The late September rain is pounding on the fuselage above me and coursing across the narrow, rectangular windscreen that sits less than a foot in front of my face. The frigid Alaskan ocean lies only 400 feet beneath us, but if we went any higher, we’d be in the clouds-clouds that are obscuring a line of towering glacial peaks that rise from the coastline just off our left wing. We are navigating by breakers. As long as we keep the white, foamy breakers in sight off to our left we’ll be over the water, so we won’t run into anything, but we’ll still be close enough to the shoreline not to get lost.
The two Pratt & Whitney radials on the sturdy, aluminum wings of our DC-3 cargo hauler hum reassuringly despite the downpour, and the heavy, cable controls convey a comforting stability that my Cheetah couldn’t even begin to offer. I conclude that if you’re going to scud-run along the Alaskan coastline in bad weather, the DC-3 is probably a pretty good plane to do it in. We can lose an engine and still keep going, and if we had to put the plane down somewhere, those massive 45-foot wings would probably clear a landing site as they went.
