AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2011 - 28

PROFICIENTPILOT

BY BARRY SCHIFF

Getting my feet wet

he old Piper Apache was anything but a muscle machine. Its pair of 150-horsepower four-bangers could barely lift it into the sky. Yet

Navigating to Hawaii involved dead reckoning to within ADF (automatic direction finder) range of November and then homing in on the ship. The cutter could not, of course, maintain a fixed position in the middle of the ocean. It was required only to remain within a designated grid centered on 30 degrees North, 140 degrees West. A pilot was provided with the position of the ship within that grid so that he could plot his own position on a chart when passing overhead. (There were other such there I was pointing down Oakland, California’s ocean stations scattered about the world.) longest runway with a full load of fuel. And I mean Getting a positive fix in mid-ocean after hours of Barry Schiff is a Fellow of Britain’s full. In addition to burgeoning wing and auxiliary monotony provided great relief, especially because Royal Aeronautical tanks, the cabin was stuffed with a humongous it corrected for unanticipated drift. It was enterSociety. ferry tank also filled to capacity. taining as well to exchange off-color jokes with The beleaguered Apache broke ground after some of the Coast Guardsmen. It was not unusual using what seemed like miles of runway and showed little incli- for passing pilots to be asked to relay messages to family and nation to climb. I prayed for both engines to continue running. friends in Hawaii or California. The failure of one would have been disastrous. There is no way The most enjoyable such chatting for me occurred years that I could have continued flying because the single-engine later when flying the polar route aboard TWA’s Boeing 707s. ceiling of the seriously overweight Apache was way below sea There was a U.S. military communications and radar station level. This is why Charles Lindbergh said that he’d rather fly to called “Sob Story” in the middle of northern Greenland, in Paris in a single-engine airplane because all a twin could do was the Middle of Nowhere. It’s not difficult to figure out how this offer twice the possibility of failure. The “twin-breasted Cub” lonely outpost got its name. Since most of the traffic passed finally cleared the Golden Gate Bridge. The Oakland Center well south and beyond VHF range, having an airplane pass controller breathed an audible sigh of relief and offered his con- overhead was almost a cause for celebration on the ice below. gratulations. Really. I gingerly turned southwest and headed for I recall one trip where our flight engineer copied lengthy mes2,327-mile distant Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. This was to sages for almost the entire time we were within radio range. be my first oceanic flight. The largest body of water I had ever After passing Ocean Station November and taking up a new crossed before then was the Colorado River. My sigh of relief heading for Hilo, I resisted the temptation to use the ADF to would have to wait another 16 hours. track outbound from the ship. While this might have been satI passed over California’s Farallon Islands, a cluster of rocks isfactory on short flights, doing so on such a long leg could of which the largest barely accommodated the radio beacon magnify unanticipated drift over the course of hours and be installed there. It wasn’t long before Off flags appeared in the cause of a serious off-course excursion. the course-deviation indicators. My calls to ATC went unanI instead fiddled with the ADF tuner in an attempt to pick swered, and I was beyond sight of land. This is when it first up a commercial broadcast station in Hawaii. After so many hits a new ferry pilot that he is going to be very much alone hours of flying and watching the fuel gauges slowly heading for a very long time. for their lower limits, I seriously began to wonder if there This was before Loran C, Omega, or GPS. The only en really was land at the end of the long line drawn on my chart. route radio aid to navigation was Consolan, a powerful low- I began to imagine hearing Hawaiian music breaking through frequency station on the California coast. (There also were the static. No such luck. I was still too far from Hilo. But just Consolan stations in Nantucket and France to assist trans- then I heard a news broadcast. Why didn’t the ADF needle Atlantic pilots.) The pilot’s job was to listen to the station for point somewhere? It just wandered aimlessly around its coma minute, carefully count the number of dots and dashes that pass rose. I was shocked to discover that the station identified he heard, and then convert them to a crude bearing from the itself as KNX in Los Angeles. Had I allowed the airplane to turn station. It wasn’t very accurate, and you couldn’t hear the sig- around in the Pacific darkness? (You really can find yourself nals during daylight from very far out. thinking like that near the end of such a long flight.) Before I take that back. There was another radio aid, a low-frequency long, though, incredibly beautiful Hawaiian music did find radio beacon floating halfway between California and Hawaii. its way into my headset. Hours of apprehension and anxiety Well, it wasn’t floating in the conventional sense. The 335-kilo- rapidly dissolved into relief and fatigue. cycle signal was transmitted from Ocean Station November, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter stationed at the midpoint of the route. Visit the author’s website (www.barryschiff.com). 28 • NOVEMBER
2011

AOPA PILOT •

http://www.barryschiff.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2011

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