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.
