The Man Called Brown Condor
Read The Man Called Brown Condor Online
Authors: Thomas E. Simmons
THE MAN
CALLED
BROWN CONDOR
THE MAN
CALLED
BROWN CONDOR
THOMAS E. SIMMONS
A Herman Graf Book
Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 2013 by Thomas E. Simmons
All Rights Reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62087-217-8
Printed in the United States of America
Dreadful is the mysterious power of Fate
â Sophocles
Chapter 2 â Mississippi, 1910
Chapter 6 â But Will it Fly?
Chapter 7 â A Twenty-Dollar Bet
Chapter 9 â Tall Tree, Short Cotton
Chapter 13 â Train From Djibouti
Chapter 14 â Addis Ababa, 1935
Chapter 15 â Rocks in the Clouds
Chapter 16 â Audience with the Emperor
Chapter 17 â Gathered at the River, 1935
Chapter 18 â Dogs and Rabbits
Chapter 20 â Sportsmen and Warriors
Chapter 21 â Stranger to Peace
Chapter 26 â Once More to Africa
Ethiopia
Africa, 1954
O
N
M
ARCH 14, 1954, A YOUNG
E
THIOPIAN IN A RURAL VILLAGE
lay badly injured. An urgent radio message requesting delivery of whole blood and medical supplies was received at the Lideta airport, Addis Ababa.
A handsome, trim, fifty-one-year-old American, former commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force, volunteered for the mercy flight that would cross some of the most rugged terrain in all of Africa. It would be a fateful decision. His name was John Charles Robinson.
As the colonel walked from his flying school office toward the L-5 Stinson, Biachi Bruno, an Italian engineer, caught up with him and asked to go along as copilot. With a nod of his head and a smile, Robinson granted the request. Biachi read the smile as a silent recognition of the irony of the former Ethiopian colonel and an Italian aviator flying together. Less than twenty years before, Italian pilots had tried their best to kill the colonel.
The flight in the small, single-engine former US Army observation plane would take two hours. By land, in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, the same trip could take two days or longerâand that was if the roads and trails had not been washed out or blocked by landslides. Even in the mid-twentieth century, a donkey could be the most reliable mode of surface travel in much of the mountainous country.
The two men waited impatiently until a packet containing two units of whole blood, surgical supplies, morphine, and bandages arrived from the hospital. Biachi loaded the packet into the baggage compartment behind the rear seat of the two-place tandem Stinson, climbed in, and fastened his seatbelt. Colonel Robinson took the front seat, started the engine, taxied to the runway, and conducted the pre-takeoff check of engine, instruments, and flight controls. Satisfied, he ran the engine up to takeoff power and released the brakes.
Because the capital city is situated at an elevation of 7,600 feet above sea level, the 185 horsepower L-5 climbed slowly in the thin air. They would have to reach a minimum altitude of ten thousand feet to clear the ragged ridges, saddles, and passes that lay along the route between mountain peaks reaching above fourteen thousand feet, some snowcapped year-round. Because the snow existed near the equator it was called “tropical ice.”
Air travel across the rugged terrain of Ethiopia is and has always been the kind pilots find extremely demanding and risky. Even in the 1950s, there were few modern radio aids to aerial navigation. The colonel did not need them. He knew the rough terrain of Ethiopia better than any pilot alive. Twenty years earlier, his life had depended upon his knowledge of the minutiae of valleys, streams, mountains, lowlands, deserts, rock outcrops, and trails. Biachi Bruno had asked to go with Robinson to gain such navigational knowledge of the varied Ethiopian landscape from the man he considered the master pilot of Ethiopia. Such knowledge can still mean life or death to pilots navigating through the Simien, Chercher, or Aranna Mountains in the Western Highlands, the Rift Valley, or the Ahmar or Mendebo Mountains of the Eastern Highlands. In the event of a crash, survivors can die of thirst or starvation before they can walk out or be found and rescued.
The two men reached their destination and landed safely on a short, flat, slightly uphill strip of dirt road. They handed the medical supplies to a waiting barefoot runner from the local village. Leaving a trail of dust behind its bone-jarring takeoff roll down the stone-strewn road, the little plane lifted into the air. After he turned on course for home, the colonel wiggled the control stick and lifted both hands into the air, a signal for Bruno to take over. The Italian was delighted. He put his right hand on the rear stick and rested his left on the throttle. Occasionally he peeked around one side or the other of the colonel sitting in front to check the instrument panel for airspeed, altitude, compass heading, and oil pressure.
