When a courier carrying top-secret documents needed transport through a typhoon, the crew of a leaky but reliable Grumman C-1A got the job done.
In 1972 I was a maintenance officer assigned to the anti-submarine warfare squadron VS-22 at Naval Air Station Quonset Point, Rhode Island, flying the Grumman S-2E Tracker. While at sea, our World War II–era carrier, USS Wasp, had developed serious hull leaks requiring us to return to port. An inspection of the hull revealed significant corrosion, and the carrier was targeted for decommissioning. As a result, we were an ASW squadron without a ship to operate from.
At the time, the U.S. Navy maintained four attack carriers on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam, conducting air combat operations. The fleet tactical support squadron VRC-50 flew supplies, replacement parts, mail and personnel to the carriers, using Grumman C-2As out of NAS Cubi Point in the Philippines and Grumman C-1As out of Da Nang, South Vietnam. The turboprop C-2As had experienced propeller problems, however, and all were grounded indefinitely awaiting a newly designed prop. In the interim, the Navy decided to send most of my squadron to the Philippines on a 90-day temporary duty assignment to operate the C-1A detachment in Da Nang. I had already completed two Vietnam cruises as catapult and arresting gear officer aboard Constellation, during which I flew the ship’s C-1A, so I knew where and what we were headed for.
VRC-50’s Da Nang detachment comprised seven C-1As. The C-1A Trader was an old reliable twin-engine, piston-powered, prop-driven carrier onboard delivery (COD) airplane built by the “Grumman Iron Works.” It first flew in 1952, and a total of 88 were built. Some foreign navies are still flying the C-1A today.
Each Trader crew consisted of two pilots and a loadmaster, flying about three roundtrips a day between sunrise and sunset, although several carrier landings were made as “pinkies”—after sunset, with runway lights on bright. To say that we were busy is an understatement. We were a can-do outfit, operating out of a very large Quonset hut at Da Nang that contained a mail bay for each ship on station. Pan Am 707s brought in the mail almost daily, while ships delivered most lower-priority items. A measure of our success was how little mail remained in those bays at the end of each day’s flight operations.
On occasion VIPs would show up for transportation to or from a carrier, or for a flight in-country, and they were given priority on a case-by-case basis. Meeting the needs of presidential cabinet members, members of Congress, astronauts, flag officers and couriers all required special schedule considerations for our detachment.
On September 26, 1972, Typhoon Ida, a Category 3 storm, was approaching Da Nang from the east. All that day we had been making runs to the carriers as they left Yankee Station and headed for open sea to ride out the storm. Around noon one of our flights returned to Da Nang from a carrier with a Navy captain who said he had to get to Clark Air Force Base, in the Philippines, as soon as possible. As detachment officer in charge, I informed him that all air traffic to the east had been canceled due to the approaching typhoon. He produced a top-secret naval message and let me read the first couple of lines. I can remember seeing something about presidential interest (Nixon’s name was in there someplace), and that he was directed to get to Clark AFB as soon as possible, “by any means available.” He had a briefcase shackled to his left wrist. We discussed the approaching storm, but he just wanted to know if we could get him to Clark “today.” I told him that he was in for a rough ride, but we would give it our best shot.
As I recall, the captain was a “Black Shoe sailor.” His naval career had been spent riding around on “galloping greyhounds”— destroyers. He assured me that he could ride out any bumpy airplane trip as long as we got him to Clark that day.
I got the mail unloaded from the “go bird,” had its fuel tanks topped off, called our friendly meteorologist for a weather brief (which scared the hell out of me), got a volunteer copilot and loadmaster, and with the captain and his briefcase aboard, took off heading due east. The distance between Da Nang and Clark is about 711 nautical miles, and about 700 of that is over open ocean. The weather was good for our late-afternoon takeoff, and we flew at an altitude of 1,500 feet. Our true airspeed at level was about 140 knots. We could have gone 20 knots faster, but I knew we had a long flight in bad weather, so why waste the fuel?
Our navigation method was mostly dead reckoning, i.e., compass heading, speed and elapsed time. I’m sure there’s some truth in that old open-cockpit, mail-flying saying about DR navigation: “If you don’t reckon right, you’re dead.” As the weather and ceiling deteriorated en route, we descended to keep the ocean surface in view. I used that old Charles Lindbergh trick of reading the wind and the plane’s drift angle off of the waves. As the waves broke, the wind blew their tops right off and produced a nice readable wind streak on the surface. As long as I could see the surface, that method worked quite well.
Our old E-6B “flight wheel” calculator really got a workout computing wind from our observed drift angles and then determining a heading to maintain our desired course. Doppler, radar, inertial, GPS, etc. are all fine, but it’s nice to know that the old Mk. 1 Mod. 0 eyeball still works when you need it.
