Blood & Panic

In the early days of aviation, the flight crew were normally fed sandwiches often of doubtful quality.
On one occasion, while flying out of Townsville Australia, the roast beef sandwiches were particularly rare. I couldn't stomach the though of eating them so I threw the meat out of the cockpit window and ate just the bread. Unfortunately the wind took the rare, bloody meat and splattered it on the passenger windows, causing one poor lady to go into hysteria, it took quite sometime for the hostess to calm her down.

Bad Dog

While a DC3 training captain I had one pupil who just wouldn't stop pulling on the tail wheel lever, in the end I took to dog training methods and kept a rolled up newspaper in the cockpit to whack his hand and issue a stern NO.

DC3 Cockpit Uniforms

The DC3 cockpit was not always weatherproof, on some occasions it leaked so much we wore raincoats while flying.

Tower Calling

After a grueling day flying in the raining and long hours we made our approach; ran through the check list, three greens, then the under-carriage alarm horn went off. I yelled at the co-pilot 'turn that bloody thing off the tower's trying to contact us'. At the same instance we both looked at one another realising we'd hadn't had three greens, too tired we'd forgotten to put the landing gear down. You can guess why the tower was calling us. 

Flying Medicines

As well as regular mail we delivered medicines to outback Australian properties, making us a real life-line to outback families. Our technique for delivering bottled medicines was to hollow out a loaf of bread insert the bottle and stuff the bread back in then tie the whole lot up with plenty of string. I never had a breakage, although it took a while to get my aim just right and couple of packages ended up in dams when I was learning.

Shadowy Landing

Delivering mail to an outback Australian property in a Cessna 172; I made my landing approach and mused on a strange shadow across the airstrip, I was too close and too low when I realised the shadow was a new fence straight across the airstrip. As I was using half flaps only, I was able yank on full flaps to make the aircraft balloon up and over the fence to avoid a crash. Once safely on the ground I persuaded the farmer to remove the fence, pointing out that the strip was used by the Flying Doctor service who's aircraft need the full length of the strip.