Plane Talk: Cessna Export Tales

By Eyvinn H. Schoenberg and Eyvinn Hansen Schoenberg

Plane Talk: Cessna Export Tales is the story of the team of close friends in the Export Department of the Cessna Aircraft Company, Wichita Kansas as seen through the eyes of Eyvinn H. Schoenberg as he relates through forty tales and five epilogue histories, experiences of his own and those of his friends in exporting Cessnas worldwide.

He describes his strict flight training in a Piper Cub, and the fun of flying Cessnas once authorized to be a Cessna Utility Pilot while learning to fly The Cessna Way, as well as his own and others adventures in flying, selling, and developing an internationally based Distributor and Dealer organization, whose sales of Cessnas in the Caribbean, South America, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, The Far East, Europe, The Middle East, and various African countries in great part caused Wichita Kansas to be called The Air Capitol of the World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 21, 2004
• ISBN: 9781465327017

Eyvinn H. Schoenberg

Eyvinn H. Schoenberg, of Norwegian parentage, grew up in Hawaii on waterfront property facing the Middle Loch of Pearl Harbor, and was soon into swimming, diving, surfing and model building. Eyvinn’s hobbies of swimming, diving and surfing, and then flying, has led him to writing three books: “BOARD TALK and other salty tales”, PLANE TALK: Cessna Export Tales, and this last one: “FISH TALES: fresh and salty”. He and Eleanor live quietly in a Mobil Home park in Ventura Caifornia, sometimes marketing their last two books, checking the waves at Ventura’s Surfers Point, kicking tires at nearby airports, and thinking of going fishing again.

Book preview

Tale 1

HOW DID I EVER GET TO WICHITA?

After finishing the manuscript of my first book, Board Talk and other salty tales, my publisher, Phil Wikel of August Publishing, became interested in my experiences while I was with the Cessna Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas, and suggested I do a second book about them.

So with the encouragement and help of former Cessnans Bill Thompson, Engineering Test Pilot; Gerry Deneau, Administrative Engineer; South American District Sales Manager, Bruce Chuber; C.W. Bill Cole, Caribbean District Sales Manager and Jim Helms, South American Service Manager, all of whom I’ve remained in contact with over the years, the idea for this book was born.

Some forty different experiences, or Tales I soon listed on my favorite yellow pad, jotting them down as I remembered them as they occurred chronologically during the time I was Export Sales Administrator at Cessna from August 1957 to January 1965. They have now become this book, which is written to tell a bit about what happened to Exports, my friends, many of our customers (and myself) at Cessna.

Those seven years were the hectic growth-period of Cessna and its International sales efforts. Exports grew from an average of 23 aircraft sold a month in 1957 to over 120 a month in 1964. I was brought into the thick of this fascinating experience because of my friendship with the two people then in charge of Cessna’s Export Department who were strong in Latin American sales: Mel Mellinger and Bill Cole. We were all graduates of AIFT, (American

Institute of Foreign Trade), now known as American Graduate School of International Management) in Glendale, Arizona in 1948 and 1949 and knew each other while employed in Lima, Peru from 1949 through 1953.

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Export Sales Manager Mel Mellinger and Author, enjoying Fiesta time at the Schoenberg residence, 1958

Deciding to leave the National City Bank of New York in the Fall of 1953, in January of 1954 I found a position with an exportimport firm as special assistant to the new Treasurer of Barclay and Co. in Seattle, WA. I later became Assistant Treasurer, coordinating the firm’s credit and banking arrangements with Seattle First National Bank, Bank of America, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank’s San Francisco Branch, as well as monitoring the company’s sparse cash flow.

It was a wonderfully challenging international business. I had many different ways of coordinating the financing of the sales of our company, headquartered in Seattle, with branch offices in Japan; Okinawa; South Korea; the Philippines and Hong Kong, plus other offices in San Francisco and Zurich, Switzerland. At the time I was hired the company was not a profitable enterprise, as the Korean

War was winding down, and the large old Japanese firms were beginning to dominate their growing economy again with the help of MITI, the economic advisory planning arm of the Japanese government.

