by T I WADE
It was a warm cloudless summer night and the party raged until the early hours of the morning. The BBQ coals died down at about midnight and the rest of the wood was placed in the fire bin. Many of the show aircraft had already left and there were spaces everywhere. But the ones that stayed overnight were eerie in the growing shadows cast by the glowing fire and many of the older boys fell asleep in their chairs.
“Bob, how do you keep the DC-3 in such perfect condition?” asked Buck. Bob Martin was the majority owner of the DC-3 and had eight other shareholders who clocked flying hours in her every year.
“It’s very difficult,” Bob replied, staring into the dying embers of the fire. “I’ve owned her for going on 20 years now and every year she takes more and more money to keep pristine. I’ll be looking for another shareholder pretty shortly. She needs both engines overhauled when we get back, and that should set us back $50,000 to $75,000. The price depends on where we take her, but the best guy to service her turboprops is in Tucson, Arizona and he is expensive. The turboprop engines were replaced on the DC-3s in the early 1950s; Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-50s. They are rated at 972 shaft horse power, drink like fishes, but give a 181 mile per hour economical cruise compared to the usual drop dead slow 150, and at only 60% power. She is fitted with the drop tanks under each wing and these have increased her range from 1,200 nautical miles to nearly 2,000 with a 45-minute reserve. Also, with her double freight doors, she can pack in big stuff and carry her full payload of 9,000 lb., and get off the ground in 2,800 feet and land in 2,500 feet with no reverse trust.”
“She could get into a friend of mine’s airfield in North Carolina with a little expertise,” interjected Carlos, who was listening in on the conversation with a blanket around him and a glass of whiskey in his hand. The girls had gone to sleep in the Huey an hour or so earlier.
“I could screw her down into anything bigger than 2,300 feet,” laughed Bob. “I live in Denver and she has as much runway as I want. We keep her in our hangar at Denver International.”
“I might be interested,” Buck stated quietly. “Bayport Aerodrome, where I keep Baby Huey on Long Island, is 2,740 feet long, mostly turf, and has several 30-foot trees about 400-500 feet from the most-used end—Runway 18. The other end, Runway 36, has trees a lot closer… how much would you like for a tenth share?”
“$150,000,” replied Bob Martin seriously.
“A little out of my league at the moment, I’m afraid,” muttered Buck, the wind taken out of his sails.
“How much do you need?” Carlos asked his buddy a few seconds later.
“I’m about $75,000 short,” replied Buck. “Baby Huey here takes a lot to keep going.”
“I have always wanted to learn to fly a helicopter,” replied Carlos. “Give me 50 hours of lessons and a small share in the Huey, let me co-pilot with you in the DC-3 now and again, and I will give you the $75,000 you need. Hell, we might as well enjoy our flying!” Buck knew Carlos was a lot wealthier than he was, and comfortably off with family money. A deal was struck just before dawn between Bob and Buck, and a gentleman’s handshake was orchestrated between Buck and Carlos with Bob as an unofficial notary.
Nobody from the party could fly out the next day due to the heavy drinking the previous night, except for Bob, who had to get back. His co-pilot and one of the shareholders that had flown in with another aircraft flew him out just after lunch and a six-hour nap.
Buck’s first flight hour in Lady Dandy, as the DC-3 was named, was two months later. He had paid his money and was offered the right seat for the flight from Denver International down to Tucson for her engine overhauls. It was a clear day, and Buck enjoyed the stability Lady Dandy had in flight compared to the smaller aircraft he owned. She flew like a rock in the sky. Carlos joined them on the flight, flying in from Salt Lake for the occasion.
Tucson had a long runway like Denver, and as they touched down the engines were feathered. Lady Dandy slowed and exited the long runway towards the commercial hangars opposite the airport’s main terminal. The crew stayed overnight at a hotel and had a few drinks with Karl, the engine specialist who had a hangar at the city airport.
The contracts for a pricey sum per engine had been signed earlier and the work would take four to five months.
