Over the Hump and Half the World
Featured in The Aviation Geek Club
December 1995. I was twenty-five, and my "checkout" in the Harbin Y-12 was a manual read in an airline seat somewhere over the Pacific. The job: ferry two camouflaged Chinese-built turboprops from Kunming, China, to the Zambian Air Force in Lusaka — half the world away.
What followed was 46.4 hours of flying and a lifetime of story: a detention in Calcutta five days after someone rained AK-47s over West Bengal, duct tape over a foreign air force's markings, Christmas carols traded plane-to-plane on 123.45 over the Gulf of Oman, hand-pumping Jet A off the wing in Addis Ababa, and a Zambian two-ship that could not believe the voice answering was a woman's.
The Aviation Geek Club published the whole thing this month — my first piece for the site, with my grandfather's 490th "Bridge Busters" woven right through it.
Read the full story on The Aviation Geek Club →