But thanks to the new Treasurer who had hired me, together we pared expenses, closed branches, cleaned up accounts receivable, (let alone nagging accounts payable), and by 1956 year’s-end the company came out of the red into the black. However, a new Comptroller was taken on and my days under him were numbered! This Comptroller looked behind at records, not forward to new businesses growing in Southeast Asia. So, by mid-Summer 1957 I was let go.

By then I’d been in contact with Mel Mellinger, Export Sales Manager, to come to Wichita for an interview. He then arranged to have me fly from Seattle to Wichita in a C-182 Skylane piloted by Len Kash, Regional Sales Manager for the Northwest. It was a hot mid-August time, and in a Cessna C-182 over the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming it became a turbulence-plagued flight, during which our pilot thoughtfully provided his passenger with two sick-cups and they were helpful. In fact, both of them were used by yours truly!

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The type of Cessna the author flew in from Seattle to Wichita for the job interview as Export Sales Administrator

Finally we reached Wichita, Kansas, temperature 97 degrees Fahrenheit, 25 mph winds a-blowing from the Southwest: A regular tornado alley of the Central Plains, with lots of ragweed and other pollens arriving from who knows where. August 27th was the regular day they tended to get to Wichita, I later learned from a doctor tending to my sudden allergy attacks. He said the Plains of southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma were the pollen-growing champs of the Midwest, and pollens always arrived in late August. But his allergy shots helped a lot.

All this was, of course, rather different from Seattle’s cool, benign summer climate, but so be it. I was now committed to the choice of life in ICT (Wichita), Kansas working with old friends, or unemployed in Seattle. It was an easy decision! So I accepted Mel’s offer to be the new Export Sales Administrator and was asked to report back to Wichita as soon as possible with wife, daughter, son and our feisty thoroughbred Welch Terrier, Duig of Mercer, aka Duke II.

Flying back to Seattle, this time in a Boeing instead of a Cessna, I reflected on the opportunity now being afforded me to be involved in flying and international trade, both my long-time interests. Once again, lucky me!

I drove our 4-door Dodge from Seattle east: Idaho . . . . Montana . . . . North Dakota . . . . South Dakota, and then south via Nebraska towards southeast Kansas leaving wife Marcia to sell our house and head east by train, for yet another move in her traveler’s life! We located and rented a house and settled in. Schools for daughter Christina and son Victor (Vic) were found and I began, once again, learning on the job. So started my new career in General Aviation International Sales!

Flying came naturally to Kansans who were grain farmers and cattle raisers, handy with tools and a ruggedly independent sort as was Clyde Cessna, a farmer’s son who taught himself to fly in 1911. He became an exhibition pilot after World War I and in 1925 joined forces with Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman to form the Travel Air Manufacturing Company and they located it in Wichita, Kansas; thus was founded the Air Capitol of the World.

Well, Lloyd and Walter both liked biplanes, but Clyde preferred high-winged, cantilevered, strutless monoplanes. Can you imagine the heated discussions as they debated the merits of their pet designs?

Walter Beech left to build the biplanes and then the fabulous Beech Staggerwing biplane; Stearman built his Primary Trainer biplane, and Cessna his high-wing monoplanes. Cessna’s company built some 250 of them before falling sales during the depression forced closure of the factory in 1931.

During 1932 and 1933 Clyde Cessna, son Eldon and friends built four racers; the CR-1, CR-2, CR-2A and CR-3. The CR-2A crashed in 1933 and pilot Roy Ligott was killed. Clyde’s interest in building aircraft also died. In 1934, nephews Dwane and Dwight Wallace reopened the Cessna factory but Clyde declined to participate in his nephews’ ventures: among them a new design, the C-34, in which aeronautical engineers Tom Salter, Gerry Gerteis and Dwane, President of the new company, collaborated. This aircraft proved to be a winner at air races (popular in those days) and, in 1936, company Demo Pilot Dwane Wallace won once again, taking possession of the Detroit Trophy for Cessna, and the Title, with the words World’s Most Efficient Airplane. So progressed Cessna until WW II, with mostly C-34 sales.

