A Good Bunch of Guys
I worked with Alan MacDonald at the U.S. Army base in Fort Rucker, ALA instructing in Hueys. Later Alan contacted me and induced me to come out to KL to work with him at SEA. I did some instructing and minimal charter and Alan appointed me to be his "Operations Manager". I started in February of 1972 and gave it up in March of 1973. I was involved in setting up the Kuching operation with the 206's and Cessna 421. I checked out Kirton in the 421 on Sept 20, 1972. I remember Smiley fondly; some of the other names not so much. Eddie Lee Po Chin was the accountant. Winton Wilde was the general manager. Robbie Robinson was the chief instructor and was killed after colliding with power lines with a student. I eventually adopted a mechanics helper from Kuching, brought him to the states, put him through college and he married a girl from Kuching where they resided in Alaska. He was killed in a senseless helicopter crash in 1976. There were so many shenanigans going on with that company you can't even begin to put them all down. Alan was buying military surplus parts from the states that didn't always quite fit and Robbie and I kept pointing out the risk. I recall one tail boom that didn't quite fit and the mechanics had to put about a half inch of spacers under the forward drive shaft bearing. When it flew....and it did fly....the tail rotor shaft looked like a whip saw. When a helicopter crashed and was totalled by the insurance company, Alan had a bank account in Hong Kong where the proceeds went. That way he could avoid bringing the money back into Malaysia then get a dispensation to use hard currency in Malaysia to buy a new helicopter. All of this made poor Eddie Lee a basket case trying to handle the books and keep out of jail. There are a million other stories. In March of 73 Alan decided to buy a Cessna 320 for some reason and he sent me back to the states to find one. I found a couple preliminary ones but they were a bit pricey.....Alan got in his head that I was working a kickback scheme causing the prices to be so high so he sent Aida, his Cuban wife, to California to straighten me out. That's when I left in disgust and went on to other projects. Alan was some crazy guy who knew how to maneuver people and get what he wanted. Too bad he didn't have the ethics and fair play with his employees and business partners.