I guess I am no different than most other people, wish I had done something different, been born in a different era, hit the lottery for 100 mil and etc. I to, as Columbo pointed out, miss flying those old birds, but Aces High has provided us with an element in which to live some things over again. There is nothing like, if you have never done it, flying a DC-6B at night, thunderstorms around, a cargo hold full of pre-cut blue jeans, bound for San Juan to be sewed and lapels applied, and surrounded by a good crew! A flight engineer who knew more about this ole Douglas, than the Douglas engineers did when they designed the thing. A Captain who had about 20,000 hours in DC-4's, DC-6B's and was a good Christan man! Airborne radar, AVQ-47 had quit on us and we were depending on ATC to work us around the thunder boomers around Jacksonville at 18,000 feet. St. Elmo's fire running all over everything and everybody in the cockpit and you knew before long, you were going to experience a static discharge. It happened just East of Daytona Beach, "Blam", radio's quit, (for a few minutes), and then it was just us and the elements of nature placing one storm after the other in our way. Engineer reset all the circuit breakers and After we finally got the company dispatcher on the radio, we were informed that a low pressure system, North and East of San Juan had become a tropical storm, (later a hurricane), and San Juan already reporting wind gusts of 60 knots. By now of course, my "puckering factor" was at the maximum and felt a great sense of relief when the Captain said, "tell dispatch we are deviating to Miami and I will talk to ATC about change in plans". Well, that plan when by the way side when Miami was reporting wind gusts of 35 and 40 knots from 135 degrees and although they had two parallel runways of 10,000 feet at the time, that exceeded our crosswind component for landing at the weight we were at, so we wound up deviating to Tampa International, where we made an un eventful landing.
Brings me to my point, wish i had not spend my 3500 dollars I had in savings for the Harley I bought the day before we took off...turns out I had only 6.00 dollars on me and we stayed in Tampa for 3 days, before continuing the trip. LOL
