My Prize Load Over The Hump

 

        It was a dark and rainy night, nothing unusual.  It seemed to me that I always flew at night and it was always raining, when I reported to operations.  I don’t remember just which base in China that I was being sent to, but that didn’t matter; it was probably Kunming.  As usual, most of us didn’t pay much attention to the manifest which described the load.  We just signed it and put it in our briefcase.  I checked the weather in route and found that it would be instruments until well inside China, then the clouds would break up and it would be contact flying to destination.

          We went out to the plane and found that it was loaded – boy was it loaded.  Every nook and cranny was jammed with boxes.  They had left a small tunnel for us to crawl through to reach the cockpit.  I don’t know how they thought we would every get out quickly in case of emergency, but that’s something else. As usual we checked the plan thoroughly then crawled through our tunnel and prepared to depart.  The takeoff was a bit unusual.  Usually it took quite a bit of runway to get speed for lift off.  This night that plane tried to get out from under us.  It was off the climbing like a homesick angel.  We reached cruising altitude, I guess about 20,000 ft., in record time and I set the autopilot and sat back to enjoy the ride.  I should mention that though it was dark and rainy it was smooth, no turbulence.

          I interrupt the story to say that the Air Force had taken to sending us new pilots right out of flying school.  Some of whom had never been in a

C-46 type plane, much less flown one.  This night I had such a co-pilot.  I believe that it was his first trip on the HUMP.

          We were cruising along and I was at peace, everything seemed to be going just as it should; what an easy trip.  Then I got to thinking about what the load was that night.  What I was risking my life to deliver.  I got tickled and started laughing.  I laughed so hard that I was about to go into hysterics when I caught a glimpse of the co-pilot’s face.  I could read it like a book, I knew just what he was thinking.  Oh Lord, what do I do now, here I am in this big bird that I don’t know a thing about flying, I don’t know where I came from or where I’m supposed to go and the pilots gone mad.  I sobered up real quick.

          What brought about my laughter was that I thought, of all the stupid places in the world for Mrs. Sutton’s little boy to be this was the most.  Here I was half way around the world from home in this big bird over these mountains, on solid instrument flight conditions with no navigational aids with a solid plane load of KOTEX.

 

Epilog:  Kotex, it turns out, was a very useful product other than for it’s original intended use.  To the number of nurses that we had in China it was, of course, essential.  The doctors and medical corpsmen quickly found it a perfect substitute for sterile compresses.  Then the strangest use of all, the mechanics found that it made an excellent substitute for an oil filter on the P-40 airplanes, for which new filters were not available.  A fine product.

 

From the Book There Was A Rainbow Around My Shoulders, by Lt. Col. Arthur W. Sutton, USAF-Retired

Used with permission.