PART III
This is Harry Hughes, the crew-chief of the airplane Pelican.
Captain Heffner called him his right hand man.
THE ENGINE QUITS ON TAKE OFF
PART III
This is Harry Hughes, the crew-chief of the airplane Pelican.
Captain Heffner called him his right hand man.
Meanwhile the truck was having a tough time of it. What had looked like an excellent highway
on the maps was, mostly, just a trail across the desert.
But word eventually reached Accra that the truck had reached Zinder,
only 385 miles from the wreck,
and Heffner and his crew loaded up their tools and supplies and started off.
Their plan was to reach the wreck a couple of days ahead of the truck convoy,
make the repairs needed, and be fully prepared when the wing arrived.
IT was hot, dirty work. The flies swarmed in an almost solid body.
Usually by ten o'clock in the morning the skin of the plane was so hot it couldn't be touched.
The only thing to do was strip, climb into cots under mosquito netting,
and spend the rest of the day talking and drinking canned fruit juices.
They supplied themselves with almost ice-cold water by burying a five-gallon water tin
about six inches deep in the sand and pouring gasoline from the plane over it.
The resultant evaporation would chill the water.
After the sun had set they would set up a portable generator, string lights around the wreck,
and start to work again. They put on new ailerons, drilled holes in the trailing edge of the one wing left
on the plane, and bolted the flaps up so they would stay in place.
Then they wrapped a sheet of aluminum six feet long around the leading edge,
drilled holes in it, and bolted it down to the wing. They also got the tail section in order.
During the second night--and the nights were so cold they had to wear their leather flying jackets--
Heffner thought he heard a siren out across the desert.
"I was expecting the truck with the wing at any minute," he says.
"I turned around with my portable light, and there, right at the edge of the wing,
not seven feet from me, was a cat. Don't ask me what kind.
All I know is that it looked like the biggest damn alley cat that I ever saw in my life.
I just froze. Finally I got hold of myself and, holding the light on the cat, I began to back away.
As I backed, she came forward, a pace at a time, crouched, taut.
I didn't dare yell to the boys working on the other side of the plane
for fear of scaring the cat into springing.
Finally I got near enough to the fuselage to reach back for a sub-machine gun lying on the wing.
I brought the gun down cautiously, still holding the light in the cat's eyes,
and then fired a few bursts.
I don't know whether I hit her or not--I think I did--but she didn't come back."
After three days of waiting for the truck they decided to fly out in search of it.
At Kano they learned that it had broken down in the Sahara, and, worse,
at Zinder the officer in charge of the convoy informed them that the wing itself
had been broken in two as the truck struggled to traverse the deep sand.
"It looked pretty hopeless about then," Heffner says, "but we had spent a lot of money
and more time on the job, and I hated to give up.
I remembered reading how a C. N. A. C. crew in China had once flown a DC-2 wing
to a wreck by attaching it beneath the fuselage of a DC-3.
So I took the idea to my Commanding 0fficer at Accra, and received permission to try it.
He was a little doubtful, because the C. N. A. C. flight had been only 100 miles,
while it was more than 1,000 miles from Accra to this wreck
. 'But go ahead and try it,' he said.
'After all, that salvage plane of yours has already paid for itself several times over.
"If you wreck it in the attempt, you can get a new one."
"He didn't say anything about my neck," Heffner says wryly.
The Douglas factory representative at Accra, Heffner, and the sub-depot men
designed and installed a Rube Goldberg rig on the under side of the C-47,
attached the new wing under the plane, and hooded up the open end. All this took several days.
So excellent was the job of fitting the extra wing that once the ship was in the air it flew in perfect trim.
Except for a reduction in speed, the only unusual characteristic noted was that, in landing,
the tail had a tendency to ride in the air longer than necessary.
Heffner was accompanied on this historic 1,000-mile flight back to the wreck by Colonel H. H. Tellman,
commanding officer of the Air Depot Group at Accra,
Lieutenant Colonel George Lusk, Lieutenant Carshon, his co-pilot, and three enlisted men.
Colonel Tellman and Lusk were to fly the salvage ship back to Accra with the enlisted men,
while Heffner and Carshon were to fly out the repaired plane--
which, appropriately enough, was named
"The Flying Bag of Rivets."
Three days were spent in attaching the wing to the crashed plane, making other minor repairs,
and transferring gas in five-gallon cans. The colonels, stripped down to shorts,
worked and sweated just as hard as the enlisted men did. Now came the big moment.
Would the plane fly?
Almost three months had elapsed since the crash, and the engines, Pratt & Whitney 14-cylinder twin-row Wasps,
hadn't been touched in all that time. One of the enlisted men got a battery out of the salvage plane,
hooked it up, and kicked over the starter.
The engines caught the first time!
They blew up a lot of smoke from the old oil, but they ran smoothly.
"That was one of the most remarkable things about the whole project," Heffner says.
"Engines just aren't supposed to sit that long without care and then start up without any trouble."
The Flying Bag of Rivets had no radio equipment, no air-speed indicator; most of the instruments
were inoperative, and the flaps were bolted up to the wings.
The whole ship looked like a third-rate prizefighter
patched up after a couple of rounds with Joe Louis.
"We ran the engines up about fifteen minutes," says Heffner,
"took her down to the end of the field, turned around into the wind, and opened the throttles".
"Hold your hat and cross your fingers," I told Carshon. "Here we go!"
'Brother,' said Carshon, 'they never taught me anything like this in the Cadets.' We used about 1,550
feet of the runway and when we were about fifty feet off the ground
the right engine sputtered and died.
But she flew along all right on one engine, so we continued on our course.
Colonel Tellman meantime had taken off in the other ship and was following us.
All the way to the A. T. C. base we worked the fuel-mixture control on that right engine, and finally,
about ten minutes before we landed, she started firing on all cylinders
and was running in perfect tune when we landed."
At the base a few minor adjustments were made and an air-speed indicator was installed,
and Heffner and Carshon flew the plane on to Accra and rolled it up to the doors of the sub-depot.
Two weeks later it rolled out of those same doors,
practically a new airplane.
Two new wings had been installed, the patches removed and the dents straightened out.
The next day this plane left on a scheduled trip across the desert with a full load of cargo and passengers.
She's still there, flying day in and day out, with never an outward sign of her three months in the desert.
She is a graphic example of the value of salvage operations--
$l35,OOO of the taxpayers' money
back in the fight against the enemy
because a few men were willing to sweat out the desert sun and take
a few chances in order to get her back in the air.
The end.
Lieutenant Martin and Lieutenant Carshon
at the controls of the Pelican airplane.
Upon Captian Heffners promotion to Major and transfer,
Martin and Carshon took over the salvage crew.
(please use Arrows to view additional story)
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