Jetrader - May/June 2008 - 28

Into the Fire At the airport, I introduced myself to TMA’s management and noted the mattresses and Kalashnikov AK-47 riﬂes leaning against the walls of the chairman’s ofﬁce. The driver of the aircraft passenger stairs must have broken a local speed record, as the lines of bullet holes along the side of the stairs truck stopped a few inches short of the cab, and so it was everywhere I looked. In the shrapnel pot-marked hangar sat the B747F, now nicknamed the Jolly Green Giant, with its stringbean-colored fuselage and canary yellow ﬁn. The Pan Am inspectors had already been crawling through its innards for a few days, giving close scrutiny to the repair of a major accident—borescoping the engines and scrutinizing the maintenance records. By now, Fred and the picky FAA inspectors only spoke to each other when there was no other choice. The situation was toxic but we couldn’t go anywhere without their signing off on the airworthiness certiﬁcate. With tact, Fred got a peace agreement signed in the form of their signatures on the necessary papers. Now we were almost ready for the next day’s exchange of registrations and money, littered with possible pitfalls outside of our control. Communications had been set up using Pan Am’s private undersea cable between Europe and the U.S., as well as ensuring that the Lebanese CAA people did not quit work at their usual time and that the FAA at Oklahoma City got in early. Likewise, it was Photo by Bill Bath The authors, at a restaurant in Beirut, trying to ignore the chaos around them—Fred Bearden (striped shirt, on far right) and Bill Bath (third from right, glass in hand). That evening we all went to a restaurant on the coastal road midway between the airport and the town, to celebrate getting the C of A. Towards midnight there was a loud explosion in the middle distance, so we headed back to the hotel in a hurry. The next morning we learned that the military clamped down a curfew shortly after we got back. After breakfast, Murphy’s Law arrived in the shape of a mortar shell crashing into the downtown telephone exchange, damaging the overseas circuit switches. So, Plan B was launched, utilizing the sole working TMA telex machine. Late that afternoon, the elderly operator was led in and sat at the keyboard—he was blind. Soon we had established simultaneous contacts with the U.S. FAA ofﬁce, Oak City, Bermuda, Lebanese CAA and the two banks. Then we got to work exchanging conﬁrmation documents, with our blind operator typing furiously with never an error. Will Brown was eager to get airborne as London’s noise regulations curfew forbade landings after 11 p.m. The Texaco fuel truck pulled up, and I gave the Texaco station manager the Pan Am credit card. He shook his head and gave it back—no good here, he said. After several minutes of trying to get him to relent, we could not waste anymore time. The TMA head 28 The ofﬁcial publication of the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading Photo courtesy of Bill Bath would do the same at BEY, except the spray job to obliterate the logo with yellow paint would be done by TMA, with the Pan Am crew sticking on miniscule six-inch registration letters (N901PA) in place of the usual PAA two-foot ones. It was Bob Pablo’s turn; he gave me a Pan Am Texaco credit card, and I asked if it would be honored, seeing we had hastily abandoned the station there when they started taking pot shots at our aircraft on the approach. “No problem,” he said. “I’ve checked with Texaco’s head ofﬁce, and they’ve cleared it with their people in BEY.” Early the next morning found me on the steps of the bank waiting for the doors to open. Two hours later I was in a taxi heading for Heathrow, where the Pan Am agent had a ticket for me on a Jordanian 707, which deposited me at Beirut airport with no potshots from the militants on the approach. The center of the town had been completely destroyed after several years of incessant shelling and street ﬁghting; all of the hotels were burnt out shells except for one on the beach, which had enough razor wire around it to qualify as a high-security detention center. Rumor had it that the reason it was relatively undamaged was because Arafat’s mistress lived there. imperative that the two banks kept their staff available for the transfer of funds. While all this was going on, the Pan Am station manager from Damascus had arrived to volunteer his help. Driving the 80 miles over the mountains took some six hours, with numerous checkpoints manned by teenagers with itchy ﬁngers on their AK-47 assault riﬂes. But, the station manager was typical of Pan Am’s worldwide staff—always pitching in and using their local language abilities and contacts to help company employees from elsewhere complete the task they were there for.

Jetrader - May/June 2008

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