Swamp Eagles

By Darryl DiMaggio

Stories about flying float planes in the South Louisiana marsh/swamp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781626759886

Book preview

1

HOW NOT TO FLY FLOATPLANES

South Louisiana is a beautiful green subtropical near-paradise. It is only a near paradise now because it actually was paradise in the recent past. At least it was Utopia for floatplane pilots. It is now paradise lost. Reasons for the demise of this Cajun Eden can be summed up as life, the world, history…just the way things are. The course of human, natural, and unnatural events has nearly ended the most pleasurable occupation on this planet.

Major oil companies began drilling in the swamps and marshes of Louisiana long before World War II. They developed the inland barge-drilling rig, a uniquely adapted unit for punching deep holes in the Earth under the shallow waters and swamps. All the equipment needed for oil drilling was built onto a portable barge: derrick, machinery, and even comfortable living quarters for the crew. Wells were drilled sometimes to depths of 20,000 plus feet. After discovering oil or gas, the necessary piping was installed to get it into a pipeline and then to market. If it was a dry-hole (no oil or gas), the hole was plugged and abandoned. Regardless of the outcome, the rig was moved to another location by small tugboats. This cycle: drill, move, drill again, was continually repeated by the hundreds of rigs working South Louisiana. The oil industry, including all of the service and support groups, soon learned the fastest, safest, and most economical form of transportation. Across the deep jungle-like swamps and wetland distances roared the floatplane.¹

By the late 1970s floatplanes numbered in the hundreds. Most of these floatplanes were flown by salesmen, who were only incidentally pilots. Many held only a Private Pilot Certificate SES(Single Engine Sea) earned in the floatplane. These pilot/sales types would fly from oil rig to oil rig making sales calls. Imagine flying, talking, flying, talking, all day long and being home every night. Doing it again the next day and getting paid for it… Valhalla! It was the same with myself(the author). My job was to fly out into the swamp, call on the rig boss(the Toolpusher), and sweet talk him into using my company’s tugboats to move their rig. Moving the rig to the next location was no small task and usually took several days and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

With only four hundred flying hours total, and only twenty-five in floatplanes, I was lucky enough to secure my first flying job. The only other applicant had about ten thousand hours on floats, but he also had a DUI driving conviction on his record. Incredibly, this made our insurance rates equal. I filibustered that employer until he had to give me the job.

Thus, began my flying career at the late age of thirty-nine. I started it with the gusto of a fanatic. Understand the accursed life-long affliction, which all pilots suffer, had reached a peak in me. I was, totally and beyond redemption, addicted to flying. Like a virus, flying gets into your blood. It is a malaise that defies description, sometimes taking years to fully develop. A person may never have had a flying lesson and be just as hooked as all the heroes in that movie, The Right Stuff. If you have it, you understand.

As a boy I was fascinated with flight. I was always building those little rubber band powered balsa and tissue models. After playing with them for a couple of weeks I would stage a crash for all my neighborhood playmates. Setting the tail ablaze, then launching the model was always more spectacular when I strategically placed a couple of firecrackers during construction. Fortunately for myself and the rest of humanity, this destructive dark side was outgrown before I was old enough to do lasting harm. My teen years often found me dreaming at the airport fence. Occasionally, I would save up enough money in those days for a short airplane ride. The pilot would circle the little Piper Tri-Pacer over the small swampland town only once, let you see your house, and then return to the airport. Once, one of the pilots even allowed me to touch the controls during the fifteen-minute flight. And all for the exorbitant fee of $2.50 (quite a lot of money back then)! Often my thriftily saved funds, destined for the Sunday collection plate, were somehow vectored to the airport ; dark side again. I suppose that put me at risk with the brimstone and pitchfork gang, but the flying sure was fun.

Indeed, had I realized earlier how much I would love flying, I would never have done anything else. However, discouragement overwhelmed my fledgling aspirations of a flying career at about seventeen. This, so called Doctor, who examined me for a Civil Air Patrol physical, completely deflated my bubble. He said I would never be able to fly, You will never get over this heart disease. I gave up. What a jerk. A second opinion would have been wise back then, but what do you know when you’re seventeen? Twenty years later it was no longer even evident. Who knows how many more enemy MIGs would have fallen over Vietnam? Though much to my delight, flying lessons twenty years late were just as enjoyable.

I used flying to speed travel time in my marine electronics business for about three years after earning my Private Pilot Certificate. I accrued over four hundred flying hours, mostly in Cessna 150s and 172s. One of the offices I managed had a small grass strip about half a block away. My employees and I named it Manure International. Once the cows were scattered it was a fine landing strip, excepting the plane needed washing after every trip. During those three years the sheer excitement of flying caused me to frequently forget everything else. On one occasion my secretary hurriedly drove up while I was preflighting. In my excitement and anticipation over a chance to fly, I had forgotten the electronic parts, the very purpose of the flight. But, I did take the flying part serious. I consider flying to be the safest means of transportation yet devised by man. Even so, aircraft are not toys and should not be treated as such. I never took chances. I still don’t.

