Early Airline Development - B&M Airways Pioneers Route Structure
The Triumph of Instrument Flight
Copyright 2007
Contact Franklyn E. Dailey Jr.
- Barnstomers and Early Aviators
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- Flight Across the Atlantic
- P-40s to Iceland
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Northeast Airlines did not fit the mold of other early startup airlines. It did not partake of the rail-air, rail by night and air by day, experience. And contrary to a substantial segment of executives in the passenger rail hierarchy that saw no threat from air travel, Northeast was founded as Boston & Maine Airways by rail executives and supported by their railroad, the Boston & Maine (B&M). B&M was a relatively small railroad serving northeast states so perhaps their management were "out of the loop" of major railroading and could be excused for their boldness.
As a source of airline experience, Northeast, the last trunk airline to be formed in the United States, teaches what it took to be successful in the passenger-carrying air transport business. This airline was also among the first to be bought out (by Delta) in a consolidation that is still going on in the U.S. airline industry. Northeast Airlines' aviation learning years occurred just a few years before my own first years as a pilot, and took place in a region whose flight conditions were comparable to my initial operational tour in flying. Northeast's pilots had made the transition to flying by Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), less than a decade before I took that step.
In a number of places these pages owe recognition to a wonderful book, Adventures of a Yellowbird, by Captain Robert W. Mudge. In 1969, Branden Press, Inc., a Boston publisher, published the copy used for reference here. Branden's arrangement with author Mudge was terminated many years ago and the book is out of print. It is a persuasive inference that "Yellowbird" is the unofficial name that stuck because of the somewhat ghastly paint job on Northeast Airlines' planes.
In his book, Captain Mudge tells the story of his airline with compassion and detail. His commercial flight enterprise ("carrier" is an appropriate generic term) came to be known as Northeast Airlines after shedding its earlier name, Boston and Maine Airways.
For basic perspective on the birth years of U.S. airlines, particularly on the achievement of instrument flight, this narrative will cite some of the experiences related by Mudge, who joined Northeast in 1941. He chronicled a number of events in which pilots who had joined Northeast even earlier than he, had made aviation history. Those pilots treated the events as all in a day's work. To them, their experiences were the ordinary things one had to do to make one segment of aviation into an economically successful enterprise. Their efforts did not make headlines. In fact, daring exploits in the air in connection with a scheduled airline were not conducive to attracting passengers. We can be thankful for pilot-authors like Robert Mudge who have left us some account of airline building.
Robert Mudge did not write as the historian might write. He did write passionately, accurately, and in sufficient detail to hold a reader's interest. It is surprising that no historian has yet come on the scene to do for aviation what an Alfred Thayer Mahan did for seapower. Mudge's book will be essential for the historians who do undertake such a challenge for aviation.
Mudge's title, "Captain," reflects the position he held with his airline, a "left seat" pilot. Left seat pilots did not exist from the beginning. The 1933 aircraft fleet operated by Boston and Maine Airways, the predecessor venture to Northeast Airlines, were Stinson Trimotors. This three-engine plane carried 10 passengers but just one pilot who sat in the middle behind the center engine in the nose. In my youth, I had seen pictures of Fokker Trimotors and there was even a Ford Trimotor, but I had never realized there was a Stinson Trimotor until reading Captain Mudge's book.
One photograph of this aircraft in Mudge's book is paired with a second picture of its interior passenger cabin. Two struts, in the shape of the letter "A" without its middle bracket, were used to stiffen the interior fuselage. One had to crouch down to pass under these struts when moving fore and aft in the cabin.
Paul Larcom, who granted permission to use several of the archived photos in this story, is Curator of the Beverly, Massachusetts Historical Society. The Stinson Trimotor photo in the next illustration is from the Walker Transportation Collection of the Society. Close examination of this photo reveals that there are chains on the tires of this aircraft. Chains fit the airplane-as-transportation picture in the northeast winters of the 1930s.
Illustration 2 -Stinson Trimotor; B&M Airways
When reflecting on the piloting assignment in the Stinson tri-motor aircraft it became a minor curiosity to determine if the single pilot was called "Captain" or simply, "Pilot." Both Paul Larcom, and David Graham, an airport and air safety consultant and former Navy multiengine patrol plane pilot, are sure that the man in control was called "Pilot." Robert Mudge's "Captain" title derives from twin-engine Lockheed Electra passenger planes, Boston & Maine Airways' second generation of planes. In twin-engined aircraft the custom as originated called for the command pilot to be known as "captain" and fly from the left seat with a "co-pilot" in the right seat. See Illustration 3 for a view from behind the pilot's seats. Perhaps, the American car and its road customs triumphed over the British motoring experience.