Finding the island of Luzon was no problem, since it was straight ahead out there someplace, and certainly big enough to run into once we got on the other side of the storm. Staying on course was important for several reasons, one of which was because the Chinese held some islands just north of our intended track, and they had a history of shooting at any aircraft that got within AAA range.
At the storm’s height, our altitude was about 200 feet above the surface, and seeing the water was quite difficult—almost impossible at times—because of the heavy rain streaking past our side windows. (Windshields provide no forward visibility in that much water, and wipers do nothing but make noise.) And of course our overhead hatches leaked like crazy, so we got pretty wet. Thank you, Grumman, for those wonderful weather-tight hatch seals.
Turbulence was mostly moderate, but came close to severe at times. We were often thrown against our lap belts. (I can tolerate positive G turbulence, but I hate negative Gs.) A few times the turbulence required full aileron throws to level our wings. We had to hand fly the plane all the way. The autopilot would overcorrect in that much turbulence, and I didn’t trust it at 200 feet anyway.
I routinely asked our loadmaster how the captain was doing, and he just said he was “belted in and holding on.”
I had not filed a flight plan before our departure, but our squadron detachment certainly knew of our flight and would check on our arrival. Flying out of Da Nang at the low altitudes we routinely operated at was always done “operational VFR,” no matter what the weather or time of day. Once en route, I was able to contact the duty Air Force tanker on a UHF frequency, and he relayed our flight plan to the Philippine air traffic control at Manila. It seemed there was always an Air Force tanker up there someplace, a good guy to talk to. He requested our flight level, and I responded “point five.” After a couple of “say agains,” I said, “500 freaking feet above the waves.” That sufficed. I didn’t want to just appear on the air defense radarscope squawking a VFR transponder code; a fighter squadron out of Cubi Point or Clark would have scrambled to intercept us, and I didn’t need a fighter escort anywhere. Then Manila ATC wanted a coastal defense penetration point with an ETA; we gave them a big SWAG—a scientific wild ass guess.
We noticed a definite shift in wind direction as we passed to the south of the storm’s center, and we made the necessary course corrections. We went from a strong headwind to a nice tailwind, with diminishing turbulence. Thank God for an operable radar altimeter, as we had to keep correcting our pressure altimeters for the ever-changing barometric pressure. I don’t know how low it actually got, but I seem to remember 28- point-something inches of mercury.
About halfway into the flight I started looking for a signal from a commercial broadcast station at Manila on our automatic direction finder receiver. We finally got some music, and the number-one needle of our old reliable RMI (compass card) started to point in the general direction of Manila (on the nose). I knew Manila was a few miles south of Subic Bay, and basically on course, so I put the needle just to the right of our nose and rode that bearing all the way in until we could pick up Subic’s tactical air navigation.
We climbed as the ceiling and visibility permitted. By this time I had definitely decided that we were going to land at NAS Cubi Point instead of Clark. Our home squadron was there, and we could get some needed repairs done on the C-1A. Once we landed, we would be “hard down”: We had two generator failure lights and one fire warning light on at this point, all caused by water from the severe downpours we had been flying through. But those wonderful Wright R-1820 engines just kept running through it all. Our Air Force tanker friends way up there above the storm relayed to base operations at Cubi Point that we had an 06 courier aboard who needed to get to Clark AFB soonest, like “now.” A helicopter was put on standby.
The weather improved about 100 miles out, and it was high overcast on our arrival at Cubi Point. My logbook indicates two hours of night VFR flight time and a ground-controlled approach. I remember taxiing to base operations to let our captain deplane. He stuck his head in the cockpit and said “Thanks,” then left for a helo ride to Clark.
It felt good when we taxied to our squadron’s line and finally shut down. Our “Yellow Sheet” write-up for that flight was long on downing gripes, and night check sure had itself a full evening of work fixing all those discrepancies. The next day the maintenance officer decided to keep the plane for some scheduled maintenance since it was there already. So with the sun out in full force, we caught a flight back to Da Nang in a squadron T-39 Sabreliner passenger jet. What had taken us 4.9 hours the day before in a typhoon at an altitude of less than 500 feet, that T-39 did in 1.1 hours at about 30,000 feet. Ain’t progress great?
To this day I have no idea what was in that briefcase or on the rest of that secret message I got a peek at. I suspect the briefcase contained recent aerial photos from an RA-5C Vigilante recon run over the North, depicting urgent target information. In any event, I hope the contents were important enough to warrant a flight through a typhoon when the rest of the in-country air establishment was grounded for weather. That old reliable C-1A made the flight possible. It was an adventure for sure, but we made it. Like I said, we were a can-do outfit.
Robert A. Shaver completed his 22-year Navy career in 1980, retiring as a lieutenant commander. Additional reading: Grum man S2F Tracker, TF-1 Trader and WF-2 Tracer (War paint Series No. 76), by Charles Stafrace.
Originally published in the September 2014 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.