When we had an influx of new guys on the fixed-wing operation, for the Dornier, a real culture clash became apparent. I had to listen to moaning about such things as these:
1. With one pack out the cockpit could get up to 25º C. Yeah, you were left sweating lightly under those conditions, compared to looking like you had been in the shower with your clothes on! You needed bushy eyebrows to fly the Twotter: sweat-catchers!
At one point we got this new CP Lagos, the famous Fast Jet Phil, who decreed that we should not open the Twotter's cockpit windows, that doing that was "unprofessional." Okay, so I used to open the door instead, until he scotched that one too.
The way Phil got his name was by arriving from Doha and telling me, when I asked what he'd been up to there, that he'd been with the Qatari Defence Force and that the Mirage F1 was "an old friend," so that he was a "fast jet pilot."
I told him that was good to know, because I was a "slow Twin Otter pilot." Right then he insisted that we had to go for a quick evaluation ride there at Lagos. Okay, so the next thing was him coming upon me ordering 2:30 fuel for a 30-minute local flight. "What are you doing, taking so much fuel for such a short ride?" asked our hero.
"Well, sometimes they close this place without any notice, so we need enough fuel to go over to Magbon or up to Ilorin and sit around for a while, and then come back with IFR reserves."
"Oh. Well, that's still too much fuel just for a 30-minute hop." I shrugged and said that it was my ride, so my fuel order, that he could do it however he liked when it was his ride.
So we did the ride and it must have gone okay because he never rode with me again. It could be that I frightened him though. With my brilliance!
About two weeks later I bumped into a guy I knew from my time with Schreiner who mentioned he'd just arrived from Doha. Of course I asked him if he knew our Phil.
"Yes, of course. He was working for us there on an evaluation flight we were running for pilot candidates. I was just there to wind it up. We had a couple of Cherokee 140s and he was our Chief Pilot."
"Oh. So ... no Mirage F1s?" Nope, just a couple of Cherokee 140s.
Another time Phil told me that he'd been a "merc" in Africa, even though he looked as if he would not be able to fight his way out of a wet paper sack. Then he told one of the local pilots that he had logged two thousand hours of "combat jet time." This was one busy guy!
Another time, Phil told me that he'd worked for "the Company," meaning, I guess, the CIA. Proof of that was that he used to dress up all in light gray: baseball cap, safari jacket, shirt, and slacks, some kind of CIA undercover agent uniform that did make him stand out. (I think he probably had on light gray underwear and socks, but that's just my guess. I would not want to tell any lies here.) He would get dressed up in that rig, hang a rather large walkie-talkie on his belt, and then go walkabout down the ramp at Ikeja, along with his wife. Given that there was no base station for him to talk to on that walkie-talkie, that made us laugh a bit.
When Phil hit his stride he came up with a fast jet procedure for us to use on the Twotter. Max chat was 50 pounds of torque. That gave you about 160 knots. (Redline is 166, limited by thermal heating of the alloy airframe at high Mach numbers or something like that. Like on the Blackbird. Fast jet pilots know about this kind of stuff; it's not need-to-know for helicopter pilots.)
What we did for efficiency was to approach at 50 pounds and then chop the power at a time of our choosing to let drag, of which the Twotter has more than enough, work its magic to bring the speed back to 115, the limit for the first notch of flaps. "More unprofessionalism," according to our Phil. He wanted to see us settle on 25 torque by the time we were down to about 35-hundred feet, by steady reductions per each thousand feet from 50 torque. That this drove everyone else at Lagos nuts, having this thing come trundling along at 115 knots from ten miles off, mixing it with pattern traffic at up to 250 knots ... what of that? Hell, we were even getting in the way of Aero Twotters, doing that! (I never did master that technique; I just kept on doing it the bush pilot way, max chat to flight idle.)
Last edited by chuks; 7th Nov 2016 at 07:32.