Aeroplane September 2017

BELOW:

Berlin Express

over the stunning,

if inhospitable,

scenery

encountered

when flying out of

Narsarsuaq on

2 July.

THE FRIEDKIN GROUP

68 http://www.aeroplanemonthly.com AEROPLANE SEPTEMBER 2017

ability to survive in cold water for a

while. Then there was flotation gear

and survival gear, survival radios and

things like that. I was attached to the

raft via the harness I was wearing.

“We rested and regrouped. The

maintenance team, Richard and ‘Little

John’, took a hard look at the airplane

to make sure Berlin Express was

ready to go over water. The weather

co-operated; there was a lot of cloud

cover, but we were fortunate enough

to be able to fly over virtually all of it

at 13,000ft.

“The first over-water leg was on

the 30th. Louis helped me get into

the survival gear. The leg was 676nm,

from Goose Bay to Narsarsuaq in

Greenland. Your mindset turns a

little bit different, and the team was

maturing. Three hours 12 minutes

later or so, ‘land ho’. As you can

well imagine, at Narsarsuaq hangar

space is at a real premium and very

expensive, so somehow the team

negotiated that if I did a low pass

they would waive the hangar fee. I

got to do a really fun low pass with

approval, and we had a free night

of hangarage. That was terrific. Of

course, I was fairly excited about

everything going as well as it was.

“The scenery was breathtaking

— in some ways scary, because of

the scope of it, but breathtaking. In

many ways it was beautiful — the

raw beauty of big icebergs and things

of that nature. We were constantly

learning lessons of how to do this

mission better and how to work

better together as a team of people.

We debriefed that night and started

looking at the next morning.

“Dan Friedkin saw the ability to

make this a worldwide aviation event

with modern-day technology, between

satellite ’phones, tracking devices,

‘breadcrumbs’ to tie in to the internet,

and Justin taking real-time images.

When I would get out of the airplane

it was like live TV, which is really

spectacular. Instead of just a group of

people doing this, the whole world

was involved.

“Coming out of Narsarsuaq to

Keflavík was a little shorter, by 16

miles or so. We made another good

call in getting out of there before the

weather deteriorated. Again, we were

on top of the cloud cover at about

12-13,000ft. We picked up a bit of

a tailwind, so at one time we were

doing 260kt ground speed and making

pretty good time.

“We made very disciplined fuel

changes. Obviously I was planning

on them, but Louis and the King Air

team were backing everything I did

“We launched on Wednesday

28 June from south-western Texas,

where the airplane is based, to

Paducah, Kentucky. The weather

was working well, and it gave me the

ability to prove the fuel, to prove the

systems and to work on the formation

tactics. Fuel, obviously, was vital. We

looked at different drop tanks, and

the drop tanks Ed had [for his 2007

crossing in Miss Velma] were sitting

on the shelf. I said, ‘Give me those!’ If

you look, they had Operation ‘Bolero

II’ on them. We put Operation Berlin

Express on the other sides.

“We did a second leg that day, about

550nm or so, to Dunkirk, New York.

That’s where Louis Horschel lives; we

were looking at home-town support

and the ability to spend the night. We

were training en route. I wanted to

get on the wing of the King Air and

simulate IFR conditions, shooting a

full-up ILS approach to minimums in

formation. We were doing that and,

all of a sudden, here comes another

Mustang [February, also a Comanche

Fighters machine]. It had to be Ed.

It was a great send-off from him and

Dan’s team of people. That made me

feel really good.

“One of the things we did on

every single leg — and this is just the

way I like to run business — is that

everything was briefed and everything

was debriefed. We debriefed all the

lessons learned from the first day. The

second day, we got up and got going

from Dunkirk to Bangor, Maine,

which was a 500nm leg. We applied

the lessons learned, and the whole

team kept getting better and better.

“From there we did the second leg

up to Goose Bay, Newfoundland. We

looked at the airplane, because now

we were going into the first over-

water leg. Things changed a little bit.

I got into full-up water survival gear,

trading my parachute for a raft, and

wearing a ‘poopy suit’ to allow me the

up and documenting the time. Every

30 minutes I took a fuel change and I

would manage the fuel based on that

time hack. I’d go, say, from the left

main fuel cell for 30 minutes over to

the right drop tank, then to the left

drop to balance the airplane, back

again to the right and back to the left.

That took the majority of the fuel out

of the drop tanks. Then I’d go to the

fuselage tank for 30 minutes, and back

over to the right main. In a sense I was

‘fat’ on fuel; I had 6.1 hours of fuel on

board the airplane for, in the worst

case, a four-hour leg. Most of them

were just a little over three. On one leg

I even left a little bit of gas at home

because I didn’t want the weight.

“We came into Keflavík and again

the tower goes, ‘Hey, you’ve got

to give us a flyby’. That was on 2

July. I felt we were on schedule, not

too far ahead but not behind. The

whole thing was planned to the last

detail. It’s very important from the

safety aspect to run it that way, like a

AEROPLANE MEETS... LEE LAUDERBACK

62-70_AM_AEROMEETS_Sept17_cc C.indd 68 31/07/2017 11:04