“I want everything kept original, Karl,” Bob directed over dinner. “I don’t want any new fancy management systems or computers. I know they would help with fuel monitoring, but I want these engines as original as they came out of Pratt and Whitney in 1952.
“You could save up to 5% on fuel usage with the new gadgets they have come out with,” replied Karl. “But Lady Dandy is as clean as I saw her last… when was it, in 1998 or 99?”
“1997,” replied Bob.
“You’re right. A lady of her upbringing should be kept as original as possible. Her value can only go up if she is original,” answered Karl. “I might even have an interested buyer for her.”
“Not interested!” replied Bob and Buck at the same time.
In 2008, Buck completed 38 hours flying the left-hand seat in Lady Dandy, and received his license to fly her. Carlos had flown in twice that year and also completed 10 hours of flight time. He only needed another 10 hours to get a competency license to fly her solo.
Buck was again promoted within his company and posted to a new satellite communications operation in Aurora, Colorado. He and Chloe flew the Baby Huey out to a nearby airport. One of his shareholders had passed away a few months earlier and the other had been bought out by Carlos, who wanted a larger share in her now that he was licensed to fly Huey helicopters. Carlos was especially happy that Buck was coming his way and would be closer to Salt Lake City. His P-51 could easily gobble up the 300-mile distance in an hour.
Chloe had been offered a new position with a flying service in the Bahamas in the New Year and was currently between jobs.
Buck’s move was intended to be temporary and he planned to be in Colorado for nine to eleven months. His intention was to fly as much as he could before going back to New York. And what New York pilot would not enjoy flying the Rockies?
As was normal, radio contact was maintained between the ham radio friends. Buck, who had not yet met Preston, chatted on a weekly basis. Sally Powers also chatted weekly and flew up to visit whenever she could, and it was funny that Carlos was always able to fly in when Sally was there. Sally did not own an aircraft, but was moving from Tucson to the Marine Air Force base in Yuma. She had just completed her final flights on C-130s and now was being promoted to jets. She had picked the F-16 Falcon and was excited to get into the world’s best fighter.
Time sped by in Colorado for Buck. Buck and Chloe flew often in Baby Huey or Lady Dandy when they could afford the cost of flying, and saw every inch of the Rockies, often staying overnight with Carlos in Salt Lake. Buck even flew Lady Dandy as far as the West coast one time when he was asked to deliver a large and heavy cargo shipment to Martie Roebels’ friends just outside Edwards Air Force Base. It was a fun flight with two beautiful women, Chloe and Martie aboard. They flew into Fox Field in Lancaster and spent a day off-loading an old engine that Martie’s boyfriend Preston had rebuilt, as well as a 200-gallon fuel tank and its tripod legs that had been disassembled to fit into the cargo door of the DC-3. Luckily, there was a fork lift there and Will Smart and family were waiting with an old, rusty Ford truck to pick up the equipment. Preston had not had time to come along, even though he had wanted to. He was busy on a project and had a friend helping him with it.
Chloe’s time came to leave and they had a tearful parting at Denver International on the last day of January 2009. The airport had been snowed in for a couple of days and neither of them had clocked any flying time since Christmas. Chloe promised to keep in touch daily and return as soon as she had some spare time, and then disappeared down the ramp to the waiting aircraft. Buck realized that they had grown very close over the last year, and wondered whether or not he should move to be with her in the warm climate of t
he Bahamas.
Slowly, the winter days warmed into spring and Buck spent all the time he had flying over snowed-covered peaks in either aircraft, but mostly the DC-3. In April, two of Lady Dandy’s shareholders were killed in a car crash in Denver, their deaths automatically releasing their shares to the remaining pilots. As if on cue, a third shareholder died a week later, leaving only six share holders and Bob, who had to front the ongoing monthly costs for the DC-3. Both Buck and Carlos invested a larger share and an equal number of shares as Bob. By the end of 2009, another three of the original shareholders had opted out for different reasons, leaving only Carlos, Buck and Bob with the responsibility of caring for Lady Dandy.
