I'm the Co-Pilot

Belize 5/1990

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Everything recounted in this story actually happened. Maybe not all at the same time, or in the same exact sequence. When the same group of people do the same thing over and over thousands of times it gets a little blurry, but that is a wonderful thing.

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All of the sexual activity in this story occurs between persons who were at least 30 years of age back in May of 1990, when to the best of my limited ability to accurately remember them, all of the recounted events actually occurred.

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"I make out the flight-plan according to Hoyle,

I take all the readings, I check on the oil.

I hustle him out for the midnight alarm,

I fly through the fog while he sleeps on my arm.

I'm a lousy Co-Pilot and a long way from home..."

-Oscar Brand

***

May 1990

Philip S. W. Gordon International Airport, BZE, Belize City, Belize

"B-Z-E, Icarus Air Douglas November-Four-Two-Eight-India-Charley roger that, we are number two behind Air Canada on runway Two-Five," Dale said slowly, phonetically, into his microphone.

Each of our engines has two magnetos and each cylinder has two spark plugs comprising eight independent, redundant ignition systems. As Dale ran the engines up next to the threshold of runway Two-Five, it was my job sitting sideways in the flight engineer's seat to check the green sine wave on the oscilloscope to make certain they were all firing and firing at the proper time.

I flipped the four-position engine switch to 'ONE' and that engine's magneto switch to 'LEFT,' then 'RIGHT,' then "BOTH' while watching the sine wave. I turned the eighteen-position rotary switch slowly to make certain everything was in order and then repeated the process three times. Good, we had 144 working spark-plugs igniting our hundred-octane-low-lead in 11200 cubic inches of combustion space.

Well it's not exactly one-hundred octane anymore. The same government agency that blatantly lies to us and says that seven plus eight divided by two equals eight not seven-point-five... That government after killing a few flight crews de-rated our engines nearly ten percent after they changed the fuel formulation. It's ninety-two or so real octane. Nature once more proving that even the United States Federal government cannot repeal the laws of physics.

The scope check done, I turn facing forward sitting between and slightly behind Captain Dale and George sitting in the right copilot's seat for this trip. The engine instruments and controls are directly in front of me. The DC-6 has four Pratt and Whitney R-2800 radial engines and each engine has four controls, levers for throttle, mixture, manifold heat and propeller pitch. Each engine has a master switch, a fuel cutoff switch and a fire suppression switch in addition to the magneto switches I just used.

A big white Air Canada jet with a red stripe filled with happy vacationers lands in front of us on runway Two-Five. They are leaving forty-five degrees behind in Toronto for the crystal-clear blue seventy-degree water and even warmer sand offered by the big resorts on the Cayes just a short boat ride from the city's historic district, the 'old capital' of colonial British Honduras.

It's the peak of the rainy season here, there are four seasons here. Winter is the busiest, its dry here and cold there. Fall is the busy secondary tourist season. Spring is wet, but it's also when most of the fruit comes in, Summer is hot, but not oppressively so, at least to a girl from West Texas, and there is Lobster, lots of lobster.

That jet like the DC-8 we will buy four years from now is three times the size of Eight-India-Charley, but everything is relative. The airplane I am sitting in is fifty times the size of Doc's Stinson that I soloed in, earning my Private. This plane is thirteen times the size of our first airplane together, the Beechcraft Eighteen we used to haul express for Sam in. That 'dirty old Beech' that I earned my multi-rating in.

While Belize City has a significant street crime problem, Philip S. W. Gordon International Airport was reputed to be the safest airport on earth. At least from the laughable to my American eyes threat that neighboring Guatemala posed. Ladysmith is its own city on a British Army Base housing the Tactical Service Unit Belize. Hundreds of young Gurkhas from Nepal carrying automatic weapons were everywhere.

Logically enough in this green tropical paradise they were dressed in their camouflage uniforms of desert tan, black, white and brown. Standing by, ready to react at a moment's notice to those scary Guatemalan paratroopers. Well they might have been scary if the Guatemalan Army had even one airworthy Skyvan.

I checked the gauges arrayed in the center of the instrument panel in three blocks of ten, sixteen, and eight. The top six indicate our onboard fuel load and the outside climatic conditions. Ambient air and manifold temperature are very important in preventing carburetor icing, an accomplished killer of aircrew.

The other sixteen gauges, four per engine, show how much power each engine is producing and just as importantly how hot that engine is getting producing that power. Heat must be managed very carefully in such large piston engines, especially when starting up and shutting down.

Consolidated, in Fort Worth, Shanghaied a pair of Iowa State professors and created the world's first effective electronic computer in 1942 to deal with those insane twenty-eight cylinder 4360 cubic inch corncobs designed to cross the Atlantic and bomb Germany after Britain had been lost.

"In the green," I said to Dale. Visually confirming my words in the loud cockpit with a thumbs-up.