That lone Stinson pilot had a lot of eyeballing to do. In general aviation as well as in commercial air transport flying, "see, and be seen," became the motto for safe flying insofar as aircraft to aircraft collisions were concerned. Cockpit visibility was never good enough for full reliance on that nostrum. Jet-age speeds further cut into its value. Though not sufficient to eliminate the possiblity of mid-air collision, "see and be seen" is still necessary.
The early Stinson pilot had poor visibility. The number of aircraft in flight at any one time, except in the immediate vicinity of airports where pilot training was being conducted, did not put as heavy a burden on cockpit visibility as flying does today.
The pilot had to be an acute listener. It was listening that informed him of the health of his engines long before engines were fully cockpit-instrumented. In the very early days, sound was the principal indication of low airspeed and the approach of a stall.
Illustration 3 includes the instrument panel of an early Lockheed Electra. Again, the source is the Beverly, Massachusetts, Historical Society.
Illustration 3 -Lockheed Electra 10 Cockpit
The Electra's instrument configuration can be inferred from its panel. The radio frequency controls, the engine and flight surface controls, and the engine feedback indicators present a baffling panorama to the student pilot who first beholds them. And indeed, this panel, even upon initial examination by the experienced pilot, might suggest a crazy quilt growth pattern. After a period of reflecting on what is there, the more practiced eye begins to find what it needs to see. Eventually a pilot gets pretty comfortable with the location of instrument indicators in front of him or her, with further dials and levers to the side, and eventually more overhead.
In later aircraft, the grouping of indicators has been greatly improved. But, this Electra 10 panel tells any pilot examining aviation's progress that the Electra instrument panel represented an important step forward for safe flight and especially for safe instrument flight.
Captain Mudge begins Chapter One of his story with a compelling sentence.
"It is perhaps the world's good fortune that the road beyond our dreams lies obscure before us as we start out along the path to fulfillment."
In its "Summa Simplified", the Confraternity of the Most Precious Blood introduces the words of Thomas Aquinas as follows:
"The road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs. Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weakness, gaily in love for all the pressures on our hearts."
While Captain Mudge's words are his own, and my favorite quotation from St. Thomas is borrowed, I can see that Mudge and I approached the subject of flying with a respect for the unknown and faith that "a path to fulfillment" existed.
Here is a passage on "pilot judgment" from Captain Robert Mudge's remarkable book. The parentheses in the following paragraph are my own.
"Flying was news in those days. (1933) It was explained carefully (in the news) that the Boston and Maine Airways had rules of safety which forbade flying in such weather. (fog) It was comforting, of course, for the public to feel the airline was governed by such a rigid set of rules; but this was far from the truth. Rules, of course, did exist; but they were simply the rules that each pilot, individually, had learned by himself. The airline was run on pilot judgment - and that was all. Rules would come, but only slowly and as experience demanded. For now, today, the rules of operations were only vaguely outlined in the minds of Anderson and Bean. (Anderson and Bean came aboard at the behest of a pilot named Collins, who helped found the airline.) Vague though they (the rules) may have been, they worked."
Yellowbird pilots would be among the first to fly the North Atlantic rim. My own first operational flight duty occurred in the North Pacific rim. Our Aleutian pilot-teachers, the Patrol Plane Commanders (PPCs) on my initial operational tour in 1946 after receiving my Naval Aviator's wings, came from multi-engine ASW flight squadrons in World War II. Those squadrons operated from bases in Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland and England (Dunkeswell, England for example) and the Azores. In school terminology, those Northeast Airlines pilots along with World War II's class of military pilots, could be viewed as being "a class ahead of me." Many of those pilots accumulated sub polar flight hours on flight schedules intensified by war. In the early experiences that characterized this period of rapid advances in aviation, there was still a lot of "learning by doing." We will shortly encounter some examples.
Yellowbird's.predecessor airline began its life in commercial aviation flying out of northeast cities like Boston, Portland and Bangor in Maine and White River Junction in Vermont. Then, returning the favor of the World War I pilot base that had inspired and instructed its pilots, Northeast Airlines, under contract, extended its air transport flight capabilities to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, and Prestwick, Scotland, all in preparation for U.S. participation in World War II. These second-generation pilots, their stewardesses, their base support crews and their investors, evolved into a globally experienced Northeast Airlines. With no little pride, I note that in the last aviation squadron to which I was assigned as Instrument Flight Instructor (IFIS), in 1962, at NAS South Weymouth, Massachusetts, a number of the "weekend warrior" reservists were regular Northeast Airlines pilots. I have saved the record of my final Navy patrol plane instrument flight-check in a P2V-5F Lockheed Neptune aircraft. That instrument flight check was conducted by N.E. Marston, a Northeast captain at the time.
