Dewey Bunnell was thinking about something else when he penned the lines, "The ocean is a desert with its life underground. And a perfect disguise above." Be he was right, to the navigator open water is more of a desert, as in deserted, than any land desert. I was in the left seat because Mimi, bless her heart, was going to let me shoot an ILS, Instrument Landing System approach and landing at Puerto Plata, and Eight-India-Charley only had one GLI, Glide
Slope Indicator, sitting in the Captain's seat it was just above my right knee.
Icarus was my graduate studies program, it was her retirement plan. Ten of us fools owned it, so it was good business to make sure it succeeded. While the oft quoted quip is that the way to make a little money in aviation is to start with a whole lot, the story of my life disagrees. My whole life has been the story of making connections with people and figuring out what we all need and desire. Then if we are compatible figuring out the logistics. It's how we built our family of seven, and became parents and grandparents in the wonderous process. We count four decades of stability and love. It's how we built our many businesses. It's how we serve God, thanking him for his many gifts to us by trying to do good for others of his children.
This whole flight had been by IFR, Instrument Flying Rules. I was getting the hang of it, I just had to be like Aristotle and find the middle point. I am a believer and I believe that heaven awaits me, but I am having a lot of fun here on earth and I am certain that Jesus will not mind waiting another seventy or more years to see me. Besides my God gave me a big enough brain to comprehend the concept that I could be wrong and that he might not exist. Yes, I know exactly what I just said, no it is not contradictory and isn't that brain God gave us just beautiful in its complexity.
Many of the songs about flight and sailing face and laugh at the prospect of death, there is an inherent risk associated with both. Many early pilots met their demise through a lack of knowledge, but complacency is a killer as well. Eddie Stinson whose company built our first airplane had amassed more hours than any other pilot when he fatally "failed to maintain adequate separation from prominent terrain features" as the official accident report read. Education is always important, in life, in love, in business and in flying. It just has a bit more urgency when you are flying over open ocean through a tropical storm in the dark.
Doctor Maria Montessori, an Italian medical doctor who built a school for the poor children of Rome's slums and later fled Fascism to build her world renown school in Chiaravalle, British India... Dr. Montessori said that education was a process of three parts. Learning a thing through observation and hands on tactile experience. Mastering that thing on your own with supervision but not intervention so that you understand that thing. Finally, permanently imprinting that knowledge in your brain and passing the knowledge along by teaching it to another. That has worked for us in life, business and fun.
In business I took what my parents had a, tractor and a semi-trailer and two drivers, what they could add, two more trucks and drivers and added them to what I could add, the seven of us. We took willy-nilly and turned it into an organized transportation agency with signed clients and dedicated routes, we their work lives better and turned a profit before we made the big boys nervous enough to buy us out. Mom and dad bought a very nice place on the eastern bank of the San Jacinto a tad north of where Santa Anna surrendered to Sam Houston, and we bought a 'dirty old Beech,' Model Eighteen.
We worked hard and played together harder; we always had several irons in the fire. Above all we heard the words that the ancient Romans whispered into the ears of their conquering heroes as they paraded through the streets of Rome. Paraded in chariots with their wheels spaced to ride on those flat stones placed the same four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inches apart that railroads adopted, that "all victory is fleeting."
A successful life is built one brick at a time. I took reading a borrowed library book about Jeanie Cochrane, a famous pilot of the thirties, and turned it into a DC-8 that we owned free and clear, but it was a process of many steps. I took the discovery that I had erogenous zones and turned it into perfect love, a family, accomplished and well-adjusted children, spoiled grandchildren and great passion in all of its conceivable forms religious, physical and emotional.
"Aeropuerto Interactional Gregorio Luperon, Icarus Air Douglas November-Four-Two-Eight-India-Charley copy that. We are cleared for straight in I-L-S on runway Eight," Mimi answered the control tower, as I flew the airplane.
As I looked at the two needles on the GSI above my knee and manipulated the airplane's yoke to keep them centered like a rife-scope's cross hairs, I was continuing that process of education. The runway at Aeropuerto Interactional Gregorio Luperon in Sosua had several directional FM radio emitters alongside of it. Once my GSI was set to POP's unique frequency it read their signal and its vertical needle showed deviation left or right from center. Its horizontal needle showed if I ventured too high or too low. Keeping them centered I flew the airplane onto runway Eight in the dark and rainy moonless night.
Just as if I was a Wildcat pilot in an old 'Movie Tone News' short that I had seen as a child, I landed my plane with an electronic device taking the place of the young seaman with the paddles. I did as I was instructed, and we had safely arrived at our destination, Puerto Plata the Dominican Republic, the resort town of Sosua with a rented house waiting for us was on the beach just to our east.
I parked Eight-India-Charley right next to Nine-India-Charley, that while sitting on the ramp all day had not been unloaded yet. I didn't blame them, I wouldn't want to be outside working in this weather either. The heavy rain tonight was not so unusual in late April, mid-May was the peak of the rainy season. Mid-April was typically the end of the primary tourist season here. Since Halloween it had been in the seventies and the small amount of rainfall came with darkness and in small bursts. Snowbirds fleeing winter quadrupled the population of Sosua, but in the summer it was pretty quiet.
