Some of you will remember Milton Caniff as the “Steve Canyon” comic strip creator, but he was also a big aviation enthusiast. He bought a Junkers JU-52, the German trimotor transport plane used in the Spanish civil war and WWII, had it restored and named it “Iron Annie”. Iron Annie was at the Quito, Ecuador, altitude about 10,000 ft above sea level, when I first saw it in 1964, it was in pretty bad shape,it had been used to haul sacks of cement up the mountain from the Pacific seaport at Guayaquil. There had been a big push to extend the runways and improve the major city airports all over South America as the jet age established itself. There was a rail road that ran up the west side of the Andes but it took for ever and the old steam engines had lost their reliability so I suspect that the contractor that was improving the airport elected to fly the cement just so they could stay on schedule. I saw Iron Annie many years later at Oshkosh and this time she had PW 1340 engines, BMW had built the same engines under a license obtained before WWII. Yeah, the Ju-52 was a work horse.

Some where in Maryland I was taxing in and I spotted an interesting airplane at the edge of the air field it was a Bernoulli twin engine with an excessively wide fuselage that had an airfoil cross section, it had been a experiment that was tried before WWII but it did not prove successful. Dr, Horton of flying wing fame was a professor at the Argentine Air Force Academy, he really wanted to talk about a likely American candidate to come to Argentina so he could pass on his lifetime of studies on flying wing experiments and learning. I sent him a copy of the Soaring magazine and suggested that he write an article of wanting to mentor an apprentice, he did and it appeared a few months later. There is no question he was an enthusiast for flying wings, but over time the drag and weight of the trailing parts that he professed were a total waste has not proved out but he was very interesting to talk to.

Dr. Coanda, a Romanian that immigrated to Peru when things started to get rough in eastern Europe before WWII, became a professor at a university in Lima. He is famous for the “Coanda Effect”, it is far too complicated to explain here but google will find it. He helped an American start an aircraft manufacturing company, no I don’t remember the names but the airplane resembled a Stinson Detroiter or a Travelair 6000, in other words a rugged bush plane that could survive in Peru. The Dehavilland Twin Otter soon became the bush plane of choice and Peru’s aircraft factory closed. At Paramaribo, Suraname a derelict Paggio Royal Gull sat mournfully at the edge of the airfield. I looked it over pretty well but it had been used in salt water and it was just too far gone. There was a flying Helio Courier at Georgetown, British Guyana, it was used by a missionary group for their work there. Many years later I learned that Mr. Mock, a Huntsville electronic store owner had sponsored a Helio Courier for his church’s missionary efforts down there, it may have been the same airplane, small world?

There was a big four engine flying boat, I suspect it was a Sunderlund, anchored in the river at Montevideo, Uruguay, one engine was missing. A person that I talked to said it had been like that for years. Oh yeah, we flew by the Graff Spree on our way to Brazil. At Sao Paulo there was a cute little Lockheed Constellation, the only one I ever saw. Don Jones, our Ops officer at Otis told me that I could not fly any Connie, my six foot + just would not fit in their tiny cockpit. Back up in Panama at the Patilla airport there were two Boeing 247’s one had the windshield that canted inward at the bottom, both were only good for scrap, two Cessna 195’s sat next to them an they too were unsalvageable, at least in my mind. At Oaxaca, Mexico was the derelict remains of a Curtiss Condor II a big twin engine biplane of early 1930’s vintage, what a sad sight, fabric was hanging in shreds, parts were missing, I wondered at the time if there were any of them still flying in the world, now I wonder if there is one in a museum somewhere.

The Columbian Air Force operated an aircraft maintenance trade school at the Bogota airport, they had acquired a bunch of war surplus PBY’s and a huge store of R-2600 engines, zero time still in the sealed cans just like they came from the overhaul depot. The R-1820 powered PBY’s proved to be unsuitable for flying in the mountains of South America so the trade school would recondition one PBY at a time putting on the more powerful engines replacing the fabric on the wings and tail, and then
painting the aircraft per the customer orders. Apparently it made a pretty good airplane because there was a two+ year waiting list. We met a New Zealander who was there waiting for them to put the finishing touches on his PBY, he complained that they were so slow. It seemed to be a pretty well run operation, the students traded their labor for the training they were getting and the country had a small but steady supply of workers with some maintenance experiance for the labor pool. I owe many thanks to the copilots and crew members that went with me on the many airport sojournes, some times even sharing the cost of the taxi. Those side trips to airports broke the monotony of hotel lay overs and kept us out of the hotel bar or from loosing money in a poker game. Bob