Twilight Zone

N8083H at San Pedro Sula Airport, Honduras being prepped for flight

During my time in the Cayman Islands, I often flew to San Pedro Sula Airport in Honduras. It is located in the bottom of a valley, along with the VOR navigation aid. This makes doing maintenance on the VOR easy, but it's fairly useless as a navaid because the surrounding mountains block the signal until you're almost on top of it. In our airplanes we had a single VOR receiver with line of sight range. The flight is over 400 miles and three hours flying time, all over water. So I would take off from Grand Cayman and head deliberately to the left of San Pedro Sula. Three hours later I would come upon the Honduran shoreline, turn right, and fly down the beach until I reached the grass huts. These huts marked the entrance to the valley and the VOR signal would suddenly come alive. Fly down the valley and presto! San Pedro Sula.

At the airport there is a beautiful old Lockheed L1649A Constellation, N8083H. Only 49 of these types were built, the most advanced piston-engine airliner ever made. The airplane I was looking at was parked in the grass beside the ramp. It flew for TWA for only four years, then went through a long series of cargo operators over the next twenty years. It's final operator used it to carry marijuana and it was abandoned at San Pedro Sula in the fall of 1983. It sat out in the hot sun, all shiny in it's bare metal skin devoid of all paint, four tremendously large engines (the biggest prop engines ever made) sitting high above the ground on it's long graceful landing gear. Beautiful.

One day I noticed there was a group of mechanics working on the airplane, obviously getting it ready for flight. I sat on the wing of my Aero Commander with the fueler and we discussed the old Starliner. I didn't speak Spanish and he only knew a little bit of English. I asked who had bought the airplane, where was it going? The mechanics turned over an engine. The propeller turned slowly at first, then a few loud pops, some flame from the exhaust, and with a cumulonimbus-sized cloud of white exhaust smoke it slowly came to life. If you have ever heard a big radial start up, you know what a beautiful sound that really is. It's mesmerizing.

We went back to fueling. The fueler replied to my question about who had bought it."Some rich American. They going to fly it to America soon."

"Any idea who?" 

He thought long and hard, carefully pumping fuel into my plane.

"Ah! A very wealthy man. His name was, uh, Smithsonian! Si, Si, Smithsonian."

We sat under the warm Caribbean sun on top of my wing, slowly pumping 100 octane fuel while we listened to and watched this historic dinosaur coming back to life. I closed my eyes and listened, basking in the warmth of the sun, the humidity of the surrounding jungles and the sounds of airport times gone by. An old DC-3 landed and taxied in. She pulled up gracefully to the gate area, swinging around and coming to a squeaky stop. Passengers walking across the hot concrete ramp. In Central America the DC-3 still flies regular airline flights as purposely as they did thirty years ago. This entire airport was a twilight zone, still living and breathing in 1961. When we were done I paid the man in US cash, the standard currency of choice here. I gave him a $20 tip and with a smile and a handshake we went our separate ways. I took off, turned off the radio and flew low down the valley, past the grass huts and out over the vast Caribbean Sea, heading north by northeast towards the distant Cayman Islands and reality.