The Boeing 777’s
Great Great Great
Great Granddaddy
1928 Boeing 40C
★Lustrous foot-deep finish ★Lasts and lasts and lasts ★Easy worry-free repairs 800-362-3490
Randolph Aircraft.com info@RandolphAircraft.com
The Boeing 40C delivered much more than mail and is
considered the first US airliner. This Randolph-finished
beauty restored by Addison Pemberton is the only 40C
in the world still flying.
late morning, the winds were already gusting to 30 knots
in Idaho Falls. We could do it if we had to, but…why?
Instead, I decided to stop overnight at Twin Falls,
which was in the wider section of the Snake River
Valley and had much better winds. If we took off at
dawn—which didn’t come until 6: 55 a.m. in Twin
Falls—we could still fuel up at Idaho Falls and be in
the pass by a little after 8: 30 a.m. That would put us
through the mountains and into Billings, Montana,
by about 11 a.m.—which, at least in theory, would be
before the high winds and cold front behind us caught
up with us. It would also give us the advantage of
much smoother, calmer flight conditions than we’d
experienced so far. Or so I told Connor.
Unfortunately, the magic of cool sunrise air eluded
us, even with a dawn departure. We lifted off six minutes
after sunrise, and it was already bumpy—which meant
the mountains were likely to be a challenge. We did a
quick-turn refueling at Idaho Falls (Connor and I were
developing an impressively well-coordinated routine
for fueling, loading, and unloading the airplane) and, as
scheduled, were headed into the Monida Pass by 8: 30. Or,
at least, what I thought was the Monida Pass.
The trouble with airborne navigation in a small
airplane that has to weave its way below the tops of the
surrounding terrain is that it really matters which valley
you fly into—and they don’t have big signs on the hillsides
saying “Monida Pass Entrance HERE.” The Monida Pass
doesn’t have a good GPS waypoint or road heading into
it, and there’s another similar-looking valley entrance
into the mountains just to its west. It wasn’t until I was
closing in on that western valley that Connor, who was
studying the sectional map on the Garmin 696, alerted
me to my error.
“Look,” he said, pointing at a little airport just south
of the mountains. “The pass entrance is just northeast of
this runway, and we’re headed more north-northwest. I
think the pass is that one over there.”
He pointed to a valley entrance to our right. I looked
at the map, at the landscape, at the map again, and
decided he was right.
“Good navigating,” I said with a smile. Good
navigators, like good traveling companions, are worth a
lot on a cross-country journey.
But as we headed into the pass, another problem
cropped up. After experiencing an intermittent stuck
valve that baffled mechanics all the way across the
country on a similar trip in 2001, I’d installed a JPI
engine analyzer to give me more information on what
was going on in my engine. I’d told Connor that the gauge
gave me a lot of confidence, because if the readings on
the JPI were steady, it was unlikely the engine was about
to quit. A mechanic friend once told me that engines
rarely quit cold without warning. They almost always
“talk” to you first. The JPI didn’t give me full insight as to
what my engine might be saying, of course, but it at least
