Superhomer VHS navigation radio on an east-northeast course toward Spokane.
Here I need to explain something else. I was not a trained instrument pilot and “Seven Charlie” had only enough instrumentation to enable a trained pilot to keep the wings level in a cloud. The little Superhomer was just one step above holding a wet thumb in the air. We had no backup navigation or communications radio.
We were cruising along nicely trimmed out at 107 mph and taking in the fantastic display the early morning sun provided of the Colombia River Canyon and the mesa beyond. As we progressed along our route we noticed a considerable cloudbank ahead of us. It wasn’t long before we needed to gain altitude to stay above the clouds and before long we were above a complete blanket of clouds. This was a new experience for me. My cross-country flying had always been by dead reckoning and you can’t navigate that way over clouds. We had plenty of fuel so we reasoned that soon the cloudbanks would burn off and we would be fine so we kept going. But instead we were soon looking at a complete blanket of clouds in every direction. Little 7 Charlie was putting along just fine but anxiety began to rise because we could not bypass Spokane and head into the Rockies without taking on fuel. Suddenly the Superhomer’s needle began to swing back and forth wildly telling us we were over the Spokane airport. There was nothing but clouds below us and I was not about to be talked down through the clouds by the FAA control center. Now what? We had fuel to return to Wenatchee but that meant aborting the entire trip. Our bladders were full and we desperately needed to land!
Jerry was a minister and I know he had been praying a lot already. His challenge was to be in Wolf Point that evening and he was asking for a hand from the Lord.
Just then we looked down and there was a hole in the clouds. I made a few quick turns and determined we could spiral down through the hole if it didn’t close up as fast as it had appeared and I couldn’t tell if the clouds went all the way to the ground. You won’t believe this, that hole in the clouds was directly over Mead Airfield 10 miles north of Spokane and there was enough space under the clouds to fly a normal landing pattern. We said “Thank you Lord” and set the little green and gray Tri Pacer down.
Was the hole in the clouds a natural phenomenon? Perhaps.
Refueled and dewatered we took off up through another hole in the clouds and set our course for Great Falls on the far side of the Rocky Mountains. I had flown across the Cascade Mountains many times. You could fly at 5 or 6 thousand feet over Snoqualmie Pass and always be within reasonable distance of a landing field. I wasn’t prepared for the Rockies. We climbed and climbed and climbed. Jerry weighed over 250 lbs, I weighed over 200 lbs, and we had a full load of fuel and some baggage to boot.
Earlier in the year my brother Roger climbed Mt. Rainier with some friends. I knew about when they would be coming down off the summit so I took off in the Tri Pacer with a friend to try to get pictures of them near the summit. So the tedium of climbing and climbing and climbing was not new to me. Little 7 Charlie worked his heart out but a naturally aspirated (no turbo) engine just runs slower and slower the higher you go. Finally with the throttle all the way to the firewall you just stop climbing. After an hour or so of constant climbing, we coaxed little Charlie to 13,200 feet and we had to circle around and around at that elevation waiting for the climbers to come down the mountain far enough to get a picture of them. But that is another story.
Within an hour we found ourselves at 11,500 feet looking out the side windows at peaks that seemed thousands of feet above us. And as I recall, Mullen Pass isn’t very wide either. There wasn’t a place to land within fifty miles. It took four times as long to fly across the Rockies as it does to cross the Cascades. I wasn’t prepared mentally for this and I am sure Jerry noticed my white knuckles whenever he opened his eyes to take a break from praying.
We made it into Great Falls at dusk, fueled up and took off for Wolf Point.
This was my plan. The Missouri River provided a wonderful navigational aid I intended to pick it up just north of Great Falls and follow it all the way past Fort Peck Reservoir to Wolf Point. Simple dead reckoning navigation I reasoned. And it worked pretty well for nearly an hour when it got really dark.
Now if you have never been in the air over the middle of Montana at night, with no moon I need to paint a picture for you. Only one color is required, black. As I recall we saw only one artificial light from dark till we saw the lights from Fort Peck. In the middle of Montana in 1959 there were no radio navigational aids and no flight controller to talk to and I am certain we did not show up on the FAA’s radar screens. The little Superhomer got a nice long rest with no signal to process as we were out there in the middle of a black hole. All we had to navigate by was a compass, except for one important stroke of luck, it was a clear night and we could see reflections from the stars on the Missouri river. That was it. We navigated by those reflections and I can’t tell you how slow that next hour went till we saw lights from Fort Peck on the horizon. It was like the Prodigal Son coming home to his father when we made a slight course correction toward Fort Peck.
<< Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>
|
Wow. I felt like I was a passenger. Even held my breath a few times. My wife and I prayed for a hole in the clouds once so she could safely drive to a harp gig in a major snow storm. We saw the hole on the weather radar that night and it hovered over her entire route of about 20 miles - long enough to greatly reduce the snowfall. As a result, her journey was completely safe and stress-free. The weather man even commented that the elongated hole was weird and could not be explained! God is with us, He answers our prayers of faith, and John 3:16 is quite true!