Commercial airlines maintain schedules. When weather turns violent or destinations and alternates are below weather minimums, airlines may delay flights but they rarely cancel them outright. After several decades of flights so regularly on time that they were taken for granted, many news stories told of airline flight cancellations that reached all time highs in 1999 and 2000. Airline pilots and planes in the last decade of the 20th century have been over scheduled or scheduled too tightly to allow for system delays. Weather, blame it on El Nino or La Nina, plus all time records for numbers of flights and passengers, an aging air traffic control system, and too few "gates" and runways at airports, added up to an air traffic control system that had become overloaded. Delays or cancellations were the result. But by and large, over a fifty-year period from 1945-1995, U.S. airlines have maintained flight schedules. Airline pilots and other flight crew members have not had the option to decide that flying this particular day to this particular destination is something they did not care to do.
Commercial flying has many parallels in military aviation. U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft operations and U.S. military air transport operations have also been performed to high standards of mission execution. A Flight Officer in a military aviation squadron reports to an Operations Officer for the squadron. This structure does not lightly accept excuses for not taking off on an assigned mission. In 1946, in my Aleutian flying assignments, a severe ear infection could keep a pilot on the ground. (My own piloting experience never included a pressurized military plane.) A substitute pilot or a complete substitute crew could be assigned but the mission was usually launched. I flew a deployment in Alaska as copilot for my Commanding Officer, Ed Hogan, then a Navy Lieutenant Commander. He filled half the dresser top in his room in the Bachelor Officer Quarters with ear medicines. His ears were always in pain in flight, both climbing and descending, but he never missed a flight.
The record of civil aviation that I most admire is the maintenance, with safety, of its regular schedules. Their "backup" in terms of pilots, crews and equipment set a mission execution standard that military aviation can only applaud. Both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Air Corps have had transport counterparts to civil aviation. These were, respectively, the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS) and the Military Air Transport Service (MATS), the latter an outgrowth of the Air Force's Air Transport Command. Those organizations maintained schedules comparable to their commercial aviation counterparts, with the added challenge of many out-of -the-way destinations.
Military flying for patrol or reconnaissance cannot match the tight schedules of commercial transport aviation and does not match airline schedule completion norms. Operational military flying done for patrol or reconnaissance involves weapons systems and electronic surveillance demands that civil aviation does not face. Added to these requirements in military aviation is "mission creep" which often becomes "mission leap." The next mission you might have to fly would have no counterpart in aviation history. In Alaska, my squadron was sent north in 1947 to escort the ships of PET Four to Point Barrow on Alaska's north coast during its brief summer of long days. "PET Four" stood for Petroleum District Four, in the U.S. federal government inventory of its precious oil reserves. Keeping ships and their drilling platform equipment clear of ice fields meant long hours for our PB4Y-2 Privateer aircraft. The landing field at Point Barrow, Alaska, was too small for our aircraft to land on, so a temporary home base was at best hours of flying away.
Orders to perform this air escort duty came to our squadron with no prior warning. The PET Four ships were on their way. Do your duty. It was not heroic in any way but it is another example of how military aviation is different from civil aviation.
Keeping to the schedule has involved a passionate commitment in commercial airline operations. With just a few intrepid passengers to satisfy in its very early days, that schedule was the focus of everyone in the organization, and the responsibility ultimately of the pilots. Prior to the availability of radio aids to navigation on the ground and in the aircraft, an early method for holding schedule in flying required the pilot to memorize every detail of the surface over which the flight had to be conducted to reach its destination. This was an early form of "instrument flying." Such a characterization might draw a raised eyebrow from those who later participated in more rigorously defined, and more technologically implemented, instrument flight.
Pilots of those early scheduled commercial flights used their studied, encyclopedic memories of terrain, bodies of water, buildings, farms, and railroad tracks as their radio beam. They had to maintain flight schedules before the radio beam became available to act as a precisely defined flight path in its constantly "on" condition. Instrument flight checks were not given to commercial airline pilots until 1933. The radio beam did not become the widely available definition of U.S. airways until well into the 1930s.
The radio beam was the bridge that took commercial aviation from its formative years to its growth years in which a successful point to point flight could be scheduled and almost taken for granted. The technology and its application were not available to Northeast Airlines in its formative years. Since the low frequency airways radio "beam" became the basic radio aid for aviation, and therefore the essential element on which instrument flying depended, I am going to describe it here.
