Wayforward Aviation

I was sitting with my feet up in Phil Byrnes’ hanger in Hilo, Hawai’i, when Ray Clamback, one of those crazy Australian ferry pilots, walks in. “I need a co-pilot to take that Bonanza to California.”

Ray Clamback has been doing ferry flights for 37 years, doing over 300 Pacific crossings. He’s ditched airplanes into the water twice, once in a Piper Archer, and once in a Cessna 182.

I volunteered: it took me about half a second to make up my mind. I’ve always been intrigued by these flights: airplanes modified to take extra fuel necessary to cross the Pacific Ocean, horribly overloaded, and the sheer intensity of non-stop flying for 10-20 hours.

I expected to sit quietly in the co-pilot’s seat, maybe help out on the radios, provide some conversation for the 12-13 hour flight, and generally stay out of the way whenever any real flying was necessary.

Instead, Ray put me in the pilot’s seat, and briefed me on how to do the takeoff, and generally left the controls to me, from takeoff to landing. I’m not fooling myself, he really was pilot-in-command, but he was good enough to let me be sole manipulator of the controls for (almost) the entire flight.

The engine was started at 6:00 AM Hilo time. The tower had just opened, and retrieved our clearance:

“Bonanza VH-XSG is cleared to the Santa Barbara airport, via Direct FITES, then as filed, climb and maintain 11,000, departure frequency 119.7, squawk 2443.”

The flight plan was filed to Santa Barbara, the closest airport. The idea apparently is to file to Santa Barbara, and once we’re sure we have enough fuel, we’ll divert to our real destination, Torrance, on the coast just south of Los Angeles.

Ray briefed me on the whole not-climbing-as-fast-as-usual thing, and on spooling up turbines, etc. and we were off. We accelerated to about 120 knots before attempting any sort of climb. Ray handled the gear and flap retraction, and I handled everything else. It was a bit spooky being only 200 feet over the Hilo VOR, 2.6 miles from where we started rolling!

Despite Ray’s briefing, I wanted to pull up. Ray had to yell at me to keep the nose down. It looked like we were aiming for the trees! We may have been fighting for the controls at some point. We fought for the controls only three times during the flight, I’m proud to say.

Our path took us diagonally across the Foxtrot and Echo oceanic routes, linking up with the Delta route at DEROK. Hilo departure switched us to Honolulu Center 126.6, and Honolulu center set us free, told us to squawk 2000, and to make position reports with Oakland Center on the HF radio.

The auto-pilot was engaged pretty early, and it clearly was not up to the task of stabilizing such an aft-CG aircraft. I thought I could do a better job, so I disabled the auto-pilot. Instead of making tiny corkscrews in the air, the airplane was now doing phugoid oscillations from hell UP and DOWN in 15 second intervals. My attempts to stabilize the airplane were only making it worse. That woke Ray right up. I think he was in the middle of making the first call to Oakland center on the HF. This was the second time we fought for the controls. Not much of a fight, really. He yelled “what the hell are you doing!” slapped my hand away, proceeded to wrestle with the airplane for a minute or two, and then re-engaged the autopilot.

I lived with the slight corkscrewing for the next couple of hours. As we burned fuel, the aft CG problem went away, and things went smoother.

Now the flight involved setting the heading bug a degree or two either way as the GPS told us we were .01 nautical miles left or right of our desired track. We tried setting the autopilot to use the NAV, but that didn’t work.

And of course, every 50 minutes or so, we hit a reporting point, and Ray fought with the HF to make position reports. We thought we could use the fancy Apollo GPS to tell us the ETA of each successive reporting point, as required by Oakland Center, and we spent a good hour or two trying to program it: it turned out to be beyond our capabilities to get the GPS to list waypoints with ETAs. ETEs, no problem.

A typical position report:

Ray: “Oakland Center, Bonanza VH-XSG, position, over”

“WHOOOOOOOOOOOOO HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SH-SH-SH-SH BWEEEEET!”

“Bonanza VH-XSG, Oakland Center, go ahead”

Ray: “VH-XSG, at DIALO, 22:50, 11 thousand, next 29, 42, North, 136, 35, West, 23:46, DOPPS”

“Bonanza VH-XSG, Oakland Center, roger”

We eventually programmed one display to have a constantly updating display of our exact latitude and longitude (useful in an emergency) and the other display to display some information including ETA to only the next waypoint, our groundspeed, and the desired track.

I was unable to pee in the bottle, when the time came.

We picked up a decent tailwind about halfway through the flight. Indicated airspeed started out at 135 knots or so, and climbed during the flight to about 145 near the end. Our top groundspeed was about 195 knots.

When we reported at DUETS, Oakland passed us on to Los Angeles Center, reachable now on regular VHF radios.

The tip tanks were empty a long time ago, and the bladder was just about empty. The main tanks were about 3/4 full, about 30 gallons each side. We were burning a little more than 20 gallons per hour.

Since we clearly had enough fuel, we requested an amended clearance to Torrance, direct Catalina. Now it was an ordinary flight. With all the fuel burned off, we were within normal weight-and-balance. We were vectored to the Torrance ILS Runway 29R approach and broke out of the clouds about 1000 feet above ground.

Los Angeles air quality is so bad that the VASI lights looked red. I kept adding a little power, trying to turn the VASI lights white. Ray kept telling me to trust the glideslope. So, the approach was a little high, but I think we touched down within the first 1000 feet anyway. Ray may have nudged the yoke forward a little, I was ready to do a full-stall landing, appropriate for a smaller airplane, like a Warrior.

And that was that.