An Eventful Cross-Atlantic Flight
Heroes Remember
An Eventful Cross-Atlantic Flight
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Somebody stole the nylon out of my gauntlets and that got
a little cool on the hands. Especially when we had to go up
to 19,000 feet to get away from weather.
And we had two oxygen masks. You wore one and after it iced,
we had no heaters, after it iced up a bit,
you reached underneath and took the other one.
You sat on it to keep one warm. Half way across the
engines quit and we had a gas, all we were was a flying gas tank.
The bomb bay was gas tanks. In the cabin, behind me
as a radio operator, was a tank.
The same as you have a tank, your furnace in the basement.
The same size, gas. At my feet were controls
to turn off number one, turn on number two.
This chap didn't wear flying clothes.
He asked me, I wondered what I was getting into
when I met him in his office in Montreal.
He wanted to know if I wore long underwear.
I thought, "My, my what am I getting into here?" I found out,
he didn't wear flying clothes, business suit and a top coat.
And when it got a little cool he had a helmet that didn't fit.
So he'd put up one thumb, and number two, turn on number two.
Thumb down, turn off number one. I did.
All of a sudden everything got awful quiet.
It was pretty noisy before that.
Then we start, I was looking at the clock as we called it,
I think it was getting up to 300 and some miles an hour and
we were going straight down and I can't swim a stroke.
We were half way across the Atlantic.
The next thing I know, there was a hand with
the longest fingers I ever saw, and it's like your car where
the console is down here, and you just reached around and
turn this lever, or you turn this control.
He had forgot to turn that when I turned the gas off.
It was an awful great roar and back up we went.
And he turned around at me and his face was the colour
of the paper, I don't know what colour mine was,
probably green. So we landed okay.
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