From radio transmitters liberally placed about the U.S., each with a carrier frequency in the hundreds of kilcocycles, the Morse Code letter, "A," dit dah, and the Morse Code letter, "N," dah dit, were broadcast into alternate quadrants by each pair of a set of four antennae. When the pilot could hear a steady tone in the speaker in his headphones, he knew it was the merging of the dah dit and the dit dah sound. When he or she could no longer hear a discrete A or a discrete N, it meant that the aircraft was on one of the four "beams" defined by the station. That beam corresponded to a path in the sky directly over an invariant path on the ground. Further out, the path was wider, and further in, the path narrowed, until over the station itself, the path converged to a point. Those radio beams created by the set of four antennae, functioned as "memory" that would be superior to any human memory of earth features, and functioned whether or not the human could see the earth below. Illustration 12 later in the story shows these beams in graphic form.
One important facet of the low frequency radio range was its station identification. After tuning to the correct frequency, a pilot would confirm that he was tuned to the station he needed by listening for its "call letters." This consisted of a repeated Morse Code aural broadcast of three letters, a feature of all the under-550 kilocycle airways radio stations of that era whether used for communications alone, for non-directional navigation beacons, or for radio range stations with their four beams. The earliest example of a "call letter" identification that I can personally recall was Radio Annapolis, with its letters NSS. Radio Annapolis was a Navy communication station. Air navigation radio range stations would regularly interrupt their "A" and "N" sector code broadcasts to broadcast their call letters for identification purposes.
Before the installation of these early radio navigation aids, and the airways system that these radio stations defned, pilots would maintain Visual Flight Rules and detour around clouds. If flying over land or water, above which the sky was partly overcast, pilots might get only an occasional glimpse of landmarks below. That brief glimpse had to supply vital information. If that undercast had fewer and fewer "breaks" in the clouds through which ground contact could be maintained, the wise pilot would go down through one of the breaks and fly 100% in "contact" with the ground even if his aircraft's altitude became uncomfortably low. Calling to stations ahead, pilots could get weather information, one element of which was "cloud cover." A cloud cover of "five" meant an overcast in which five tenths of the sky was obscured. At five or above, the pilot would begin to seriously consider getting down below the cloud cover.
In a burst of change, much of which occurred in a brief four or five-year period, the following "aids" were given to pilots. In the cockpit, an early addition was the "turn needle," a flight control instrument with an accurate response to a flight control movement but one which required a very considered interpretation of what it did and did not tell the pilot. Shortly thereafter, that needle indicator was combined with a ball in the lower arc of the round indicator, into an instrument called "needle-ball" by some and "turn and bank" by others. The turn needle indicated if an aircraft was turning. If one kept the ball in the bottom of the instrument centered by proper application of rudder, the turn of the aircraft would be aerodynamically coordinated, that is, no "slip" and no "skid." In a flight fully obscured by clouds, where the pilot had no visual reference, the pilot could keep the aircraft from turning by keeping the needle and the ball centered. Or, one could make an intentional turn, say a "one needle width" turn, holding the ball centered for coordinated flight. A pilot trained to use this information could maintain a modest turn rate.
The needle indicator was actually the first instrument installed on the pilot's instrument panel whose intelligence was derived from a gyroscope. Its function depended on a gyro characteristic called, "precession." The pilot did not need to know that. He or she did need to understand that the use of the needle in instrument conditions to maintain level, controlled flight, required extraordinary concentration and an ability to steadfastly disregard false interpretations that might derive from what the human body might "feel" was happening.
When the "artificial horizon" instrument came into use somewhat later, the use of needle-ball as the sole aid to controlled turning, a challenging process at best, faded into history for most pilots, though keeping the "ball centered" remained good technique. In addition to its indication of the turn condition of the aircraft, the artificial horizon provided a second piece of essential information. The device told the pilot whether his aircraft was nose down or nose up, and by inference, whether it was climbing or descending. This essential information was quite difficult to obtain in a timely fashion with needle-ball flying. Before the availability of an artificial horizon, one had to use two other instruments, the altimeter, and the "rate of climb" indicator, to infer gaining or losing altitude. Rate-of-climb devices had very jumpy needle indicators.
The airspeed indicator had come earlier. It improved dramatically on the determination of airspeed, an essential piece of flight information. Before the airspeed indicator and its pitot tube sensor on the plane's forward fuselage, one method to infer airspeed was by listening to the sound (pitch) of the wind past the wing struts. And when airspeed fell close to stall speed, the experienced pilot had to quickly recognize the feel of an aircraft entering the stall condition.
With a rate of climb or descent needle, and a conscientiously updated "setting" of the pressure altimeter, the pilot could maintain flight in clouds using needle-ball flying. A calibrated magnetic compass could help him hold a prescribed course and proceed from one point to another. Actual wind drift differing from predicted wind drift required a peek at the ground below to determine an actual "drift angle" and then apply that drift angle properly to correct the plane's heading in order to hold the prescribed course.