South Louisiana floatplane pilots have become an endangered species due to a combination of circumstances and events well beyond their control. Just as other industries have moved out of the country, so too has the oil business. Importation of foreign oil, environmental restrictions, cheaper labor, government tax policies, OPEC, oil prices, gas prices, plus depletion of the oilfields themselves, are all conspiring to bring about an inevitable end. In 1982 there were well over one hundred Cessna amphibians and floatplanes based in South Louisiana. Today, there may be as little as ten. Of course there has been a corresponding thinning out of pilots. The only ones left are old dinosaurs and a very few younger ones who stubbornly hang on to what’s left of our South Louisiana dreams.

South Louisiana just happens to lie along a major bird migration route. Birdwatchers love it. Both resident and transient fowl number in the millions at any given time. The American Coot (scientific name: Fulica americana) is one of these birds. A large chicken-sized, duck-like, species, it is very common in South Louisiana marshes and swamps. While being somewhat colorful, it is at the same time a rather ungainly looking bird. Worse yet, it is definitely a poor flyer. The Cajun name for this feathered enigma is Poule D’eau (pronounced: POOL DEW). In contrast, the Bald Eagle also builds its’ nest in South Louisiana and is considered the best of flyers. And so it also goes with floatplane pilots. You have some Swamp Eagles and you have some Poule D’eaux(the x on the end makes it plural). I have flown for several companies during my flying career. I have met, seen, and flown with the best Swamp Eagles, and perhaps, even the worst Poule D’eaux over the years. But, even the Eagles have a little Poule D’eau in them and the Poule D’eaux, of course, have traces of Eagle. Many amusing and amazing incidents have occurred as the Swamp Eagles and Poule D’eaux encountered South Louisiana’s special flying demands. This book is an account of some of the best of these tall tales.

Bald Eagle

Poule D’eau

____________________

¹ An aircraft fitted with pontoons(floats) for landing in the water.

2

THE J3 AND THE WORMS

Before I began flying for a living my vocation was marine electronics. You know, all those gizmos and whiz boxes on modern ships such as RADAR, LORAN, etc. Starting as a technician, I progressed so that in a few years I became manager of a small company with several offices along the gulf coast. Traveling often, I soon realized how utterly unproductive, not to mention boring, that mile after mile of driving in an automobile can become. So to speed my travel time between offices I decided to get a Private Pilot license.¹ This would allow me to rent an airplane and fly it myself when convenient. On occasion I was able to give faster service to my customers by delivering parts, equipment, and personnel between offices or to the ship. I used mostly a Cessna 150 or 172, landing at the nearest airport or grass strip, and then begging a ride to the ship or office. However, after getting my float rating² I would sometimes rent the Dream Machine. It was the most beautiful little yellow airplane on shiny silver floats, a flying monument to a bygone age. With this grand old Piper J3 Cub on floats, marine electronics took on a whole new aspect. I could literally delight myself directly to the vessel needing service. Often, I could even dock alongside the ship and service the RADAR or whatever. The J3 on floats was really a joy to fly. It was especially fun in the summer, with the window that opened up against the wing, and the door that folded down against the side. The roaring slipstream brushed your right shoulder and whipped around the cockpit giving a sense of birdlike freedom and messing up your hair. You had better be familiar with the territory because unfolding a chart in that breeze was impossible. That was an early hard-learned lesson, but there was another, even more indelible experience.

We were installing the electronic equipment on some newly built offshore oil support vessels at a small shipyard in Stephensville, Louisiana. Stephensville is one of those picturesque little villages that stretches a couple of miles along a bayou bank. The small shipyard sprang up in the mid 1970s along with many others fostered by the now busted oil boom. But those were boom times and everyone always wanted things yesterday, and was willing to pay for it. They still want it yesterday, but are no longer willing to pay.

This particular shipyard devised a rather unique method of launching those newly built vessels. They slid them down a huge ramp made of steel beams into the water. That part was not so unusual. What was so unique is that they used bananas to grease those ramps to make them slick. The bananas were biodegradable and didn’t pollute their pristine little bayou setting. This has nothing to do with our story but I thought I would put it in as a little side attraction.

The new automatic pilot that our company had installed on one of the boats had a defective part that needed replacement, a small circuit board. When? Yesterday, of course. Luckily the only new part available in North America was at our Cut Off office. Cut Off, along with the peculiar name is another of those numerous bayou-side villages, and our office was on a bayou-side dock, a perfect setup for a J3 trip. Weather was good with a few summer cumulus clouds and light breezes, just ideal. A friend of mine, another pilot, came along for the ride. After landing at Cut Off we didn’t even have to tie up, one of my people came running out and handed us the part. I opened the small four inch cardboard box by removing the lid, made sure it was the correct part needed, stuffed it back into the box with all those little Styrofoam worms that are so annoying, and put the lid back. Storing it on the rear floor, we pushed off, taxied out and took off, enraptured with the J3.

At about eight hundred feet in our fat, dumb, and euphoric climb, there were suddenly little styrofoam worms flying everywhere. We watched as the box pieces, bottom and lid, swirled around overhead, sort of hung there in formation, mocked us in slow motion, then disappeared out the abyss. The part! The part! The part, raced through our two collective brain cells. I looked around at my friend, he was looking on the rear floor. He reached around behind him and came up with the pretty little green circuit board clenched tightly in his hand. The box had undoubtedly opened, then the wind scattered the lighter worms and box parts