Unusual Attitudes: Unconventional Cargo

"Tripp" flies the MU-2 and is not only a pilot but also a doctor and businessman. But he started out as, and still thinks like, an engineer. So he scientifically positioned his ice chest on the floor in the back and scolded me when mine went in a passenger seat, jury-rigged with a lap belt. "It's going to end up all over the floor," he muttered, which, of course, I ignored since I know more than almost anybody about hauling edibles (and drinkables) in airplanes — sometimes successfully and, OK, sometimes not.

In 1962, as a fledging TWA hostess (now flight attendant) on a Convair 880 trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, my cohort and I were working the dinner service in steerage when we hit unexpected and rather impressive turbulence. I was in the aft galley and Margie was teetering back down the aisle, balancing an armload of dinner trays, when the seat-belt sign lit up and a call came from the cockpit. Before we could batten ourselves down, a "williwaw" put both of us on the floor, awash in ham and sweet potatoes with a gooey, sweet raisin sauce.

That winter, back home, finishing college and working on a Commercial and CFI, I was invited by friends on a marathon flight from Lunken to St. Louis Lambert Field. "Marathon" because it was in a little PA-28-140 Piper Cherokee. I'd packed goodies and a big thermos of hot chocolate in the event we were forced down over southern Indiana or Illinois. It was clear and smooth at 6,500 feet but there was a fierce headwind, so the pilot had begun a slow descent. Just as I handed a cup of (very) hot chocolate to the right front seat passenger we hit turbulence. The liquid rose out of the cup in an amorphous blob and this brown shaped thing hung in midair for an awful moment before landing in the guy's lap. From the contortions and noises emanating from the front seat, I believe he thought he'd been unmanned — come to think of it, Bill never married.

Do you remember hauling cases of Coors beer from Wichita or Denver and points west because it wasn't available east of the Mississippi and everybody absolutely had to have it? We stuffed 20 cases in Frank Wood's Aero Commander, but I recall corporate airplanes with at least 75 cases on board. There was a liquor store at Denver's Stapleton Field with case weights displayed to help with loading computations. And then there was the Cointreau we almost brought home from the Bahamas. My husband Ebby's friends claimed the orange liqueur available in the states was bottled in New Jersey with local water, thus making it inferior to the real French stuff you could buy in the Bahamas. We were coming back from Abaco in the late '70s, when Lockheed 18s were the airplane of choice for drug haulers, and the customs guy at West Palm Beach eyed just two of us in a Lodestar with suspicion. He wanted to see the hooch I told him we had on board, but the ensuing exchange between Ebby and me got rather heated — actually, it became a shouting match. I asked where he'd stowed the booze and he said he thought I'd loaded it. When we realized that we'd left six cases of Cointreau sitting on the ramp at Marsh Harbour our chagrin was obvious, and the customs guy told us to go on — he didn't need to see anything.

Since I'm telling firewater and airplane stories, there was a couple from Cincinnati's "elite 400" — both ATPs, she an ex-WASP and he a former naval aviator — who owned a Cessna 421. Sam always rode the right seat and, invariably, about a half-hour before landing, she'd break out a hamper of fancy finger food packed by their cook and open a beautiful brass-bound leather liquor case. Everybody — everybody! — would have a "pop" before landing. But that was a long, long time ago. …

And I can't forget the "Savannah Shrimp Saga." I was throwing a huge party and Pat McGuinness promised to bring 12 pounds of shrimp from Georgia in his company's Gulfstream on the afternoon of the party. He assured me these were "colossals" (about 15 per pound), shelled, deveined and fresher, tastier and much cheaper than I could get locally. At the last minute Pat didn't take the trip but assured me that the other pilot knew where to pick them up and would call as soon as they landed. Right on schedule I got the call and raced to the airport for the iced-down boxes of shrimp.

"I got you a better deal," he said. "These were much less than the kind Pat ordered and the fish guy said they were just as good."

With a sense of impending doom, I opened one of the boxes and saw he'd bought "mediums" — 45 to 50 per pound — neither shelled nor deveined. I thanked him, paid him and threw the whole mess in the freezer at home. I still cringe at the obscene amount of money I paid for 12 pounds of jumbo shrimp at a local fish market.

But back to crawfish boudin and how I found myself in Houma, Louisiana — about as far south as you can go without wading in the Gulf of Mexico. It all started earlier this spring when I shared a longtime dream with Tripp while we were flying a DC-3.

"Ron wants to sell this thing so let's buy 50J and fly around the world. What a glorious adventure. It might take a year or we might never make it back, but if we do I'll write a book and if we don't … well, what better way to end the round."

Amazingly, Tripp latched onto the idea and before the day was over we were brainstorming about how much money we could scrape together and whether we knew any like-minded, hugely wealthy souls (few and far between but out there somewhere). By the next day we'd progressed to semiserious negotiations with Ron, the owner, and were plotting routes ("I want to see Turkey"), talking about stockpiling avgas on remote Pacific islands, visas, how to survive in an Iranian jail and whether we would need inoculations for plague.

The following Saturday night, during an incredibly long Easter Vigil Mass, I (appropriately) had a "come to Jesus" meeting. It was past midnight when I called Tripp and said we needed to talk; this scheme was a surefire way to go bankrupt, even if the round-the-world part never happened. And while bankruptcy didn't make a whole lot of difference to me, it would severely impact his family, businesses and commitments. In an incredibly sad moment he agreed and next morning we called the owner and backed out of the deal.

Tripp flies "big iron" on rotation for Airborne Support Inc. in Houma and, because I was pretty "bummed," he suggested I tag along for an upcoming week of recurrent training in the company's fleet of big, old, round-engine airplanes. More about that next month …

Well, it helped (sort of) and, after five glorious days in Airborne's DC-3s and a DC-4, we left Houma Terrebonne Airport with the Styrofoam ice chests more or less secure in the back of the MU-2. The weather was pretty good until Columbia, South Carolina, where there was a stubborn line of weather. Now I'm pretty good at picking my way around stuff at Cessna 180 and DC-3 altitudes but FL 230 isn't my territory. But we tightened our shoulder harnesses and aimed for the skinniest part of the line and, thanks to Nexrad weather and ATC, had less than a minute of "moderate to scary" turbulence.

After landing in Fayetteville, I made my way back to the cabin door sloshing through a sea of ice, crawfish boudin and the fragments of Tripp's upended ice chest. Oh, my "MacGyver" rig in the seat? It survived beautifully. After all, I know more than almost anybody about successfully hauling edibles in airplanes — well, usually.

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