Free Old Songs in a New Cafe by Robert James Waller Page B

regret.
Aircraft
No.
Captain
Date
Location
Crew
53
Fox
3/11/43
Hump
Lost
49
Welch
3/13/43
Hump
Lost
48
Anglin
8/11/43
Hump
Lost
72
Schroeder
10/13/43
Shot Down
Lost
59
Privensal
11/19/43
Kunming:let-down
Lost
63
Charville
11/19/43
Kunming;let-down
Lost
    Between April 1942, when Hump operations started, and September 1945 at the end of the war, CNAC pilots will fly the Hump
     more than 20,000 times. They carry 50,000 tons of cargo into China and bring 25,000 tons back out. Twenty-five crews are lost.
     The consensus remains among those who understand flying that, given the conditions under which CNAC operated, the pilots were
     one of the most skilled groups ever assembled, the losses remarkably small.
    Today Charlie Uban is freighting ammunition. Sometimes he carries fifty-five-gallon barrels of high-octane gasoline, a cargo
     he prefers not to haul Or he might be loaded with aircraft parts or medical supplies or brass fittings. Occasionally he moves
     Chinese bank notes printed in San Francisco and being forwarded to deal with China’s sprinting inflation.
    On his way back from Kunming, he will be dragging tin or wood or hog bristles, or mercury or silk or refined tungsten ore.
     Now and then he has a cargo of Chinese soldiers going to India for training. They are cold and airsick for most of the trip.
    As Stilwell begins his 1944 push back down into the jungles of Burma, Charlie will haul bagged rice that is booted out of
     the cargo doors at low altitudes to construction crews following the armies. The crews are building a new land route, the
     Ledo Road, from India across northern Burma to China.
    Conditions are seldom good enough for daydreaming. Most of the time he concentrates on his gauges and listens to the engines,
     “… envisioning misadventures and figuring out what to do about them ahead of time.”
    But now and then in clear weather he thinks about other things. He thinks about his girl, Emma Jo, back in Iowa and calculates
     the days left before he gets his three-month leave in the States. And he remembers Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across
     the Atlantic in 1927. He was six years old at that time, but somehow understood the magnitude of Lindbergh’s achievement even
     then. That’s what brought him here.
    His family moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he grew up building model airplanes and reading magazine articles about the new
     world of flight. At fifteen, he bicycled out to the old Canfield Airport and used $2 from his
Des Moines Register
paper route to purchase his first airplane ride on a Ford Trimotor.
    Bouncing around in a single-engine Taylorcraft, Charlie Uban learned to fly at Iowa State Teachers College in 1940 as part
     of the federally sponsored Civilian Pilot Training program. At Iowa State College in Ames he studied engineering and passed
     the secondary stage of the CPT program. He learned cross-country techniques at a school in Des Moines, taught flying for a
     while in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and was trained as a copilot for Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis, where he picked up his
     instrument skills.
    When Pan Am wrangled a contract for supplying the Far East, he went to work for them and flew as a copilot in four-engine
     DC-4s and C-87s, hauling cargo and passengers down the Caribbean to Brazil and from there to Accra on the coast of West Africa.
     In Accra, the cargo was off-loaded onto smaller planes for the flight over the desert and across Asia to Calcutta.
    In the summer of 1943 he was riding copilot alongside Captain Wesley Gray with a load earmarked for the Generalissimo himself.
     In Accra, they were ordered not to off-load, but rather to continue on across Africa and Asia to Dinjan, pick up a Hump pilot
     to guide them through the mountains, and take the cargo on into Chungking,
    On the way, Charlie bumped into a few CNAC pilots and talked with one of them at length. Since Pan Am owned 20 percent of
     CNAC, he applied for a transfer, and by the fall of 1943 he was flying