Close to the end of my year's tour of duty, I came eligible to navigate my way to Hong Kong -- all overwater flights required an onboard navigator & Pleiku AB's "Base Flight" flying support missions had no navigators assigned! This was a mission hauling GI's on a 3-day "leave" or R&R to the edge of "Red China" as it was called then.
This was my first long-distance overwater flight anywhere without an instructor on-board! We tracked NNE out of Da Nang on the TACAN radio nav aid counteracting the wind drift so that, if winds didn't change over the next 8 hours, we would come in right over Hong Kong Harbor! The pilots had been on this route many times before but it was a virgin trip for me. The old C-47 had absolutely NO navigation equipment on-board, so I had to keep my DR (dead reckoning) position super-carefully up-to-date! If we had no clouds under us halfway across the South China Sea (during the Vietnam War, you heard of that place a lot), I would be able to see a large reef underwater and know where we were for sure! (In order to make sure we were not flying into Red China!) Well, the pilots were not worrying, so I surely was not going to show that I was!
The fear of Red China was a realistic concern back in the day! Look at any world map with Southeast Asia and you will see a very big, round island in the middle of the South China Sea between Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Red China. Draw a line from Da Nang in Vietnam straight to Hong Kong, and you will notice it comes too close to Hainan Island for comfort to an enemy nation's airplane. Especially if that airplane doesn't know exactly where the hell it is! Nav School taught us that DR (Dead Reckoning) is the basis of all navigation -- this flight would be the no-joke proof of that as long as we didn't drift the wrong way (west) over Hainan Island. And if I didn't reckon right with very careful line drawing, we could wind up dead. That could ruin our whole day -- crew AND the 30-odd GI's riding in this old WW2 aircraft. (I guess we wouldn't have to go back to Vietnam, though.)
Halfway to Hong Kong when I looked out my little navigator's slit window by the left engine, we were undercast & I couldn't see a frigging thing! I checked from all the other windows in the cockpit, too. Even with a super-accurate DR on your map, you can't see the ocean from 10,000 feet if there is a solid layer of clouds at 5000 feet! I guarantee I had kept a very accurate DR position for every little change of heading or change in engine speed. Our airspeed in a Gooney Bird was 120 Knots (2 nautical miles per minute) -- some of you have driven cars faster than that standard Gooney Bird speed!
That was a very important fix point and we could not take advantage of it to check on our wind drift or our groundspeed and ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) to Hong Kong. There were no other landmarks like islands or ANY fixing aids until about 80 miles out of Hong Kong -- 7 hours into the flight as I recall, and we finally had our commercial AM radio lock-on to a Hong Kong broadcast signal. The arrow tracking the signal was pointing ever so slightly to the LEFT (west) of the aircraft's nose! If the equipment were working properly, we were not going to be shot out of the sky on THIS trip! Once we got within 35 NM (nautical miles) of Hong Kong, our TACAN radio navigation aid locked onto the signal, gave us a radial and distance away from the Hong Kong antenna, & confirmed we were within 8 miles of where my 6-7 hours elapsed time of careful DR'ing had plotted out on my navigator's chart! (That's really very close -- especially for just DR! International rules allowed us to be up to 20 miles off.)
Hong Kong airport's runway actually juts out into the harbor of the then-British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. The majority of that long, long runway is actually in the middle of Hong Kong Harbor! It runs straight out of the terminal area in mainland Chinese city of Kowloon! The tarmac sits on top of what appears to be a long, narrow levee dredged from the harbor floor. There is no room for running off the runway sideways because there is no grass overrun there like at every other runway I have ever seen. If you go off the runway when landing THERE, you might just drown! I don't remember if our old plane even carried water survival gear -- a big raft & individual PFD "water wings!" I'm sure we were required to have them (so they must have been there in a big old bag or two in the aft end of the little C-47 (DC-3), but it wouldn't have made a damned bit of difference on landing, anyway. It takes 5 - 10 minutes to get emergency gear out and ready to use -- that surely cannot be done when EVERYONE is strapped in for landing!
posted by Richard A @ 7:04 AM
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