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Ferrying Two Y-12s to Zambia
My checkout in the Harbin Y-12 was a manual, read in an airline seat somewhere over the Pacific.
It was December 1995. I was twenty-five, and a ferry company called Southern Cross had a job moving two Y-12s — stout little Chinese-built twin turboprops — from Kunming, China, to Lusaka, Zambia, for delivery to the Zambian Air Force. Southern Cross liked hiring airline pilots’ kids: we had travel privileges, which kept positioning costs down. So, on December 19, the day before my dad’s birthday, I non-revved Honolulu–Taipei–Hong Kong — a girl who had never been on that side of the world, carrying a stack of traveler’s checks that would prove useful in exactly none of the countries I was about to visit. Hong Kong educated me fast, mostly about which restroom doors not to walk through.
The crew gathered and we took Dragonair to Kunming, riding in from the airport past bicycles three inches off the door and piles of coal burning in the street. The airplanes were waiting in camouflage paint with ZAMBIAN AIR FORCE already on their tails — though on paper mine was Chinese: registration B-600L. An American crew, plus one pilot from New Zealand. My captain was a man whose real first name was Swing — Swing Lindsey. I was the First Officer, and the Y-12 turned out to be a Twin Otter with a Chinese accent: fuel in the wings instead of the belly, thrust levers on the quadrant instead of the ceiling, otherwise an old friend.
The crew that lied to customs
The first leg was Kunming to Mandalay — over the Hump, the same Himalayan route the China-Burma-India crews flew in the war. We crossed at 14,500 feet, where we probably should have been puffing supplemental oxygen, and I mostly remember the view.
Then Calcutta — where the trip became a story. A building on the ramp was labeled CASUALTY CENTRE; I decided not to ask.
Five days before we landed, on the night of December 17, an AN-26 had dropped several hundred AK-47s and sixteen thousand rounds of ammunition over villages in Purulia district, West Bengal — about 150 miles away. The drop plane was intercepted and forced down the very week we arrived. It was the biggest aviation story in India. And into the middle of it taxied two camouflaged turboprops wearing a foreign air force’s tail markings, registered on paper to the Chinese government, flown by Americans and a New Zealander.
Customs asked what was in our crates. The Chinese had told us “aircraft parts,” so that’s what we said. They unloaded everything and ran it through the scanners — and out came pots, pans, and rice: gifts for the Zambians. Now we were the crew that had lied to customs. The next morning’s paper ran a photo of the four of us beside the airplanes — grinning, because nobody had told us how much trouble we might be in — under a headline about suspicious individuals intercepted at Calcutta International. It was not the sort of international press coverage any of us had been hoping for.
Covering Zambian Air Force on both Y-12s
While they screened our cookware, we got out the duct tape and covered ZAMBIAN AIR FORCE on both airplanes, reasoning that whatever was making everyone so excited, less of it would be better. Hardware-store solutions to international problems: that is ferry flying.
It cost us an extra day. When the release finally came, we walked out and Swing called “clear number two” — at which moment a military jeep came screaming across the ramp, the man inside throwing his hands up: stop. Swing said, “Nope. We’re leaving — tell him to get out of the way of the engine.” So, there we were, him signaling stop, stop, me waving get back, get back, the props turning through the argument. We taxied out and went. Some airplanes are simply safer in the air.
India released us through Nagpur — a fuel stop with armed guards who followed me everywhere, leaving me to conclude I was either very important or very bad, and I wasn’t sure I was on the important list — then Ahmedabad, then Karachi, where the airport director, a woman, told me how she would have loved to fly. Thirty years later, I still remember that conversation more clearly than the airport itself.
Crossing the Gulf of Oman
Christmas Eve, we crossed the Gulf of Oman. It was late and we were tired, so to stay awake the two airplanes sang Christmas carols to each other on “fingers” — 123.45, the air-to-air frequency pilots use over open water. The lead ship would offer Jingle Bells; we would answer Batman smells; somebody would finish with Robin laid an egg. The frequency was silent — we were the only ones out there.
I have to stop on that frequency, because it’s the reason I’m writing here at all. My grandfather, Lt. Col. James A. Philpott, was the first commander of the 490th Bombardment Squadron — the Burma Bridge Busters — and The Aviation Geek Club’s piece on the 490th is part of how our family verified its own history that you can read at Trove Collections website. In September 1972, on my grandfather’s final airline trip across the Pacific, a friend passed him news over that same frequency: my father had just been hired to fly for an airline of his own. Two generations later, there I was over the Gulf of Oman, singing Batman smells on 123.45. In my family, the good things seem to happen on fingers.
Swing, meanwhile, was getting sick — sweating, eyes closing — and by the approach into Muscat he was out cold, with every approach chart stacked on his side of the cockpit. So, I flew it the only way available: I keyed the radio and asked the airplane ahead for the inbound frequency, the course, the minimums, and the missed approach, copied it all down, tuned it up, and landed. Single-pilot IFR with a wingman reading me the plate. Honestly? It was fun.
A red dirt strip in Zambia
Muscat gave us Christmas dinner — the hotel had it waiting, a kindness nobody expected — and a table of Omani military pilots who spoke no English and talked with us anyway, in hand signals. One of them pressed his squadron pin into my hand, a little camouflage jet. I wore it on my tie for years; I lost it on a ramp once, and the mechanics knew exactly whose it was and brought it back. I still have it.
We left Muscat with 55-gallon drums of Jet A strapped down in back, because Ethiopia was at war and nobody could promise us fuel. That is how I came to be sitting on the wing of a camouflaged Chinese turboprop in Addis Ababa, hand-pumping Jet A out of a barrel. There’s a photograph of me mid-pump, and I treasure it — proof that “building flight time” sometimes means building forearm.
Nairobi, then Kasama — a red dirt strip in Zambia with thunderstorms stacked behind it — then the last leg into Lusaka, where the Zambian Air Force launched a two-ship to escort us in. Their flight lead called: “This is the Zambian Air Force, calling the Zambian two-ship.” I answered: “Go ahead, this is Bravo-six-hundred-Lima.” A pause. “No — we are calling the Air Force two-ship.” We went around like that until Swing keyed up, grinning: “I don’t think they understand, because it’s a woman’s voice answering.”
Tidy formation approach
We flew a tidy formation approach and taxied in to a reception with blue checkered tablecloths, Coca-Colas, and orange sodas — some of the warmest people I have ever delivered airplanes to. The Zambian pilots looked at me — twenty-five, long curly blond hair — then at my captain, and one of them said:
“Ah, Captain Swing — you have a nice young girlfriend!”
Total time, Kunming to Lusaka: 46.4 hours. That’s what the logbook says, anyway. The logbook doesn’t have a column for suspicious headlines, Christmas carols on 123.45, hand-pumped fuel, or being mistaken for the captain’s girlfriend — and thirty years later, that’s the part I still carry. It’s the kind of flying that runs four generations deep in my family, and it’s the spirit behind Trove Collections (trovecollections.com): built on the idea that the only things worth carrying across the world are the ones that have actually been somewhere.
Photo credit: Micki Sharp and E.Caminade-Levault Bob Adams from George, South Africa via Wikipedia