Those 'Batshit Hawks,' Dale's name for BATSUBs American made Hawk anti-aircraft missile batteries made me nervous as their crews practiced for the imminent Guatemalan Paratroop invasion by tracking us as we landed, taxied, and took off. This airport was always busy with Royal Marines in their blue Puma helicopters, RAF ground crews servicing their inappropriately camouflage Harrier jump-jets that had proven themselves recently in the Falkland Islands. Many, many troops parading in both dress and fatigue uniforms or doing the airborne shuffle in matching sweats for PT.

"Icarus Air Douglas November-Four-Two-Eight-India-Charley this is Philip S. W. Gordon International Airport holding on Runway Two-Five," said very proud perfectly accented British English voice on the radio, "You are cleared for takeoff, B-Z-E, over."

All prim and proper. All part of their little game. We normal people had to deal with all of their childish crap that goes along with humans forming themselves into organized societies; organizing before attempting to ruthlessly murder one another in direct violation of God's words.

Icarus had three airplanes, this old 'Delta Eight' couldn't go to La Aurora in Guatemala; because if it did then it couldn't come back to Gordon in Belize. So 'American Seven' our 'Aurora airplane' never comes here. It's a real pain in the ass for maintenance and scheduling. At least as aircrew we don't go through customs, or we would have to have two separate passports. One day we will have a crunch, be short and have to go paint a bogus number on nine the old United airplane, that has been done.

"Philip S. W. Gordon, Icarus Air Douglas November-Four-Two-Eight-India-Charley roger that," Dale said slowly and clearly, "we are rolling."

Without mountains to climb over we could start flying over open water climbing slowly and efficiently as we made our way to the intersection point with the airway that crosses over Cuba about half of our way home. It was a more fuel efficient way to get places and we needed to do everything we could to maximize our bottom line and get in front of that big balloon payment two years into the future.

We left both Guatemala and Belize flying east-north-east even though MIA is almost perfectly north-east, that's because there was only one politically approved place that we could fly over Cuba. Once we got to an empty spot in the ocean as determined by our navigational instruments we could turn north-north-east. We couldn't fly over Belize to or from Guatemala because they didn't recognize each other.

The Aeroporto Internacional La Aurora, a mere hour west of here by air, was teeming with young boys involuntarily playing Army dress-up with their huge Spanish rifles. Conscripts that appeared to be fourteen or fifteen years of age. None of the portly old Generales running the Guatemalan government were stupid enough to send those boys marching east.

I am certain those young men would not have been enthusiastic about the march, or a fight to the death to capture a few Mango and Sapodilla plantations and taco stands. March on foot they would have to, for the Guatemalan Army's Short Skyvans, were persistently disassembled, perpetually being repaired without ever actually being so.

Those dozen Skyvans belonging to the Army's paratroop force were always visible with their sizable guard detachment from the windows of the main passenger terminal at La Aurora. I suppose it was a show of force. Of course, it would have been an even more impressive show if any of those aircraft were actually complete.

Major items such as engines, landing gear, ailerons and rudders being humorously absent. Each aircraft was missing something essential. We joked that this may have been done intentionally creating 'dummies' to make it appear that the Guatemalans had somehow acquired even more aircraft than the British themselves had sold them in the first place.

Those incomplete aircraft, with all of the bored young troops milling about and their engine nacelles, elevators and rear doors removed... The large contingent of young troops from the Indian sub-continent at Price Barracks and guarding the co-located city of Ladyville and Phillip S.W. Gordon International Airport...

All of their posturing would likely have been so much more impressive if they were not all part of a gigantic political farce. The power brokers on both sides of a disputed line drawn on a map through an uninhabited plain were rattling their sabers to maintain domestic control. The government of Belize even being housed in the military garrison town at Ladysmith.

There really is not a lot for the Flight Engineer to do as we slowly climb on our return to MIA. I monitor the sixteen gauges reporting the status of our four engines and fiddle ever so slightly with their twelve levers to keep them synchronised. Our twin-engined Beechcraft, and the plane we owned just before this one, a venerable old Curtiss Commando that flew 'the hump' back in India-Burma-China did not have a Flight Engineer. So I used pencil and paper to figure fuel and time back home to Miami International.

Belize is on the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula south of Mexico and most weather moves from the west to the east. As the air climbs over the mountains it cools at higher elevations and the moisture in the air is left behind as rain. The continent's west coast is wet, be it Seattle, San Fran or San Salvador. In addition it's always ten-degrees or so warmer at the lower elevations than five thousand feet up.

Winter is the dry season in both Guatemala and Belize, but Belize is always dryer than the western part of Guatemala. We have an airplane full of the delicious Pitaya, Guaya, Sapodilla and Mangoes that are grown in the brackish water along the coast south of here and up the tidal estuary of the Belize River along the Northern Highway. Fruit season will make us financially. Under our contract with Sam the profit on the backhaul is all ours.

This trip was fun, we did not have time to drive two hours down the Southern Highway to Hopkins. But a call from Miami had a couple of our business partners from there at Ladysmith to greet us. The Garinagu down there, descendants of the union of Carib Indians and Nigerian castaways, sold us an entire airplane load of fruit to sell in Miami. To make it even better, they brought with them a delicacy that was essentially fresh fish and diced fruit tacos in Cassava wraps, wonderful delicious little things.