Also the daily phone calls or radio call from Chloe had slowed to weekly calls, and Buck found himself starting to look forward to returning to New York rather than moving to the Bahamas. In March of 2010, he did just that and became the boss of the entire Future Development division of his organization. With the hefty pay hike that came with it, he could now keep both aircraft.
In June of 2010, Buck heard from a fellow radio friend in Miami that Chloe had been killed in an air crash in heavy winds trying to move a helicopter to a safe haven in bad weather. She and a second pilot had been in drenching rain and had gone down in a sparsely populated area, crashing into an unoccupied vacation home. Their calls had become few and far between, and they had drifted away from regular communication as life and time often forces. He had never met her family and did not attend her funeral, since he had heard the news after her burial. Buck had heard about a helicopter crash a couple of weeks earlier, but the announcer had stated Bermuda instead of the Bahamas and the news had disappeared from his thoughts.
That summer, Buck felt empty inside. He had enjoyed Chloe’s friendship and she had been the closest person to his heart, more than any of the rare girls he had ever dated. He was not the dating type and work and flying always took the majority of his time. After Chloe’s death, he buried himself into his work and didn’t fly much for the rest of 2010. His driving interest for the rest of that year was getting Lady Dandy down to Martie’s boyfriend’s farm in North Carolina for the New Years Eve Fly-In and finally meeting his ham radio buddy. He looked forward to landing her on the 2,700 foot runway at Preston’s farm. It was going to be a tight fit for the DC-3 and it would take all of his ability in her to get her in. Bob Martin had personally promised him a couple hours of flight training on landing before he left.
A major dilemma for Buck was that he had planned for Chloe to return to New York over the festive season and join him on the flight to North Carolina flying Baby Huey down to show Preston and Martie and completing the fly-in with every aircraft available.
Buck met Barbara one day later that Fall when she walked up to inspect him and the machinery while he was doing a pre-flight inspection of Baby Huey. Barbara had just piloted in a new-looking Cessna Citation jet, wore four stripes on her shirt lapels showing her Captain’s rank, and was a six-foot tall, leggy redhead. Buck felt scared for the first time in his life. He already knew by looking at her for a split second that she was an inch taller than him, could out run him, out fly him, out drink him, out party him and most probably could eat him alive any time she wanted. And he wouldn’t mind! His past feelings for Chloe slowly became a distant memory.
Chapter 3
China, Jiangsu Province
Reform—dubbed China’s “Second Revolution”—was one of the most common terms in China’s political vocabulary in the early 1980s. Reform of the Chinese Communist Party and its political activities, reform of government organization, reform of the economy, military reforms, cultural and artistic reforms—indeed, China’s post-Mao Zedong leaders called for reform in every part of Chinese society.
The leaders of the People’s Republic of China saw reform as a way to realize the broad goals of the Four Modernizations; the modernization of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense, and to bring China into the community of advanced industrial nations by the beginning of the new millennium.
Thus, the reform movement of the 1980s, which was attributed largely to the insights and determination of Wang Chunqiao, one of the most important figures in the post-Mao Zedong leadership, took its place in the broad spectrum of Chinese history.
It took time for Reform to change life in the rural areas of China.
In Beijing and Shanghai, reform could be seen quickly. In Jiangsu Province and its largest city, Nanjing—one of the four ancient capitals of China—immediate changes could be seen in the new buildings on the Yangtze River. The Yangtze River Bridge had gone up 20 years earlier in the 1960s, and had been the largest project in the area until a new building several blocks south of the bridge was noticed in early 1979. It went up at a fast pace compared to normal construction work, and by December of 1979, the 30-story modern glass building was complete and its name appeared outside the main entrance—Zedong Electronics.
