Jason Chou, son of CNAC co-pilot Bing Zhou, passed along these photos.
After completing college in Kunming, Bing Zhou joined the China National Aviation Corporation in 1944, and he flew more than 130 Hump trips before the war ended. He stayed with the airline after the war, and when the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek collapsed, he opted to stay on the mainland. In November, 1949, he piloted a C-47 north from Hong Kong into China. He worked in China’s domestic aviation industry, for CAAC, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, until he retired in 1987.
Fred Chin on the left; Bing Zhou in the white shirt, second from the right.
Bing Zhou and a friend, late 1940s
Bing Zhou enjoying a coke in the cockpit, late 1940s
Capt Fred Chin, the left-most figure in the left-most photo above, lives in Shanghai today, and Jason Chou told me yesterday that he is coming to the United States in April for Moon Chin’s 100th birthday party. I hope I get to meet him.
There’s an excellent story about Bing Zhou and Dick Rossi on Bing Zhou’s page at cnac.org. As well as some nice photos.
And of course, Moon Chin is one of the main supporting characters in my book, China’s Wings, and one of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met.
I’ve posted a lot about Moon in the last two and a half years. Here are some of my favorites:
I just saw the news on the Rock & Ice website that Kate Rutherford and Madaleine Sorkin have climbed the route Mate, y Porro, y Todo lo Demas on the north pillar of Fitzroy, in Patagonia. Well done! That’s a colossal feature.
In their honor, I’ll post a few photos of Fitzroy. (The north pillar is the immense flatiron leaning against the right side of Fitzroy in the first photo.)
This morning, I stumbled across an interesting photo of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the Sirius flying boat they used on their famous survey flight to China in 1931 here, at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum’s website. (It enlarges well using the “large JPEG” button below the photo.)
Their aerial journey to China was the subject of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book North to the Orient. Near the end of North to the Orient, Anne Morrow describes Charles’ efforts to survey the extent of the damage caused by the Yangtze River’s 1931 flood, which is possibly the most devastating natural disaster in human history, and is briefly described in China’s Wings (pp. 29-30). The Lindbergh’s efforts to mitigate some of the unbearable suffering of the flood survivors nearly ended in Charles’ demise. It’s an exciting episode in an enjoyable book.
North to the Orient is also one of the three books I discussed in the four-minute 3 Books episode Pioneers of the Sky I recorded for NPR’s All Things Considered last March. The other two books are Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars and Ernest K. Gann’s Fate is the Hunter.
I enjoyed the writing, recording, and production process and would love to do more radio.
On September 30, 1943, Chuck Sharp, Operations Manager of the China National Aviation Corporation, wrote a letter to a Colonel Felton, in the US Army Service of Supply headquarters in New Delhi, discussing the airline’s operation and trying to solve what was, to Sharp, an outrageous Army-caused SNAFU — the US Army had impounded 420 tons worth of equipment consigned to the airline.
On that date, CNAC had 27 planes, and of those 27 planes, CNAC was keeping 20 constantly in the air. Twenty planes used 325,000 gallons of fuel per month, which had to be divided around the many airfields the airline used. Sharp’s letter discussed engine upgrades, spare parts, shop equipment, hand tools, airplane parts, engine parts from Pratt &Whitney, Wright, Hamilton Propellers, instruments, miscellaneous test equipment, radio ground transmitting stations, Bendix radio parts, and more.
On and on the list went… on it was everything necessary for DC-3 type engines, instruments, and airframes, and then the list ran to various shop equipment, food, office sundries, canteen supplies, including eight ¾ ton carryall vehicles, eight 4×4 command cars, twelve 1½ ton trucks, a pair of 2 ½ ton 6×6 tanker trucks, and a dozen jeeps.
In all, the equipment on order was valued at $446,099.63 U.S. dollars (worth more than $5 million modern dollars) and it weighed 420 tons. The Army had impounded the shipment when it arrived in India.
Arthur N. Young, a member of CNAC’s board of directors, had to fly to Dehli to get it released to the company.
The parts list: Sharp to Colonel Felton, September 30, 1943
The Army-impounded shipment and efforts to release it: Arthur N. Young to His Excellency H.H. Kung, September 21, 1943.
Both documents in the Young Papers at the Hoover Institute.