During WW II, Beech’s Twin Beech, Stearman’s Primary Trainer (later in the war built by Boeing in Wichita) and Cessna’s new twin-engined Bobcat all did yeoman service, with Cessna building 5,399 Bobcats for the USA and our Allied Forces by 1945.

Toward the end of the War, Cessna began planning to fill the need for inexpensive two-seater trainers: the 120, the 140; later four-seaters, the 170 and 180 and the higher performance 190s and 195s. Then came the twin-engine 310 series followed by a two-seat, tricycle-landing-geared 150, the four-seat 172, plus the 182, all to replace the 120, 140, 170 and 190-195 series. Domestic sales were ever-increasing and International sales were also growing; 23 a month in 1957.

I arrived in August of that year to help sell more Cessnas to the waiting world, under the tutelage of my old Lima, Peru pals, Mel and Bill, who were running the Export Department.

Wow, what a fabulous job it would be!!

Tale 2

FROM PIPERS TO CESSNAS, AND A LESSON LEARNED

Thrust into this new world of Cessna’s General Aviation flying procedures with a 17-years-old expired Private Pilot’s license obtained in a 50 HP Piper Cub where I trained at the then-called John Rodgers Airport, in that beautiful little two-place, tandem-seated airplane with conventional (two-wheeled) landing gear with a tail skid instead of a tail wheel, I found that things were very different in the cockpit for me as my new training began.

John Rodgers Airport was built and named by the Territory of Hawaii (Hawaii not then spelled with the apostrophe . . . . Author) in 1927 for Commander Rodgers, USN Aviator #2, the first to fly from Alameda, California almost to Hawaii in a Navy twin-engined floatplane with his crew of four other Navy aviators. For details of their flight, US Air Force Army Lt. Colonel William J. Horvath’s book Above the Pacific records that flight and other aviation historical events occurring in the Islands in fascinating detail. Now, John Rodgers Airport is the very busy Honolulu International Airport. But then it was a nice, quiet small airport . . . . just right for wannabe pilots.

Our short, crusty instructor was on loan from the Navy for our Civil Aeronautics Authority Pilot Training School (CAAPTS) flight training course offered through the University of Hawaii. During my Junior year, a number of us wannabes took the flight training course from September, 1939 through June of 1940. We received ground school instruction from two Army officers at first, then the in-flight training during the second semester of the 1940 U. of H. class. At last, we students were introduced to our instructor whom we called Chief, and our student-trainer airplanes: Yellow-painted Piper J-3 Cubs, S/N 26139, 26950, 24601, and 26026, provided under contract to CAAPTS by K. T. Flying Service. Up we went, in the back seat for our first lesson in the air to learn how to handle the throttle, ailerons, rudder and elevators!

In the Cub, power changes then were by a knobbed control handle on the left side of the cockpit for one’s left hand, ailerons and elevators by a stick in the middle of the cockpit for one’s right hand, slanted to the right for banks to the right, coordinated with a little left rudder to avoid the steepening of the bank. Coordination of the rudder with the ailerons was practiced for turns and perfect circles without losing altitude. The elevators were for attitude changes, with climbs by pushing the throttle knob forward for more power and altitude, with very little up elevator. Here one learned that up elevator raised the nose or attitude of the Cub, not necessarily the altitude; pulling back on the stick, one learned soon that it should be done with care and smoothness. Rough, hard or jerky control movements would result otherwise, bringing harsh, sea-going expletives from our enlisted U.S. Navy Chief Pilot Instructor!