For the average Chinese population, all security was normal, but passers-by at the new Zedong Electronics building noticed extremely high security around the clock. Armed guards were always at every entrance, and anyone entering the building was frisked, and briefcases opened and thoroughly checked. The building had a basement car entrance a few yards away from the main entrance, and often rare black limousines for that era could be seen going down the ramp and through the heavy security once the garage doors were open.
The boardroom on the 30th floor was not be seen by many people once it was lavishly completed in 1980. Around the 16-seat table, each comfortable leather chair was taken by a man in an expensive suit. The oldest looked about 30 to 40 years old. Marble was everywhere. There were works of art, mostly ancient Chinese, but a few paintings that looked Western as well.
Very large windows for that period covered the outer wall and were reflective so that one could see out but nobody could see in. At the head of the table, a much older man used a wooden pointer and moved it over the display on the wall behind him. The display showed what looked to the average person to be small electrical fuses, switches, and electronic gadgets common in the West in the early 1980s. Apart from the abnormal wealth and luxury in the board room, it looked like a normal business meeting.
Chairman Wang Chunqiao, the man holding the pointer, was dressed immaculately in a dark suit, red tie, and red handkerchief in his upper pocket. All the men seated at the table were Chinese, well-dressed, and affluent. Discussions of metals, glass, electricity, electrical engineering, and the uncommon word Strontium were heard around the room. For any person listening in, these men were experts in electronics, engineering, and modern day China— masters of their knowledge. Unfortunately, nobody could listen in. The room had been cleaned and checked for Russian, American, or even any Chinese “bugs” days before this meeting. Nobody other than the 16 men were allowed in the room and no notes were taken. There was not a piece of paper in the room.
Comrade Hu Lee, one of the slightly older men, gave a 20-minute lecture on Western computers. Then, the younger Comrade Zhi Yun gave a lecture on modern Western satellite communications and the new American spy satellite project. Comrade Ri Yun, another member of the table, gave a lecture on the growing Japanese auto industry, and many of the men spat on the floor when the word “Japanese” was mentioned. Very few at the table had not lost fathers, mothers, and older family members during the Japanese invasion of China just before the Second World War. This part of China had been one of the worst hit areas, with more than 300,000 Chinese fatalities at the hands of the Japanese army in Nanjing alone.
Lunch was served by young girls in traditional dress flowing in with a full buffet table of food. A large table was brought in and placed along one of the windowed walls and filled with delights most people in this part of the world only dream about. Within five minutes, the mass of servers were gone and the men got up to help themselves. It was a working lunch after all. Tea and drinks had been placed at one end, and one-by-one they gathered their
favorites and sat down with chopsticks in hand to eat.
For the rest of the afternoon, one man after the other stood and lectured on a different subject. All speeches were made with the same end in sight—to produce the best electronics possible for the developing Western world hundreds and thousands of miles away. Microsoft came up often, as did Apple. So did telephones, electrical grids, fuses, and aircraft directional equipment made in America, Germany, and France. Vehicle-management systems and control units were under development in Germany, and Japan had already started negotiating for them to be in every future vehicle made in Japan.
Pricing and opposition company prices were discussed the next day, and the day after that. Production of well over a hundred different components took three days of discussion. They talked about the dozens of new factories that would need to be built within the next 12 months to manufacture these new components. They would be of only the best quality, made with the best computers and workforce, and work better than any competitor’s product. The pride of China’s productivity would be at stake, and everything would be made in Nanjing.
Many of the discussions involved new gadgets the West had not yet heard of, but well-placed Chinese in every corner of every industry worldwide were already giving feedback to Zedong Electronics on every new electronic invention about to come on market in the next four or five years.
Chairman Wang Chunqiao had been working on this project for over a decade now. Under the old regime many thousands of Chinese had been placed overseas and, at one time, were all under his control. With the changes in China’s government and new people rising to power, the older communist party people were being ejected and replaced by new blood. Wang Chunqiao was no longer a part of the government elite, but he was still one of the most powerful, wealthy, and prominent members of the largest population in the world. Some Chinese reckoned that he was nearly as powerful in China as the whole new government.