In his comment, Eric mentioned that his grandfather told him that the CNAC mechanics had the plane flying again the next day. (The one in the photo to the right.) And although historically, the pilots of the China National Aviation Corporation have garnered the lion’s share of the glory for the airline’s success (as they have in my book, China’s Wings), I feel I ought to acknowledge the miracles worked for twenty years by CNAC’s teams of mechanics and maintenance experts. They labored in difficult and uncomfortable environment conditions in China, Burma, and India, and they always dealt with chronic shortages of supplies and spare parts. Quite simply, none the airline’s astonishing accomplishments would have happened without their talents, expertise, and dedication to duty.
Mechanics salvaging one of the Kweilin’s engines
Some of my favorite CNAC stories hinge on the accomplishments of the mechanics, and not all of them made it into the final draft of China’s Wings: salvaging and restoring the Kweilin, the plane in which Hugh Woods was shot down by the Japanese in August, 1938, renaming it and returning it to service only to have it shot down by the Japanese AGAIN, in October, 1940 (pp. 155-171); Chuck Sharp, Zigmund Soldinski, and The Flying Sieve (pp. 265-267); Bond and Ernie Allison flying a Consolidated Commodore with unmatched engines (which isn’t in China’s Wings, but can be found here); mechanic Troy Heine threatening a gang of coolie laborers tearing up a railroad track ahead of the advancing Japanese when Heine needed it to evacuate a dismantled airplane; and, of course, the absolutely classic story of the DC-2 1/2… (pp. 228-231)
The DC-2 1/2
Coming soon, I’ll post a list of spare parts requisitioned by the airline in 1943 to give some idea of what it took to keep the airplanes flying during its years on the Hump, and I’ll see if I can find the Troy Heine story in one of my old drafts…
Donini is in that pile somewhere… hitchhiking out on the steppe… we were at this spot for 6 or 8 hours. Happily, the first car picked us up. And holy mother of God, was it ever windy….
Well, Liz Matzelle at the HFF managed to track down a photo of the airplane when it was in service with CNAC. (It was hiding in the cnac.org archives all along, on the page of Captain Sam Belieff.)
CNAC No. 100 after a rough landing; Captain Sam Belieff with his hand on the engine nacelle.
Despite the laconic caption inked on the photo above, I’m pretty certain that the CNAC mechanics had No. 100 back in service within a few days.
(UPDATE: According to the story from Sam Belieff’s grandson posted in the comments below, CNAC 100 was back in the air the next day. Great detail!)
No anecdotes about the airplane made it into China’s Wings, my book about William Langhorne Bond and the madcap adventures of the China National Aviation Corporation, but the next plane in fleet number sequence most definitely does.
CNAC No. 101 was the C-47 in which CNAC wildman Jimmy Scoff died leaving Dinjan on the night of October 7, 1944, when a violent thunderstorm tore the wing off the plane (China’s Wings, pp. 358-359). Scoff was CNAC’s great wildman during the Hump years, the star of many of the company’s most legendary stories — most notoriously the time he shot the lock off the door of a whorehouse in Calcutta. (China’s Wings, pp. 326-327)
Here’s the report about Scoff’s fatal accident at cnac.org. Apparently the wing of Scoff’s airplane stayed stuck in a tall tree through the rest of the war.
If you’ve ever dreamed about climbing a big wall like Yosemite’s El Capitan, my friend Chris McNamara, main dude at the essential climbing website Supertopo.com, has just released a book that’ll teach you how to do it.
His new book, How to Big Wall Climb, released this week, promises to add tremendously to the how-to climbing genre. Chris is an exceptionally accomplished big wall climber, having climbed more than 100 of the beasts, including a whopping 70 times up the Yosemite behemoth El Capitan. He has forgotten more about big wall climbing than most of us are ever going to know, but he’s done his best to download his methodical, step-by-step brain into his How to Big Wall Climb book so the rest of us can glean some of his expertise. You can get a great sense for Chris and for what he has done watching the three and a half minute video on his How to Big Wall Climb page
Chris is a great guy, and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on his book. His ability to get things done leaves me in awe. The only strike against Chris that I can think of is that he’s a “janitor,” a “sweeper,” a stand-up-paddle surfer, and although I’ve been amazed to watch how fast he’s made himself good at it, one of these days he’ll gird up his loins and learn to pop to his feet like the rest of us. ;-)