The ability to get from takeoff field to landing field while maintaining the aircraft in level flight improved day by day, flight by flight. Regularity of flight departures led to retention of dedicated passengers. Mail contracts, when added to passenger revenues, provided additional income from the U.S. Post Office Department. The combination gave the early airline a margin, though tight, of revenues above costs. Mail subsidies for airlines were a throwback to early transatlantic shipping days. Cunard ocean-going ships made a priority of His or Her Majesty's mail, taking passengers only when the mail requirements had been met.
The pilots who transported passengers for pay were eager to obtain the technical improvements and flying skills that would help them maintain flight under instrument conditions. They had a hands-on appreciation for how their rudimentary disciplines for maintaining flight in clouds needed to be improved. These pilots set and met their own standards for meeting a flight schedule while reducing risk to passenger, pilot and aircraft.
When the fog rolled into the landing field, the early airline companies saw to it that a telephone connection to a telegraph system operator was available at both departure and destination airports. The pilot eyeing his scheduled departure time could be notified in sufficient time to delay his departure until conditions improved. There was someone in charge in actual practice even if there had yet to appear a man with a title and all details of his responsibility spelled out on paper. The early pilots with a healthy respect for weather impediments to safe flight were smart enough to heed the order to delay. Those that were not smart enough to respond to cautionary signals became casualties. The process was self-cleansing.
Before proceeding further into the progress of instrument flying in U.S. aviation, let me mention three other challenges to safe flight that received some prime attention in the emergent period of modern aviation. The first is icing. Icing on the wings and on the propellers would lead to loss of lift or thrust and a crash. No answers were immediately at hand at the beginning of the 1930s. Icing on the wings, if not observed visually by the pilot, would quickly become noticeable on the flight controls. Propeller icing resulted in loss of thrust and its effect was additive to the effect of wing icing. Concentrated attention to the flight controls would not provide an answer. Changing the rpm (revolutions per minute) of the propellers could help throw off the ice. Maintaining higher airspeed by adding engine power was an initial recourse for the loss of lift due to wing icing but eventually the loss of lift could become a problem that no amount of skill with engine or flight controls could overcome. The answers to icing challenges came in four "systems" over a period of time. For the flight surfaces, these came firstas wing and vertical stabilizer leading edge deicing systems andthen wing heat over the whole surface. For propellers, first came alcohol deicers and then electric propeller heat. Where relevant to a flight situation encountered later in the story, these solutions will be covered in a bit more detail.
The next two challenges each resulted in an emergency landing by a Stinson Trimotor belonging to Boston and Maine Airways in its founding year of operation. One shut down all three engines and the pilot made immediate and successful preparations for an emergency landing on a farm. The culprit was carburetor icing. It can occur in clear air on an ideal day and in any and all forms of cloud condition. There was in Boston and Maine Airways' formative years no answer for carburetor icing with the Stinson Trimotor aircraft. The ultimate solution for Boston and Maine Airways was to add an important requirement to the list of "must-have" features required of any new replacement aircraft. That was the feature of "carburetor heat."
A second emergency landing brought to light a problem that caused a B&M Airways Stinson to lose two of its three engines. In this incident, another farmer witnessed a bumpy, but safe, landing. The diagnosis: contaminated fuel. These pioneer scheduled airline pilots knew where their pay came from. These men were money savers. Their sustained employment depended on keeping revenues above costs. The pilots often saved money by running aviation fuel from the main tank for takeoff, and switching to automobile fuel from other tanks when leveled off in a cruising flight condition. In this emergency landing incident, there was no way to determine where the contaminated fuel had come from. The airline immediately instituted a new practice. The two full containers of aviation fuel kept in the red painted barrels at each of the served airports were dumped and refilled every six months.
"The Lamp" is a publication of ExxonMobil. The Spring 2001 issue contained some eye-opening numbers. Exxon supplies one fifth of the world's consumption of aviation fuel on any given day. 700 airports in 86 countries. 25 million gallons sold every day. From 45,000 gallons of jet fuel in one Boeing 747, to 5 liters of aviation gas in a 1909 Bleriot for an air show. A picture caption on page 6 of that issue of The Lamp was quite revealing. "Crew Chief Mario da Silva runs a fuel-quality test at Guarulhos Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the busiest airport in South America. He matches a color code on the card with the color of a jet fuel sample." In the photo reproduction, the colors being compared all look gray in the illustration supplied. The color swatches on the card look, respectively, more gray, less gray, and hopefully, just the right gray. This is the end of a sophisticated fuel delivery chain, so the crew chief was really looking for an outlandishly wrong color. Still, I would have expected a far better method than color swatches in the 21st century. The other data in the article are more reassuring, such as "less than 1 milligram of solids per liter" and "less than 30 parts per million of water." Those are measurable contaminants without depending on any one human being's color perception capability.
