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From: Ken Gebhart (no email)
Date: Thu Jan 19 2006 - 23:01:13 EST
On 1/18/06 2:06 AM, "Gary J. LaPook" <> wrote:
> Great post Ken.
>
> It brought back memories of my flight across the atlantic in a Cessna 172 in
> 1978 trying to find Flores in the Azores. I was working for Pete Demis, who
> you also know. No autopilot, shooting stars with an A-10a I had purchased from
> you several years earlier. Level the wings, start shooting, straighten out
> plane back on heading, resume shooting, etc. and then interpolating the
> altitude from all of the pencil marks covering half of the disk.
>
> Have you had any contact with that crazy greek guy recently?
> Gary LaPook
>
>
Gary,
No, but the word crazy fits. He was flying one of the planes on the trip I
related. So many stories to tell. The last of which was his repossessing
Idi Aminıs private jet (while Idi was still in power.)
You mention the Azores. Some friends of mine took off in several C-310s
from St. Johnıs for the Azores. But instead of allowing for variation, they
used grid variation (GV), a 35 deg difference! Upon expiration of ETA, one
fellow wanted to start a square search for the islands, but the others
talked him out of it, reasoning that they were bound to hit Europe if they
continued on. As you know, prop planes get their best mpg low and slow, so
they were down on the wave tops when the ETA for Europe arrived. Still no
land. An hour later, with all fuel tanks solidly on E, land and an airport
appeared, which they used, but no-one there spoke English. They had gone
into the middle of the Bay of Biscay and landed in France!
During the 70s, Cessna, Beech, and Piper supplied 80% of the worldıs single
engine, prop airplanes. The new owners almost always opted to have them
ferried instead of waiting for sea freight to bring them. On one of my
flights from Gander to Shannon, I was informed by the line boy, that I was
the 22nd single engine airplane to arrive from the US that day.
Most navigation of these planes was by the gun-barrel method. The metal
ferry tanks installed for the trip made the magnetic compass all but
useless. You tracked outbound on a VOR radial, and set the directional gyro
(on unslaved mode) to the radial bearing. Then when the radial dropped out
at around 100 miles, you held the last heading until hitting the
destination. Trouble was that normal internal gyro precession, plus
earth-transport precession guaranteed a large error. This was not too big a
problem over the Atlantic, but I personally have know 5 people who did not
return from Pacific crossings, most probably due to navigational errors.
Thus, I used a sextant.
Gary, how about your flight? Did you do many or just once? Any problems or
comments? I only did two, once over each ocean, but living in Wichita with
Cessna and Beech, I was close to many of those who made such flights for a
living.
If ever a book SHOULD be written (referring to Billıs earlier comment), it
should be written about the unbelievable adventures (navigational,
political, and physical) of the pilots who flew these ferry flights. I have
only scratched the surface with my above comments.
Ken
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