Too tru, Tailwheel. Some days I think we should have a "use by" sticker.
With a moniker like that I trust you like my favourite Cessna, the 185, as much as I do. How do you decide the load for a 185? I was a (slightty apprehensive) pax in this exercise. First cover the floor, except around the pedals, with cartons of frozen beef. Then load the pilot and 5 adult pax. Of course that takes up the luggauge space, so the luggage for 5 pax goes on everyone's lap. You may need help to close the doors!
But the 206 did help out the operators as it did away with the ground-looping problem with new pilots. One such ground-looped a 185 on a bush strip, so a LAEME was flown in with tools and camping gear to get it up to ferry permit state. When it was ready, guess who was the only pilot available? And he ground-looped it on Moreby...
I suspect his career was a short one. A similar story with a member of a sky-diving club operating a 185 I did some flying for. One of their members had a licence, so went off to get his tail-wheel endosement - in a Chippie? First flight in the 185 cost them a new wing, but it was a miserable little strip.
The RBB50's were quite a sight, especially the one who visited a BBQ the aero club organised on Fisherman's island. We had invited him to drop by, and he did so with about 10ft prop clearance, and the wingtip maybe 30yds from the crowd. Certainly got everyone's attention.
They formed a critical link in the marine rescue I mentioned. Story started one Sat. afternoon as we were mooring the diving boat in the harbour, we were aproached by the wives of some friends, with a question, whether we had seen their husbands fishing party, as their lakatoi was late back from a Fri o'night trip. We assumed they would be sitting on one of the beaches, having misjudged the tide. We'd all done that, with unreliable tides when the one you were counting on to float you off didn't arrive. The ladies were worried, so i quickly organised the club 180 to locate them and reassure the wives. But we couldn't locate them anywhere between Moresby and Idihi Is, so we started to worry. We wanted to search that night as they would have some sort of light. But the club was not able to lay on a night flight without some declaration of an emergency. There was a USN ship in port, and we knew they had two Kamman choppers. We found the captain, and he was symathetic, but he would also need some official request, the only person able to declare a rescue mission was the Harbourmaster, and when we found him he was too drunk to organise anything. So we did manage to get an official search sort oforganised on Sunday morning. Dave Robbie volunteered his 310 and I claimed the rh seat.
We flew one or two missions, the airlines were allocated areas to look at on arrival and departure, and I think we got an airline DC3 as well. Singles could only be used to check the shorelines. No result Sunday. Monday we hit the jackpot, near the seaward limit of our run we found the lakatoi floating upside down with people on top of it.
We called the good news in, and then the communication SNAFU started. Although a DC3 drop of a dinghy pack was successful, after one of the partty had a long swim to retrieve it, the Kaaman choppers were organised to retrieve the rescuees, They had been turned over by a rogue wave on Fri night and had drifted 50miles down the coast & about 30 out to sea. Co--ordination.... the choppers only have military UHF radios. Enter an RB50 somewhere over the gap who has UHF and HF, so he can talk to the choppers on UHF and Moresby on HF, Moresby can talk to us on VHF. The reult was that location we gave of SW from Hood Pt. got to the choppers as SE. Finally worked out who was where, we found the choppers and led them back by hand signals. They lifted the whole lot of survivors out as an overload and everything seemed fine. Then we found there were two people missing. One was a strong swimmer who had set out to swim to an island they had drifted "close" to on Sat morning. We thought we had lost him, but a native fisherman rescued him from a palm tree washed up on the main reef some miles further along on the Tuesday. Unfortunately the other guy was never found. Apparently he snapped sometime Sunday night, just said "i've had enough of this, I'm going home home" and swam off. Worst thing was he was the father of one of the kids on board, who had to be restrained from following him.
Quite a performance