In the early days of jet flying, the airline industry and the military services operated a mix of prop planes, requiring aviation gasolines of various octane ratings, and jets that required jet fuel, a close relative to kerosene. Instances of aircraft being fueled with the wrong fuel did occur and a crash was the usual result. Even a prop plane could be fueled with the wrong grade of aviation octane gasoline.
In 1952. I was assigned as Project Officer in Air Development Squadron Two (VX-2) based at the Naval Air Station, Chincoteague, Virginia. One of the missions of that unit was to fly drones by remote radio -control out over the Atlantic to let the USS Mississippi test its then experimental Terrier anti-aircraft missiles. The drone (no live pilot aboard) was a Grumman F6F Hellcat and the chase plane in control of the drone's flight, with pilot aboard, was the Grumman F8F Bearcat. "Chase 1" was backed up by "Chase 2." The second chase plane was there in case the primary chase plane had to return to base for mechanical or radio difficulties. The usual reason was that the primary chase plane's radio control carrier frequency would fail. A drone under remote control was certain to do some crazy things if there was no carrier signal for the control commands.
The next illustration shows an F6F-5K Hellcat drone, with two F8F-2 Bearcat chase planes. The drone has no pilot aboard. The Navy's VX-2 Air Development Squadron Two had the mission to fly the drones for Terrier missile test firings off the east coast of the United States. Later drones had the letters "NOLO" for "no live operator" painted on the tail so that local fire departments would not attempt to save a pilot in the event that the drone crashed returning from a mission.
Illustration 4 -A drone with two chase planes
One day in 1952, I was assigned to fly an F8F to NAS Niagara Falls New York on hurricane evacuation. (No, I was not accompanied by an F6F drone. Those drone aircraft, many damaged by missile fire but still drone-flyable, were left behind at NAS Chincoteague, expendable in the hurricane.) Weather in the northeast was poor and the F8F was not an instrument flight certified plane. So, I flew north using ground references, cross checking with radio beams in poor visiblity areas by using my low frequency radio range receiver. I recall passing over the Chemung County airport near Elmira, New York and then turning west to Niagara Falls. Upon landing there, I discovered that the Niagara Falls Naval Air Station did not stock the 115/145 aviation gasoline that my particular model of the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine required. I had about a half tank of that "hi-test" fuel left in my main tank. I filled the belly tank with 100/130 octane fuel and resolved to return to Chincoteague by using the unadulterated hi test in the main tank for takeoff, without crossfeed. Then, when I got leveled off at altitude, I would shift to the belly tank with crossfeed and let the lower octane mix with the higher octane gas remaining in the main tank. Two days of waiting for the storm to pass ensued, and then I took off for home on a Sunday morning. Locally, the Niagara Frontier had about 10,000 feet of solid overcast. I obtained a flight plan for "five on top" which meant I could fly back to NAS Chincoteague in the clear, 500 feet above any overcast. The F8F climbs pretty fast (it held the world record to 10,000 feet early in its career) and I was relieved to break out on top a few minutes after takekoff. Then I shifted to the belly tank which would give me just over one hour of flight in the level cruise condition. The weather was such that I could fly airways on a fairly direct route home. Alas, I had not done all of my homework. Near Philadephia, the undercast disappeared and then while I was almost directly over the Friendship Airport in Baltimore (now, BWI for Baltimore Washington International) my engine quit cold. On our over water, drone control flights in the F8F, we were warned to manage gas so that we did not risk losing power at low altitude because the R-2800 engine used up a bit of altitude while the prop windmilled the engine to a re-start. Lucky that my "five on top" had put me at nearly ten thousand feet. I dropped nearly four thousand feet getting that engine going again. Part of the time was used figuring out what I had done wrong. Which was simply, that the belly tank was running the engine, and filling the main tank at the same time. The F8F did not glide very well. I did not have the contented hour-plus minutes at cruise altitude that a belly tank would have given with a full main tank but a very abbreviated, hour-minus minutes before the belly tank was empty. There then ensued a few anxious moments before the engine was re-empowered. I looked around to see if anyone had been looking and made my way without broadcast of any kind back across the Chesapeake Bay to NAS Chincoteague, Virginia. Early Sunday mornings in 1952 were still good times to be flying. Not too many folks around. The importance of fuel management was brought home to me.
