Zinc Mines and Fighter Pilots

A couple of the flight instructors from Luke Air Force Base got all fired up on the idea of investing in commodities. The fact that we knew nothing about trading commodities would not stand in our way. We were going to get rich in the commodity market.  So, one day, I want to say it was spring of 1968, one of my fellow instructors got a tip on a lead zinc mine in Colorado. The mine owners were looking for a couple of “investors” who wanted to buy the lead zinc mine and then get somebody to mine it for them so they could sit back and get rich. Just what we were looking for. The perfect deal. Hard to pass up. So, we decided to rent an airplane and go take a look. Now, the mine is up in a tiny town at the height of the Colorado Mountains, and it's an old cowboy town with a population of probably 100 or maybe less. We were going to overnight in an old hotel, saloon, boarding house, or whatever. Very old and rundown, and probably the place where Wild Bill Hickock got shot.

Anyway, there were four of us. It began so predictably, as all ill-conceived adventures often do. Three F-100 Instructor pilots and a stockbroker—each brimming with their own veneer of expertise. One of the IPs (instructor pilots) was the guy that was going to rent the plane and he had all the connections with the owners of the lead zinc mine. The other guy was an instructor pilot that had spent some time as a part-time bush pilot up in Alaska. So, he had a lot of small prop plane time. And then me. We took our stockbroker with us because stockbrokers know all about commodities and investing and stuff like that. Besides, he was a really good guy. So, a very solid team for our trip, sort of. Anyway, we're going to take a weekend and the four of us will fly up to Colorado, check out the mine, decide whether we want to invest in it and then turn around and fly back.

We rented the plane. Nice plane, a four-seat something prop type, and we flight planned the trip. With our collective years of aviation experience, we decided that if you land at the top of high mountains in the thin air, you can land a little heavy, but you can't take off heavy. The runways are usually not long enough. Certainly not dirt strips. So, we decided that we would not refuel on the way up. Instead, we would fly up, we’d land at this little dirt airstrip on the top of the mountain and then the next morning when we're ready to leave, we'd be light because we won’t have full gas tanks. We'd take off light and we'd fly out of the mountains to another airport just outside the mountains, refuel there and then fly back into Phoenix from there. We'd be light going in and light coming back out. Very clever.

So, the day comes, we jump in the plane, we fly up there, everything's going good. We finally get over this little airstrip, and it really was short. It's a dirt strip and, at the end of the strip, it drops off very sharply into a valley. Think cliff. And lo and behold, as we're flying over the top of the airstrip, kind of checking it out to see what we have to work with, there's a tree line, obviously with trees, across the middle of the runway. So instead of having, let's say a ... I'm guessing, let's say a 3000-foot strip or a 2,500-foot strip, you have half of that because there's trees across the middle of it and you have to figure out how to land at the very end of the runway, jump on the brakes and stop short before you run into the trees. Of course, then you have to figure out how you will take off and clear the trees during the takeoff. Not a problem. We’ll worry about that tomorrow.  After all, three of the Air Force’s finest fighter pilots are running the operation. So anyway, as we're flying over the top of the strip, we check it out and decide, okay, not a problem. We land right on the edge of the runway, hit the brakes, come to a stop and taxi off. Sure enough, it works just like we expected. So far, so good. Not much there.

We go to the local hotel that had four rooms or something like that, and a beat up ratty old bar restaurant kind of thing and spent the night there. Primarily at the bar.  The next morning it’s “up and at ‘em” and we head over and check out the lead zinc mine accompanied by one of the current owners. A nice guy, looked and dressed just like the owner of a lead zinc mine in the mountains of Colorado. Or maybe a cowboy. Of course, the four of us wouldn't know a lead zinc mine from a volcano. But we looked at all the rocks and thought, is this a good rock, or a bad rock or what? None of us had any idea, none. Anyway, after walking around inside the mine for quite a while, we left, and we all agreed that we're clueless and that this might not be such a great investment for us given that all the rocks looked alike.

Time to give it up and head for home. So, we go back to the airstrip and get on the plane, and now we're going to fly back to Phoenix. We get to the edge of the runway, we run it up, get off the brakes, full power, off we go. And, Whoa! Clearly, we won’t make it over the trees running across the runway. So, abort, jump on the brakes, turn around, and go back. So, I said to my buddy who’s in the left seat (pilot in command), “well what we can do is we can go full power and when you get just shy of the trees, bounce the airplane over the trees. I’ll pull up the gear and when we clear the trees, I’ll drop the gear and then right as we get over the trees, we land again. We run down the runway till we get to the end of the runway where the cliff is and by then, we should have enough air speed to lift off.” Sure, sounds like a good plan, except for the part where we are bouncing over the trees, landing and continuing to accelerate to take off before you get to the cliff. As you can imagine, that’s a bit sporty. Not something you would practice as a pilot.