Once we could maintain straight and level flight, turns, circles, and rectangles, then came figure 8s with concentric circles oppositely around a spot such as a large tree on the ground below us in our practice areas, adjusting the circles by tightening or opening up the banks, correcting for wind drift. This was a difficult maneuver but necessary to be able to correct for crosswinds if need be. Next came the descents, at first by simply reducing power from straight and level positions, then by the use of slips (at first an awkward-feeling position for the student pilot), with the stick moved to the right, while the left rudder pedal was pushed to give left rudder. That gave the airplane a bank to the right, while the left rudder kicked the nose around to keep the path of flight straight ahead, as the plane’s descent steepened, without increasing velocity. The crabbing angle, strange at first, was a wonderful maneuver once one’s initial alarm at the plane’s weird position was overcome by repetition, and for left slips the stick and rudder positions were reversed. One had to learn both types of slips for landing so when on either downwind leg, right or left of our rectangular landing patterns, our final approaches were too high, altitude corrections could be made easily without a go around. Otherwise, a sharp complaint from you know whom! Fun . . . . eventually!!

By then we students were getting the feel of flying, when there came a new maneuver to be learned from the Chief. Up we went, much higher than usual, and from a straight-ahead climb angle the nose of the airplane came up, up, and up; the stick back, back, and back, until the nose was aimed far above our heretofore-friendly horizon. Suddenly, forward flight slowed as the controls began to feel soft and unresponsive, with some strange vibrations to warn the student pilot to lower the nose as the plane attempted to settle to avoid something bad: The Stall!! With no lift, no more flight could continue until the airplane’s pitch was reduced and recovery commenced. Of course, our ground school had taught us about stalls which happened because the wings’ angle of attack had become too great from level flight’s relative wind-against-the-wing chord (center line), resulting with the loss of velocity of the air flow over the upper surface of the wings which created the lift. So recovery by lowering the nose and regaining equilibrium with the relative wind causing the lift, had to be resumed. Pretty scary, even if we remembered the theory! Stalls at first were power off; then came the power on stall, by keeping the power on until no further flight at that pitch angle could be maintained, and down the nose would go. So stalls became sort of old hat, but in different hats that we had to learn to recognize and avoid, or recover from their effects: Power Off, Power On, Accelerated Maneuvers (for, especially, the more one banks the plane the less the lift there is, so stalls can come unexpectedly). The last one to remember, and definitely not to forget: Approaches to Landing, as one slows down on final for the round-out and touch-down.

But our Instructor Da Chief now had a new one for us to learn: The Spin!! And up, up, up again we went for spin practice.

From our ground school we knew what a spin was after the stall and loss of lift. The plane might, due to the twisting force of the propeller (or torque) during power stalls or the natural instability of that airplane in power off stalls, fall in a twisting spiral downward still stalled, and difficult from which to recover (little understood in the early days of aviation). They had been carefully explained before, by our Army Instructors. In theory, we knew what a spin was, what caused it, and how to recover from it by centering the rudder (and ailerons, if needed) so as to straighten out the path downward and regain the lift from the stalled dive . . . . if you still had enough altitude!

We were graded in our log book by our Instructor by the numbers: 1-Excellent, down to 5,-Very Bad. Too many 5s and one could be washed out! Reviewing the log book once with my young son, he noticed the 5 on the day spins were the maneuver first practiced (apparently a rare score, as I remember). Wow, he gave you a 5! Were you scared? I had to admit that I was nervous, but suggested Keep reading, and soon he found 4s, 3s, 2s and, finally, a 1 for a spin maneuver day. He felt better then about his pilot Dad. But I don’t think I ever liked spins nearly as much as slips, though we still had to practice them!