A Naval Academy classmate of mine, Spence Ziegler, was sent with a crew from our rear base at NAS Whidbey Island, Washington, to Arizona to pick up a rehabilitated Privateer and bring it on up to our squadron. The plane, along with thousands of others, had been parked in the open sun waiting for an occasional call back to active duty, or to the scrap heap. Based on European combat experience, these four engine planes had been equipped with self-sealing gas tanks so that a bullet in the tank would not force them down due to fuel starvation. The flight from Arizona to Whidbey Island, Washington was an easy non-stop flight for this plane and its crew. Just as Spence's plane proceeded into northern California on its flight up the coast, one engine after another sputtered and quit. Spence and his crew came over the runway threshold on an emergency landing at Redding, California, with just one engine still providing thrust. Post mortem? The self-sealing tanks had been in the desert so long that they had deteriorated and contaminated the 100/130-octane gasoline so much that the engines would no longer function. Except for leaks, inspecting those tanks in greater detail up to the time of that incident had not been on the preflight check.
Early pilots learned to be kind to their aircraft engine. Fuel of a proper, controlled, quality, needed to be used for an aircraft just as it had been for an automobile. Prudent use of the fuel, called fuel management in an aircraft, had a good payoff just as with a car. The consequences of poor fuel management in an airplane could be more punishing than running out of gas in a car. Both had internal combustion engines and both had spark plugs. Optimum firing of the plugs kept the engines running smoothly. The aircraft engine had more redundancy, a dual ignition, with "right" and "left" magnetos to check before returning the switch to "both" for takeoff.
So, here are some pre-flight checks that served well in the propeller era. Drain water from the fuel sumps until you're sure it is all gas. Check oil sumps for signs of bearing metal (shiny) or metal particles attracted to the magnet on the inside of the cover. Remove pitot tube cover. Remove battens from control surfaces. For Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines particularly, pull the propeller through a couple of rotations by hand. The master cylinder is on the bottom and if oil runs by the rings and collects in the head chamber, the piston rod can snap, or in a less likely event the rod may go through the piston head. Both sequences are bad. The general term is called "hydraulic-ing", and refers to the incompressibility of fluids. It occurs most often when the engine is started without a manual pull-through procedure. The damage may not show itself until the plane takes off and if it shows itself during takeoff, the aircraft and its occupant(s) are in great danger.
Robert Mudge wrote in "Adventures of a Yellowbird " that Boston and Maine Airways' year of 1933-34 was by far its most crucial. There was 'a north of' Boston, south of Boston' dichotomy. B&M Airways had pledged its future to passenger traffic generation north of Boston, at first to Portland and Bangor in Maine but eventually to a comprehensive route structure serving Yankees who were willing to take some extra risk to make their time more effective.
Robert Mudge's book includes anecdotes of how the new airline attracted passengers. Amelia Earhart was an important operative for Boston and Maine Airways in attracting early passengers. Interestingly, she did not fly for B&M Airways, but she did promotion for them.
In the next photo (Illustration-5) from the Beverly, Massachusetts Historical Society collection, we see Amelia with a number of ladies. She would accompany such groups on short flights over the then short routes of Boston & Maine Airways. If she got the ladies comfortable with flight, the ladies would then approve flight for the family breadwinners, the husbands. Completely logical thinking on the part of all those ladies, including Amelia whose idea it was.
Illustration 5 -Ladies fly, including Amelia
The photo was taken at Bangor, Maine on August 12, 1934. Amelia Earhart is standing at the left. Dispatcher Thomas Gore of Boston & Maine Airways is the man in the picture. The aircraft is the Stinson SM-6000, the Trimotor.
It is instructive from Mudge's story to learn how the airline kept its growing trickle of early passengers coming back. He emphasized the reliability of the flight schedule. The airline introduced delays when it was prudent to do so to await improved weather conditions but they did not cancel many flights.
The first pilot aboard was named Collins. He had earlier been a contract mail pilot. The next hire was a pilot named Anderson. Collins became the pilot in the front office and Anderson's role was to be the pilot in operations. To Anderson fell the learning, followed by the teaching, responsibility, for safe piloting and to Anderson fell the challenge to recognize change and to make the proper accommodations to change. Anderson had to confront New England weather, its land originating challenges and its sea originating challenges.
Airlines operating to the south of New England were buying new, twin-engine, all metal construction aircraft with retractable gear, landing lights, radios and flight-in-cloud instruments. Those early Lockheed Electras were rapidly entering service, configured with their advanced features.
The Stinson Trimotors flown by Boston and Maine Airways dated from an earlier aircraft generation. While the Stinson pilot's instrument panel was beginning to have part of the set of flight instruments needed for instrument flying, the ground over which they would fly had no radio aids and their landing fields had no lights. Many fields had only a grass surface. North of Boston, not even a light beacon system had been installed. This airline was a daytime operation. Its planes were configured for the environment the airline had chosen to make its own. Fortunately, the Trimotor proved adaptable to the special conditions encountered because enroute and destination weather forecasting, and the communication of existing weather conditions were both still in a primitive stage.
