Word: airlifts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Constellations parked in a guarded portion of the airport there. "I knew what they were," he laughs, "In our business word gets around." Word had also reached him of the $1500 per trip salary for pilots ($1000 for flight engineers) and after a few inquiries, he joined the Biafran airlift as a flight engineer...
...airlift runs a delicate course between the thunderstorms always encountered at night, and the radar-directed anti-aircraft fire which grows heavier as the storms fade. When he began flying for the outfit, it had six Constellations and one DC-7. Of the Constellations, one was hijacked and flown to Madrid; a second was impounded when it made a forced landing on Malta (when its flight plan said it was going to New York). A third crashed in the jungle killing all aboard, and a fourth was blown up in Bisau, reportedly by a South African...
...plight of the Biafran people is a topic on which McGuire spends relatively little time, because he feels the subject has been adequately covered by American reporters, and also because the airlift crews seldom stay in Biafra longer than four hours -- the time it takes to unload 30 tons of baby food, or Mausers, or whatever from the Constellations. He does, however, venture to add a few vignettes to the picture of the people. Pilots on flights into Biafra carry canned hams and salt to give to the unloaders as an incentive for faster work. On one of his flight...
...carried a gun, even for personal protection in Biafra. ("I figured we had enough guns and ammo on the plane already.") He left Biafra at the end of July, after his mother died in the United States and his close call made him suspicious of the safety of the airlift's flying procedures but he wants to return there, this time for expenses only...
...unruly mobs hounded him with taunts of "Worm!", "Imperialist!" and "CIA agent!" No wonder Gerardo Gonzalez, 42, decided that it was time to leave Castro's Cuba. Gonzalez, better known as Kid Gavilan, the bolo-punching world welterweight boxing champion from 1951 to 1954, hopped a refugee airlift flight to Miami last week, leaving behind three sons, his mother, and wives Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Says "the Keed," now a Jehovah's Witness: "I don't think, if I had known God's Word, I would have become a boxer." He suffers from cataracts, sciatica...