Anyway, sure enough we give it a shot and the stockbroker in the back is listening to the conversation between the three of us. He is scared to death. He had never heard anybody, like the three of us, discuss how we would handle the takeoff. When listening to us, he was less than overwhelmed with the game plan. Not a problem. Piece of cake. Anyway, I'm in the right seat. The co-pilot seat. My buddy is in the left seat flying. We run it up and go as fast as we can. When we get to the edge of the tree line, he bounces the airplane. (The way you bounce the airplane is you slam the nose wheel down, bounce the nose wheel up, and then you hop over.) A little short hop over the tops of the trees. You land on the other side like you would land anywhere else. Now that you’re on the other side, you put your nose down again and try to build up air speed to get enough to take off. The whole thing was a bit exciting, but we made it fine. Not a problem. However, the stockbroker in the back is not handling this very well. Not to worry, the hard part’s over.

So, we're climbing out of the mountains and going along. Five or 10 minutes go by, and I looked down at the fuel gauges and saw that we were running out of gas. We're literally running out of fuel. I said to my buddy, “We calculated the fuel pretty carefully and we should have more than enough fuel to make it to the airstrip south of here but with our fuel state now I'm not sure we're even going to make it out of the mountains.” He looks down and it turns out that in the excitement of the takeoff, which by the way was pretty cool, he forgot to turn the boost pumps off. Now the boost pumps are fuel pumps that inject a much higher flow of gas into the engine than the engine would normally use. It's sort of like having your afterburner on and you forgot that it was on, and you're burning gas at two or three times the rate that you would ordinarily be burning it.

So now, we're still in the mountains, we haven't cleared the mountains and, in fact, we’re nowhere near getting out of the mountains and running out of gas. We're not going to make it. It's a sure thing.  We're not going to clear the mountains. This now officially qualifies as a problem. Not to worry. So, I told my buddy "Well, we're going to have to land." He said, "Well, we can't land. There's no runway around here." I said, "We’ll have to land on a road." It's not like we have parachutes. You can't eject from one of these things. Anyway, to make a long story short. We do clear this one mountain range, and we look up ahead, and there's a farm road running perpendicular to us, kind of narrow. I want to say probably more like a wide-ish one lane road, maybe more like a one and a half lane road and it's going steeply uphill into a ranch. So, I said to my buddy, "That's it, babe." I said, "It's either there or you're going to land in a field. We don't have a lot of choice here." Anyway, he takes it around and we line up and land on the road. Good landing, considering it’s the first time he ever landed on a road on the side of a mountain. But, as we land on the road, we clipped off the wingtips on the telephone poles on both sides of the road. We didn't take them all off, but we took off maybe, I don't know, six inches or a foot off both wings, and then we rolled uphill to a stop because we were out of gas. Perfect timing. No problem. Couldn’t have planned it better.

So, we rolled up and turned off onto a dirt road going into the ranch. We were only there briefly when a Colorado state trooper shows up to find out what's going on and how he can help. Great guy. But you have to remember that the stockbroker is in the back during all of this and he is absolutely petrified. I have never seen it. It’s so funny to think back on it. He was absolutely beside himself. I've never seen a guy go through that kind of a change before. So anyway, the state trooper was there, and we explained to him what had happened, and he said, "Well, what can I do for you?" We said, 'Well, can you get to a gas station and get us some gas and we'll fill up just enough to get us to the next airfield." And he said, sure. But before he leaves and drives off, we explain to him what we're going to do. The three of us talked it over and it should be “a piece of cake.” Now, for takeoff, we know that the plane will fit between the telephone poles, because we’d shortened our wingtips a bit, so obviously, we know that if we stay in the center of the road we should be able to go downhill to take off, make it through the telephone poles, take off and fly to the airfield down the road. So now the stockbroker is listening, and he says to the state trooper "I'm not doing this, I'm just not flying with these guys again. Can you drive me to a train station, bus station, or something like that, and I'll take a train or bus back to Phoenix?" So, the state trooper took our stockbroker to the local train station and then he came back. He had a couple of gas cans for us and said, "If I were you guys, I wouldn't count on seeing that guy again for a long while. He really was excited. Doubt if you’ll ever get him back in an airplane.” Anyway, we got some gas. We didn't fill it up, but we put some gas in the thing and took off, ran downhill down the “runway.” We managed not to hit any of the telephone poles on our way down, so we took off and flew to the closest airstrip, which wasn't very far away. It was about five or 10 minutes, refueled, and pressed back to Phoenix. The three of us paid for the damages to the plane, and we confirmed our decision not to buy the mine. Good decision. Don’t know what we would have done with all that lead and zinc anyway.

It was all very humorous because you’ve got three seriously good jet fighter pilots flying a small prop airplane at slow speeds. Not a problem. Of course, if you were hypercritical, you might question how good we were with small, slower planes and you might even question whether we should have landed there in the first place.  But, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time and as it turned out everything went great, except for the part where we had to land on the road.  Details, Details. All in all, a fun-filled weekend and we got to see a lead zinc mine for the first time. Typical fighter pilot humor and great entertainment.