Time for another interesting little trip from my book that I am writing! Hope I live long enough to finish it! At the rate I am going, be about 115 when I finish it! ROTFL.
A company out of AtL which I had done some contract flying for, needed someone to deliever a On Mark conversion B-26 to a small country south of the canal. I had done a fair amount of flying in South America when flying for a freight outfit out of Lakefront in New Orleans, so I thought this would be a good chance to pick up some nice change for my pocket, as it would be a weekend delivery and would not interfere with my "day" job. Aircraft was in Lima, Ohio so first order of business was to plan the trip, which way to go, MIA direct Panama then south, or Brownsville, Tex then South.
After agreeing to do the job, first order of business, check my Jepps to make sure everything up to date in route and local, but then the first problem cropped up, as there was no approach charts for the airport where I was supposed to deliver the bird. OK, just hope its VFR when I get there! Now, have to plan on arriving in daylight hours, not after a dark, as I know there are mountains all around that area, so I sure want have the eyeballs working for me!
Then the seemingly never ending "Paper trail" which you have to go through to deliver an aircraft out of "country", and since this was a potential "war" bird, going to a South American country, oh crap, now everybody in the world has to approve this "ferry" flight!! The U.S. state dept being the most troublesome, as back in those days, there were no computers, no email systems, just good old USPS. It took 7 weeks, as I recall and 3 sets of questions to be answered before approval was finally granted.
Then you have to consider the "custom" people! MIA folks are pretty good, but have to cross every "T" and dot every "I" or you not going to get thru them without problems. The guys at Brownsville, on the other hand, which I had used serveral times before, are fairly easy to get along with, so the decision was made for me, go the Brownsville route and it is about a 100 miles closer that way.
Now you have to figure out what time you want to leave and arrive! Do I want to fly this aircraft, which I know nothing about its history yet, at night, with a planned arrival around mid-day, or do I want to plan a early morning takeoff, at first crack of dawn, but with the stop at Brownsville, weather deviations and other unforeseen delays of one kind or the other, would put in there during nighttime and I sure don't want to do that! So now it looked like a "lay over" in Panama was in order to be safe.
Now I have to get me a co-pilot, you really don't have to on a ferry flight, but going out of country, its best to have 2 sets of eyes and it really cuts down on your work load, if you run into weather problems or mechanical problems while in flight. I had used "Foxy Knoxie" as we called him, before, and he had a fair amount of multiengine time, but never been in a B-26 before, so I told him that I only had about 44.5 hours in one, so we could "learn" together. I had acquired a "type" rating in the 26 by flying a few trips out of ATL with a friend of mine who was hauling potential investors to Orlando, Fla from BMG. Found out later, they were evolved with acquiring property for the Disney World complex!
All the prep work completed, arrive in Lima on Thursday afternoon, go look at the aircraft, check over log books, everything looked in good order, no big maintance problems of note
just the normal cylinder replacements for low compression and etc. Aircraft had a fresh annual inspections 2 months ago, so everything looked OK.
Enter the cockpit to look everything over, get familiar with radio system and etc and the first little question popped up in my mind, a little note on the manifold gauge instrument which read, left MP shows 5 inches low at max power setting. Hmmm, wonder what that is all about? Turns out, fuel boost pump on left engine doesn't work on high, just low! No problem, or shouldn't be. The guys who had been maintaining the aircraft were right there and they were very helpful with my pre-flight questions and etc.
A "K" model in flight!
Not the actual aircraft in this story, but very close!
A couple of hours of daylight left, so lets take it up and check out some things, fuel burn at cruise and etc.
So, off we go after preflight checks and etc and with no fuel in tip tanks, bird lifted off at 90 knots with 15 degrees of flaps, even adjusted right engine MP back to match left MP and was no problem at all. Just wondered how long they had been flying this thing with it like that. Guess they couldn't afford a fuel pump!
Test hop turned out OK, made a couple of notes about fuel burn settings and after about an hour we landed.
Toyed with the idea of putting 100 galleons in each tip tank, but thought, no, won't need it, so why drag that weight around! Flight distance about 1525 miles, so with a flight plan speed of 220 knots, should be around 7 hours flight time, with a little reserve, weather is supposed to good all the way, so should be no problem. On second thought about the tips, better take 50 in each, gives me about an 30 min reserve, just in case.We planned a 5AM takeoff, filed my flight plan, had a steak on the company for dinner and when to bed.
We get up next morning and you guessed it, "fog" all over Ohio, Northern Kentucky down as far as St. Louis, but no problem.
We had a 1/2 mile visibilty for takeoff, so I told "Knoxie", you adjust right throttle to match left throttle on takeoff, watch engine instruments, let me know if anything amiss!
Takeoff was normal, climb out normal all the way to 12,000 feet, which I had filed for and off we went!
Everything was normal except, found out I couldn't cross feed right tip tank to left engine for some reason and when the engine started back firing a little on no fuel, "Knoxie" said, please don't do that again! OK, but we need to know what this thing will do just in case. The right engine ran fine on left tip, all other cross feeds worked good.
Rest of flight unevenful, except because of headwinds at altitude, 7 hours, 44 minutes total flight time to KBRO, or Brownsville Parde Island Airport. Cleared customs, after jumping through about 10 hoops, seemed like, we fuel up for non stop to Panama! Full fuel in the tips this time and 80% eternal for trip, which would give us a 45 minute reserve.
Took off, but now, a little heavier and with high heat at 3 in afternoon, density altitude increased our takeoff roll a fair amount, so I told "Knoxie" to match throttles again, but as soon as we had a positive rate of climb, push right throttle back to full and I would use rudder to keep it straight. These "On Mark" conversations, with the larger rudder present no problem keeping it straight, the size of the rudder was increased in conversion to lower VMC.
If you have ever done any flying in South Texas, especially around the coast, you know in the afternoon, you are going to have the old thunder boomers around and we had plenty that day and we took off while one was really in progress at the airport, but not a bad one. The RCA AVQ-55 worked really well, so we managed to stay out of anything of any size until we popped out the lower scud crap, then there was a line building up just Southwest, but it didn't look bad on the radar, so we will just keep climbing on course, punch through and departure says nothing behind it.
Now "Knoxie" is getting excited, because he is saying something about left fuel pressure fluctuating and I am trying to keep the thing straight and still climbing to get through this junk. now, as fate would have it, it started, the left engine, back firing, so told "Knoxie" to shut it down, feather the prop and we would then assess what to do from there. About that time, we popped out the back side of the small line of boomers, leveled off at 9,000 feet to get some speed up and see what the heck is wrong with #1. All we really could do is try to restart the thing and see if it would run, if not, back to KBRO and back through that little line of boomers. Engine started fine, ran smooth and fuel pressure was steady as could be, so I made the decision to continue on the trip. During all this, I had kept ATC informed of what was going on and I re-activated our flight plan, just in case they had canceled it.
To be Continued