Captain Mudge put it this way in his Adventures of a Yellowbird: "The Boston and Maine pilots were professionals who had learned to approach New England weather slowly and carefully. At first they retreated, ....and watched and thought. Then they began to approach more closely, observing all the while, not getting too close, for it might kill them - but as close as they felt safe - to see what made it tick. They learned to probe, while in their back pockets they kept in mind a sure way of getting out if they had to......Good weather flights became practice missions for bad weather."
New pilots had to be checked out in the airline world of 1934 just as they have to be checked out today. Not many pilots got their Boston and Maine Airways check flight on a trip quite like that experienced by Stafford A. Short. He had flown with Andy Bean in an earlier flight enterprise. Bean had been the third or fourth Boston & Maine Airways pilot to come aboard and Short elected to get his checkout with Bean on a run from Boston to Burlington, VT. With 100% cloud coverage and limited visibility, Bean elected to take the Stinson Trimotor off from Boston's airport, heading east into a wind off the ocean. Short crouched just behind Bean. As the plane ascended, it flew into solid fog. The only option Bean had was to try to get some altitude
The situation now involved two pilots, neither instrument qualified, in a plane that was not instrument qualified. But, they were in the soup. As pilot, and author, Mudge described it,
"He (Bean) hung on as best he could-trying not to turn either way and keeping his eye constantly on the turn (needle) indicator in the center of his panel. He really didn't trust it very much; it was a new instrument he had never really used before; but at a time like this, it was all he had. Slowly and gently he eased the wheel back to gain precious altitude."
"Bean had concentrated intently on the new turn indicator, and managed to hold a straight course. After a rather short climb, he had broken out on top of the fog. There were no breaks in the clouds visible anywhere....Turning north, he steered a compass course toward Concord (New Hampshire) in hopes that he could find some breaks in the clouds near there. After about 35 minutes flying, he figured he should have been over Concord, but he saw nothing, so headed for White River Junction (Vermont). Holding this course about 30 minutes, still no sign of the ground. Turning right to a north heading again, he flew toward what he hoped would be Montpelier (Vermont). A few minutes after making this turn, he saw a break in the clouds and spotted a town. ....(He) recognized it as Middlebury (Vermont)..."
Concluding this flight meant dropping down beneath the overcast and making course toward Montpelier where they landed. That wind must have been pretty strong. Looking for Montpelier and finding Middlebury is a testimony to Bean's confidence in his ground recognition because while the distance covered was checking out reasonably well, the angular divergence between Montpelier and Middlebury from White River Junction is over 45 degrees! The last line of Mudge's account of this flight episode states, "Short was now qualified over the route."
On page 84 of Robert Mudge's Adventures of a Yellowbird, one finds an early tabulation of instrument flight landing minimums for Boston, and its Maine destinations of Portland, Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor. If runway lights were available, a night minimum was published. For Boston, in daylight hours, the minimums were ceiling 300 feet, visibility 2 miles and at night, ceiling 600 feet, visibility 4 miles. Keep in mind, that Boston & Maine Airways was not instrument-equipped and those numbers were for aircraft and pilots that were instrument qualified.
Andy Bean had demonstrated by his self-taught, on- the-job learning, that he was qualified for takeoff and for enroute instrument flight. He would need a better aircraft, and radio navigation ground aids to complete the destination instrument qualification. To get to a landing at Montpelier, Bean had called on his earlier skills of detailed recognition of ground features and their geographic relationship to each other.
The early days were aviation's days of 'learn by doing.' As with most human acquired skills, the idea of accumulating these experiences and putting them into a program of 'learn before doing' would soon take hold. "Ground school" was an aviation idea before the automobile driver training schools came along for automobiles. The Link Trainer evolved from the efforts of a man and his company in Binghamton, New York, to provide some feel, before actual flight, for the relationship between an aircraft's controls and its instrument's indications.
The complete mastery of all but the cruelest weather conditions came rapidly for the newly named Northeast Airlines, successor to Boston and Maine Airways. By World War II, with their extensive knowledge of northward flight, Northeast would be a leading airline in all aspects of instrument and cold weather flight operations. As part of this experience, Northeast undertook contract flights for the military, added new planes equipped for weather and instrument flying, and became an experienced north Atlantic rim airline.
For one of the most thrilling stories of flying ever written, I recommend Chapter XIII of "Adventures of a Yellowbird," a chapter entitled "The Moments of Terror." Just thirty-one pages. The word "terror" is an understatement. The Convair 240 flight that Mudge chronicled became a triumph of man over adversity. Order Book