Barreiras

By Clevis O. Laverty

A Douglas DC-3A, silvery, graceful, and dependable workhorses of THE AIRLINE, had taken off from the airport at Rio de Janeiro with the rising sun on her tail and in the face of an unfavorable weather report. She lifted her twenty-eight passengers and four crew members into the air and over the mountains without protest. She was a willing servant; the pilot’s slightest touch was her command.

Four hours later found her nearing Barreiras, the halfway mark to Belem, where a mechanic’s loving hands and a comfortable hanger awaited her. Rocky and canyon-rutted terrain passed insignificantly beneath, and bracing headwinds tired her not at all.

The black, menacing nimbus clouds ahead promised her no quarter, but unhesitantly, she plunged her nose into their midst. The elements reacted with unrestrained fury; the wind increased to drive her back, and jagged streaks of lightning threatened her. Heavy sheets of solid rain lashed her unmercifully fore and aft. Undaunted, gallant, and blind, she flew on, trusting implicitly her masters in her tiny cockpit.

There her pilot struggled with the wheel to keep her on an even keel. He peered intently through the ineffective windshield wipers for the twelve-hundred-foot plateau that was Barreiras, but he only saw a solid sea of water. Her copilot, too, was staring intently at a world filled with water, some of which was seeping through the weatherproofing, forming a trickle down the instrument panel and finally dropping unnoticed into his shoe. Her radio officer’s attention was glued to an azimuth dial from which he was busily taking bearings.

“We’re directly overhead, Captain,” he shouted.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s my neck too, Skipper.”

“What’s the wind?”

“Twenty miles, north-northeast.”

Her pilot pushed slightly on the stick, applied left rudder and left aileron, and loyally she swung around in a wide circle, hunting for a way to bring her precious cargo to safety.

“Signals dead ahead,” snapped Sparks.

“Altitude. . . thirteen hundred,” said the copilot.


“Wheels down. . . forty-five degrees flap. Stick your heads out of the windows and watch,” commanded the skipper as he slid his window open for the radio officer. The copilot lowered the wheels and flaps and opened the window on his side. The rain lashed at the two faces as they accustomed their eyes to the stinging wetness.

“There’s the runway,” cried Sparks, “fifty feet dead ahead.”

The DC-3A stretched her landing gear eagerly toward the muddy, rain-blasted runway. She touched it gingerly and ran with her tail just off the ground, reluctant to set it down in that muddy morass of an airport.

Nose up and proud, she set her brakes and slid to a stop. Buffeted, rain-lashed, and blinded, she had won again.