But to get up in the air to fly in the lovely Piper J-3 Cub, then equipped with a tail skid instead of a tail wheel, we had to learn to taxi out from the parking spot. To do that, a burst of power with the stick forward a bit would lift the tail skid off the ground. The force of the air blasted past the rudder caused ruddered turns to swing the plane around to the new directions needed to follow the taxiway. Further progress controlled by short blips of the engine giving thrusts of air against the Cub’s rudder steered the plane on to the active runway. But one had to be careful doing all this as too much down elevator together with too much power would lift the tail up too high, with propeller too close to the ground, resulting in loud noises of pebbles picked up and sent back, striking the yellow fabric-covered belly of the Cub. This would get an expletive from the Chief and a 5, if repeated, so we students immediately became very careful. It was a bit tricky, but had to be learned. Procedures were different on grass, as well as on the tarmac, so smooth and easy was the watchword. Maybe that’s why tail skids finally went the way of the Studebaker wagon and buggy whips, and tail wheels were designed so as to turn with the rudders.

The earliest practice takeoffs had been easy as we had the Instructor to get us to the Active, wait for and receive the green light from the tower, and have him advance the throttle, keeping the Cub straight down the runway. We learned to follow his moves on the stick and the rudder pedals, until we could do it ourselves, and be able to counter tendencies of drifting off the runway, when caused by crosswinds, with careful rudder pedal footwork and the stick’s ailerons slightly banked into the crosswind, to at last take off in flight, piloting our beloved J-3 Cub. Crosswinds were problems in figure 8s, circles, and takeoff-and-landing practices. They had to be understood and managed, always a bugaboo.

So we learned how to fly a Piper J-3 Cub, and after 51 hours and 20 minutes on June 11, 1940 as noted in my log book, Robert Tyce, C 7899, Owner of K. T. Flying Service had me write in that day’s entry:

Received Private Pilot License at end of C.A.A.P.T.S.

Like many young pilots, proud of their newly-learned flying skills, I immediately subjected my brother on June 18 to be my first passenger on a ride for thirty minutes. We got up and down safely, and eight days later my best pal courageously went up with me for a fifty-five minute ride. But my conservative father apparently declined such an honor, as his name does not appear in that hallowed document! Several more flights around Oahu on cross-countries with friends and three flights on the Mainland in the fall of 1940 filled my log book to a grand total of 58 hours and 30 minutes. At that total of instruction in flying and the few hours as pilot in command, I arrived in Wichita, Kansas to become once again involved in flying.

But I had to learn to fly the Cessna way, as the indoctrination to flying Cessnas was a necessary requisite for my job responsibilities as Export Sales Administrator; so I reported to Mr. Emory Rakes, who doubled as Chief Corporate Pilot for Executives’ trips out of town, and as head of Flight Training for the Marketing Department.

With such ingrained memories of my Cub and Aeronca tail dragger flying, I then began my acquaintance with the various 1957 versions of Cessnas in our marketing group’s Domestic and Export Department demo aircraft. These models were used for training and sharpening of the skills of our sales and service people to the Utility and the Demonstrator categories. Flying these Cessna airplanes, mostly tricycled, for me was at first very different!

In the cockpit of the Cessnas, the throttle knob was in the middle of the instrument panel for one’s right hand to push in for increased power, pull out for less, and to twist for a change in pitch of the propeller: In, greater or fine, for takeoff; Out less or coarse, for cruise power. This was not like the pre-war designed 50 HP Cub with its fixed pitch wooden prop!

Ailerons and elevators were no longer moved by a stick in the middle of the cockpit, but by wheels for both the student in the left front or traditionally, the pilot’s seat, and the co-pilot in the right, or Instructor’s, front passenger’s seat. Turning the wheel clockwise caused a bank to the right moved by the ailerons: Right aileron moved up; Left, down. Pulling the wheel back caused the elevator to move up; pushing forward, down. These were the same basic moves used, of course, by the Cub for the controls; but for me, a right-hander, the beautiful wheel which had to be controlled by the left hand for ailerons and elevators on take-offs, while throttle, prop pitch, engine mixture and (something new) wing flaps controlled by a handle on the cockpit floor (and one more there . . . . the flight trim tab wheel for the elevator). Meanwhile, both feet were busy on the rudder pedals; all this, with the Instructor watching me like a hawk as we trundled down the narrow Delivery Center runway on takeoff at the Cessna Pawnee plant on a very hot, bumpy-aired and late summer day!