Robinson relaxed, his gaze sweeping the horizon from right to left.
I never tire of the view from up here.
Mile by mile, the terrain slipped beneath them.
How good this rugged, savage, beautiful country has been to me.
Flying had been his life. He had read somewhere that flight was perhaps mankind's greatest technical achievementâ“
the dream of countless millions of man's ancestors who for eons could only stare at the sky and wish
.” Even so, John knew the plane was but a tiny, fragile, man-made toy winging above the awesome, God-made Ethiopian expanse of jagged, mountainous, plateaus, lush jungles, and deserts of volcanic sand. Here and there, the terrain was ribboned with silver streams that tumbled into wild rivers coursing through falls and rapids eventually to calm and spill out onto valleys, nourishing the fertile plateaus, seeping into desert sands and simply disappearing. Three of the riversâthe Lesser Abay, the Reb, and the Gumaraâfeed Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile. Robinson had flown over it all.
“Colonel,” Biachi Bruno asked, “when did you first know you wanted to fly?”
The question interrupted Robinson's reverie and propelled him through time to a sliver of beach where the Gulf of Mexico lapped onto the shore of Mississippi.
***
The year was 1910. An airplane with a wooden float in place of landing gear, circled over the town of Gulfport, touched down in the shallow water of the Mississippi Sound, and taxied to the beach at the foot of Twenty-Third Avenue. The pilot, John Moisant, usually flew his Blériot monoplane with which he had recently won an air race in Paris. He had shipped it to New Orleans to race the Blériot against a Packard automobile. But he borrowed the float-equipped biplane to visit the young Mississippi town of Gulfport, developed twelve years earlier by Captain Joseph T. Jones, a former Yankee soldier turned oilman from Pennsylvania. Moisant's interest lay not with the town, but rather with Captain Jones's daughter, Grace, whom he had met at a gala in New Orleans some seventy-five miles to the west.
It had not taken long for a large crowd of townsfolk to gather in a semicircle around the flying contraption. John had borrowed the latest model of a Curtiss pusher biplane. It was a strange-looking contrivance composed of a fragile, wire-braced, wood-and-bamboo frame with wings and control surfaces covered in varnished linen, and it was powered by a rear-facing engine mounted behind the pilot's seat. The wheels had been removed and a wooden float attached to the fuselage. Two smaller floats, one mounted under each lower wing, kept the wingtips from dipping into the water.
Two young women, late arrivals, pushed their way through the crowd and approached the intrepid flyer. He was standing by his machine answering questions from the curious crowd.
“Hello again, John,” Grace Jones said, and without giving Moisant time to answer continued, “I want you to meet my friend, Elsie Gary . . . and we have come to take a ride in your flying machine.”
Nodding to Elsie, Moisant replied, “I don't know about that, Miss Jones. What would your father say?”
“Come on, John, take us flying.” Grace smiled. “Please.”
Elsie agreed. “My daddy might kill me, but I want to go, too.”
“Listen, you two,” Moisant said, “Captain Jones will hang me for sure if I do.”
“You promised, John,” Grace said, and she touched John's arm. She had the kind of eyes that could turn men into putty.
“All right, Grace, but I can't take but one of you at a time. Who goes first?”
The toss of a coin decided Elsie Gary would become the first known air passenger in the state of Mississippi. (There is a photograph to prove it.) Elsie climbed up on the plane and sat on little more than a board fastened next to the pilot's seat on top of the lower wing.
Among the growing number of excited spectators, there was a seven-year-old black boy standing at the back of the crowd clutching his mother's hand. From her vantage point, the small, stout woman could see only the aircraft's upper wing above the heads of the crowd. The little boy stood on his tiptoes but could only see the backs of the people in front of him. He squatted down and tried to look between their legs to no avail.
At Moisant's direction, a half-dozen excited volunteers took off their shoes, rolled up the legs of their pants, pushed the plane into water just deep enough for the craft to float freely, and swung it around to face away from the beach. John instructed them to hold tightly to the wing struts and warned them not to let go until he gave the signal. He switched on the magneto, set the throttle, waded around behind the wing, ducked under a tail boom, and hand-cranked the wooden propeller. The warm engine roared to life with a burst of black smoke from the exhaust.