One day, he swung the pick for the millionth time,
and there it was. He sold his claim to a major mining
company and decided to invest some of his millions in a
mining equipment transport business, using Skymasters
as his mode of delivery. My airplane was the first of what
was planned to be a fleet of five Cessna 337s.
No, don’t ask me why. No cargo door, not much cargo
space. More importantly, the check didn’t bounce.
While this Skymaster might have been mildly
unsuited for its mission, it did have its strong points.
The unusual push/pull twin was a late-’60s develop-
ment from Cessna. Old-time pilots may recall that
the Skymaster’s main claim to fame was that nothing
ver y exciting happened if an engine failed in any mode
of flight. The airplane merely sags slightly from the
loss of power, but there was no problem with asym-
metric thrust. Other than that, it was pretty much
pure airplane.
On the positive side, the thrust line of the aft engine
is 8 inches higher than on the front mill, a hedge in case
someone over-rotated on a dirt-runway departure.
On that initial Pacific trip, the crossing went well,
with no significant weather and no squawks on the
airplane. The route was standard—Santa Barbara
through Honolulu, Majuro, Marshall Islands and on
south to the aforementioned Guadalcanal. The weather
was characteristically clear most of the way, not a
typhoon in sight. I had been advised by my friend Jon
Egaas that clear and 30 were fairly typical in the South
Pacific, except when they weren’t. Egaas has something
like 500 Atlantic and Pacific crossings (compared to
my piddly 250 ocean hops), so when I need advice, I
know exactly who to call.
The Skymaster and I were both eager for a few days
off, and after that day’s hop to Cairns and an overnight,
I would have another long leg diagonally across all of
Australia to Mount Magnet, followed by a short com-
mute down to Perth and a long ride home at 450 knots
rather than 150 knots.
That day, it was a mere 1,000 additional miles over
water across the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef,
the largest living thing visible to those talented, lucky
folks cruising at 14,000 knots looking down from 300
miles up.
On this, my first full Pacific crossing, I selected
a slightly lower altitude than the astronauts enjoy.
Accordingly, I leveled at 1,000 feet above the Pacific
for a better view of the underwater rainbow of color
provided by the world’s most famous submerged tour-
ist attraction.