The upcoming calendar held many wonders in Belize. Next month was the beginning of Lobster season. Then in September Hopkins celebrated Garifuna Settlement Day a colorful sorta tropical Thanksgiving commemorating when their ancestors from Saint Vincent arrived here by way of Honduras. Later in the year is Finados: a 'Three Day of the Dead' celebration, honoring and seeking communion with venerated ancestors. Wonderfully spiritually Pentecostal in my eyes.

We have called on ahead to Punch in Miami; he is lining up buyers for our bounty from our conjoined townhouse condominiums in Kendale Lakes. The lease on which was part of our three-year deal with Sam. The boys took sledgehammers and knocked out twenty five or so cinder blocks and in doing so created a doorway through the wall in the basement between the units.

Our padded and comfortably upholstered playroom was two floors beneath mine and Jamie's bedroom. As a funny aside we often had grandparents or sitters come over to stay with the children. On those occasions we walked next door and then returned unseen to our own basement to party discreetly with our lovers.

There would not be time for that this evening; George and I had to grab some sleep because we had to fly to Houston tomorrow. Our major maintenance is performed at IAH, Houston Intercontinental Airport. That facility is less than thirty minutes across the Farm to Market Bridge from mom and dad's place on Lake Houston. We will take Eight-India-Charley there tomorrow after unloading the backhaul, and pick up Nine-India-Charley. Maybe we will see our youngest brother Nate there; he got a job in the accounting department at Enron. (Not really, that's a joke.) He was working in commercial real-estate in Houston.

But while there was no time for play tonight, there was and would be plenty of days to repeat, or improve on, the day preceding this trip south. The evening that our dinner was just a little late, yet nobody cared. The evening that Kristin was making her wonderful Pork Cutlets Marsala and we interrupted her. She had the seasoned cutlets in a frying pan and was browning them when Eva and I came into the Kitchen.

Neither Eva nor I particularly enjoy being clothed, but it can be an occupational requirement for both of us. I can only imagine the reaction I would get in a crew lounge naked. It would likely be positive, if annoying. Most pilots, especially the ones who say you are gay for being a girl wearing black socks are male.

Eva has been known to deliver sermons while wearing nothing but her frock and sandals; her lovers saliva still upon her corporeal being. So yesterday before our outbound journey here, Eva and I, we entered the kitchen in Punch's townhouse. Kristin was wearing sweats in deference to the hot cooking oil, I was wearing a light robe. Eva was Eva, totally naked and totally beautiful.

Kristin took the skillet off of the burner and kissed me, then she kissed Eva. She put the oven on low and adjusted my temperature as well removing my robe and placing it on a barstool. She took a pair of tongs and removed the cutlets from the pan and placed them on a tray, before kissing Eva again and fondling her breasts. Placing the tray in the oven she slapped my right buttock sharply. She is so romantic.

Eva slapped my left buttock and we formed a huddle of three trading spit and doing a tongue dance while our arms intertwined and we got nice feels of breast buttock and pussy. I was pleased that Kristin was not wearing panties and I faced her, kissing her beautiful face and sliding my hands below her waistband to fondle her ass. Eva got behind her and reached under Kristin's shirt to fondle her breasts.

I pulled my right hand from Kristin's pants and held her head, Eva held mine with her right hand and started fingering Kristin with her left. I broke my lip lock and Kristin kissed my right cheek while I kissed Eva lip to lip. Then Eva kissed Kristin lip to lip while the fingertips of my left hand joined with Eva's exploring Kristin's very wet and aromatic twat.

The tree of us kissed each other upon the mouth and face and neck. our fingers explored each other's cunts and butts and breasts. Eva and I removed Kristin's shirt and her pants and lifted her onto the cool granite of the island. Eva went first licking and lapping at Kristins most sensitive flesh while I kissed her tummy and her left side, ribs and shoulder. I kissed her neck, lips, and both breasts.

After Kristin came Eva and I switched places and I enjoyed the sweet pussy of my brother's wife while Eva took my place kissing our 'sister-lover' all about her person. At one point I reached over and played with Eva's pubic hair. She was soppy, soaking wet.

George walked in and we helped him get his pants off while he kissed his wife deeply on the lips. Eva and I we held Kristin much as Jamie and I had that very first time a dozen years ago. Holding Kristin, holding George, as Kristin went to her knees and took her husbands' turgid member into her mouth. We each held one hand on one of George's buttocks and one hand on Kristin's head playing with her hair.

George was in her throat and we were careful, pushing Kristin down onto him a few times and then letting her up for life-giving oxygen. The tempo increased and our steadying hands became useful as well as erotic. Eventually George came in Kristin and being our loving 'sister' she did not immediately swallow but instead shared George's gift with her 'sisters.'

We washed our hands and helped Kristin saute the mushrooms in the frying pan left atop the stove, adding chicken broth, wine and a tiny bit of corn starch. Once done she removed the cutlets and prepared four plates. Then we carried the plates out to the table.

We did not get dressed for dinner.

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Lisa Ann