A Long Day

November 25, 1970

Apparently our 12-hour crew days were too easy so Hilda decided that our crew days should be 14 hours unless transiting type 1 or 2 (short) fields. Some days like this one went longer...

Dalat to Danang

We just flew in (how else?) from Dalat where we picked up a whole passle of Vietnamese brass for Hue. Dalat is a pretty little resort town with a 5000' elevation. Its 60'-wide runway made it interesting to land our 132'-wingspan Lockheed Whisperjet there.

Next stop will be Hue where the weather is 300' broken, 600' overcast with one mile visibility, rain and fog. Fun. Those guys probably haven't seen the sun for a month.

Hue

Hue was as forecast but I made a pretty good GCA and landing there. Our next destination was "home" (Tan Son Nhut). But as we taxied out our frag was changed to Danang then Quinhon then Nha Trang then Tan Son Nhut. Our crew day was almost used up but the duty officer assured us that they'd have everything set up at the extra 3 stops to minimize ground time.

Quinhon

The stop took about twice as long as normal even though they were supposedly expediting it.

Taxiing out at Quinhon the whole crew went into hysterics when ALCE called us up and said that both they and Hilda considered our (vanishing) crew duty time as paramount. After all the delay we thought it was amazing that the controller could tell us that with a straight face. I must've been getting punchy--I laughed for about 10 minutes!

Nha Trang

At Nha Trang our #4 engine-driven hydraulic pump failed. That was 4 hours ago and it's 3 ayem and we're waiting for a bird to take us back to TSN. Nil illegitimus carborundum.

Loosely translated from the Latin, that means "Don't let the bastards grind you down."