Doing all this, required telling my left hand on the wheel to keep the wings level or perhaps banked slightly into a crosswind, the attitude of the aircraft in a proper angle of climb, steady on the elevator, and no drift while leaving the runway center line thanks to maintaining direction with careful rudder pedaling!! I gradually learned to avoid such problems often caused by those darn crosswind-y winds, so prevalent in Kansas.

Emory seemed to despair at my ineptness as I gradually unlearned Piper Cub stick-and-rudder habits such as how, during WW II, Wolfgang Langewiesche’s classic book entitled Stick and Rudder an Explanation of the Art of Flying described the fine points of flying with stick and rudder. But gradually, my instructor began succeeding in transitioning me to modern tricycled-landing-geared aircraft with different cockpit controls and his Cessna style of flying.

All this required flight training took a rather long period of time from when I took my first lesson in airwork in a C-172, noted as 1 hour and 30 minutes in my precious, now 18-year-old log book. But it also showed that I had three flights marked Familiarization, Airwork and Patterns and Landings at Wichita Municipal Airport in two different C-182s, and a C-180 tail dragger with my Lima, Peru pal C.W. Bill Cole, before starting with Instructor Emory Rakes.

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Author’s first lesson in learning to fly the Cessna way: in a 1957 C-172

My training was rather sporadic, busy as I was learning on the job of how things were supposed to be done in the Export Department. However, Emory finally soloed me . . . . again . . . . on August 1, 1958, almost a year after arriving in Wichita. By then we had been using various new C-175 models, which were great to fly with their extra power over the C-172. For a full hour I was all alone in N9385 Bravo, happy at last with NO Instructor in the right seat, having been signed off by Emory’s clean-up Instructor, M. H. Pat Patterson as noted in the log book, to be a Cessna Marketing Department Utility Pilot once I obtained my Private License by passing the FAA Flight Test.

While gradually being trained in flying Emory Rakes’ Cessna way, I was introduced to one of the many responsibilities of the Export Sales Administrator, in this case coordinating the delivery of an aircraft ordered, built, and ready for delivery to a Distributor, Dealer, or customer, depending on the particular arrangements of the Distributor or Direct Factory Dealer with our Export Department.

To do this, Cessna’s Export Department had three grades of representatives:

1.   Distributor: Responsible for a large territory or country and with a Dealer’s area to work with the public, since the Distributor was a wholesaler, with his own captive Dealership at his headquarters for sales and service to the public; also, he was responsible as well to train his other outlying Dealers. His Dealers were not supposed to work directly with the factory on orders except for financially cleared pick-ups.

This was at times a thorny problem with Exports, when the Dealer or his customer had paid the Distributor in local currency, but U.S. money that was needed for clearance had not yet arrived on the airplane’s delivery date, for whatever reason.

2.   Direct Factory Dealer: Responsible for a smaller territory and who could work directly with the Export Department regarding sales and service in his market area.

3. Dealer: Sales and service organization nominated by a Distributor and under the Distributor’s control for sales and service to the public.

This delivery was that of a twin-engined C-310-B model destined for our Australia Distributor in Sidney to be flown there by a well-known World War II pilot from California. He and the Distributor had arranged for auxiliary fuel tanks to be installed at a nearby airport, not by Cessna, and a long range HF radio for the over water flights (2500 miles from Oakland to Honolulu), lesser mileage on the legs he probably planned to use: to Canton Island, Fiji, New Caledonia, then on to Sidney; all Army Air Corps stops used in WW II.

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Type of C-310-B destined for Australia

The pilot flew to Oakland with no problems, prepared for his long over-water trip to Oahu’s Honolulu International Airport, and arrived there with a report of just a routine flight. With the C-310-B’s top speed of over 220 MPH; at a lesser cruising speed it would have taken him about 12-1/2 hours. It was not just a routine flight as I, as an Island boy, knew about the history of flights to the Hawaiian Islands from earlier times and from my own transPacific Navy and airline crossings.

After