Chapter 8

 

Panagra

In early January 1946 got a call from Pan American Grace Airlines, also know as Panagra. They wanted me to be a technical advisor to an airline called Lloyd Aero in Bolivia at 450 per month. Since my folks were living in Bolivia I accepted. Marion, Adrian and I drove our 1941 Ford to Miami and stored it and caught a plane down to Lima. On arriving in Lima I was informed that the Bolivians didn't want a technical advisor. Now I had a problem. Had wanted to fly for Panagra. They then sent me through their co-pilot and captain's school that took three months.

On one flight in a DC-3 I was with a couple of other pilots practicing single engine operations. We were 10 miles off the coast of Lima. At 6,000 feet one of the pilots cut the mixture control and stopped the starboard engine. The other pilot feathered the port engine. With both engines dead they sure were in a hurry to get them started. We just did make it before having to land in the Pacific Ocean. That would have been bad. On another flight with an instructor and another pilot we were practicing landing at the Limatambo airport. When the co-pilot was on an approach to land, gear down, flaps down, the instructor cut an engine and requested a wave-off. Now this can be done if you are above 300 feet, but the co-pilot waited until he got down to 50 feet and tried to abort. He almost lost control of the plane. It went 45 degrees to the runway across a field with both pilots on the controls. They finally got the wheels and flaps up. We almost washed out that DC-3.

Panagra hired only U. S. pilots. I was born in the Argentine, but I had a U. S. passport. My father was born in Canton, South Dakota and my mother in Van Meter, Iowa. I was a Commander in the U. S. Navy Reserve and I figured I was a good U. S. Citizen. The pilots had a meeting and voted that I could not fly for Panagra since I had not been born in the U. S. Panagra then offered me a job as airport manager at Santa Cruz in Bolivia. This is down in the tropics and I sure didn't want to take my family there, so I tried to get a job flying for Faucett airlines in Peru. Old man Faucett was in the States at the time, but the chief pilot wanted to try me out. Made one flight from Lima to Talara in a 8 passenger Fairchild. Then got another flight in a DC-3 to Iquitos on the Amazon River. Now this flight was something. When I got in the right seat the Captain said, the gear is down and locked. I said Yes Sir. The indicators showed down. He said they were down and locked. I looked at the gear handle and it had a padlock on it. It seems that the native mechanics would raise the handle and sit the plane on its props, so in this airline when they said the gear was down and locked, it was locked. He had me run into operations and get the key. Took off and climbed to 19,000 feet and went through a mountain pass just south of Cerro de Pasco. Hit the soup. Flew ahead for 10 minutes then turned and paralleled the Andes. He and I were using oxygen by a rubber tube. The plane we were flying did not have any de-icing equipment on it. On dropping down to 17,000 feet we picked up a good load of ice. It stayed on for about an hour until we got down to 6,000 feet. At Iquitos I asked the Captain what we would have done if we had picked up more ice. He said, we would have gone down. When Faucett arrived back in Lima he had hired all the pilots he needed in the States.

While living in Lima we first stayed at the Bolivar Hotel. Panagra was giving me 1,000 dollars a month for expenses. This hotel was quite plush. Marion, Adrian and I would have tea in the afternoon. Very fancy dining room. But after a month, Panagra cut off my expense money so we moved to a "pension" in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima near the Pacific Ocean. Here we had a room with meals. Very nice place, but too close to the Ocean. Very foggy and damp and Marion had problems with headaches so after a month we rented a house in Lima. In this house one night we thought we heard some one. The next day discovered things missing. Someone must have had a key, so that day I put dead bolts on the outside doors. Next night heard a door rattle. Saw it was a maid. That took care of that problem. It was a scary house. You could near the neighbors and all kins of sounds at night. Marion didn't like to be left alone. To keep herself busy she kept that house clean as a pin. Not being able to speak Spanish was also a handicap. She had waxed and rewaxed the stairs. One day she slipped on the stairs on her bottom. She was pregnant at the time and almost had a miscarriage. I used to take her to the British-American Hospital in Lima for her check ups. They found her very anemic and got quite concerned over her condition.

Not having a job, I decided to go back on active duty. Wrote the Navy Department and asked them to answer me by airmail. They sent the letter by boat, that took two weeks, and the day I received the letter I had only 24 hours to get to Charleston, S. C. This was the days before jets, so had to give that idea up.

Dad had written that the Corporacion Boliviano de Foment was hiring pilots. He had talked to the manager and I was promised a job in Bolivia. Since the only thing Panagra had offered me was an airport manager in Santa Cruz, I talked them into flying Marion, Adrian and me to La Paz with a free airline ticket back to the States within one year.

In April we took a Panagra DC-3 to Arequipa. Arrived around ten in the morning. Adrian was four at the time. We were all hungry so ate some sausages at the airport cafe. This was the wrong thing to do. It probably would have been better not to have eaten anything for our trip up into the highlands. Pulling out of Arequipa we climbed to 19,000 feet. Passengers got oxygen by the use of rubber tubes. I couldn't get Adrian to use his oxygen and he got quite sick. Lost all his cookies. Tried to get the steward to give me a hand, but this was his first trip and he had "sorache" too. When we landed at the airport in La Paz, altitude 13,404 feet Adrian had fully recovered.

Dad and Mother were at the airport to greet us. Down to the Clinic in Obrajes we went and Dad put us up in the nurses home. The apartment had two bedrooms, bath, kitchen, dining and living room. Most of the meals we ate with my folks in the Clinic. Dad only charged us 50 dollars a month for board and room the whole time we were in Bolivia plus free medical attention. Boy, that was pretty nice.