In 1982 I was serving as Director of Flight Operations and
Training with responsibility for The Ohio State University’s Air Transportation Service
(ATS) and all the flight training for the Department of Aviation. As might be
expected, flight instruction activity at the OSU Airport
slows to a dull roar in December because of
inclement weather and the lack of aviation students, most of whom have migrated off-campus to
enjoy the Christmas break.
The seasonal slowdown in December 1982 was typical and gave me the
opportunity to disappear for a few days to participate in two AOPA weekend
training courses, one in West Palm Beach and the other in Little Rock,
Arkansas. The vehicle for these trips
was a Cessna 340 I rented on occasion for personal business travel; it was not
a big airplane (6 seats, max takeoff weight just short of 6,000 pounds), nor was it a
speed merchant (average cruise speed 170-180 knots TAS in the mid-teens) but it
satisfied my needs. I
truly enjoyed flying this pressurized light twin that was for all practical
purposes a scaled-down Cessna 421.
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| Typical Cessna 340 |
One day in early December ’82 I took a phone call from the
Phillips Petroleum representative who looked after the fuel and oil needs of
the OSU Airport, which was (and still is) a full-service FBO. Having learned
that the ATS transported organ-transplant teams on occasion (we called them
"kidney trips"), the Phillips rep asked if we could furnish an
airplane for a TV commercial that linked Phillips products to these life-saving
flights. The 340 was available and with the prospect of another aviation
adventure I decided to fly the airplane myself.
The storyboard for the commercial featured a desperately ill
child who needed a kidney transplant right away. For a bit of high drama the
subject organ would be delivered by air in the wee hours of a snowy night, the
airplane would be met on the ramp by an emergency vehicle with flashing red
lights and the med techs would hustle the critical organ off to the hospital.
The child would survive and live happily ever after and Phillips Petroleum got
subtle credit for the humanitarian service.
My recommendation for
a nearby facility that virtually guaranteed snow on the ground in December was
Cleveland, Ohio, whose Burke Lakefront Airport was located on the south shore
of Lake Erie; winter winds off the lake created snow with a near-daily
frequency (winter weather in Columbus—about 120 miles southwest of
Cleveland—is typically less severe and highly unpredictable…"if you don’t
like the weather in Columbus, wait five minutes").
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| Burke Lakefront Airport, Cleveland |
No sooner than we had finalized plans for the shoot (when
videographers take pictures they call it a "shoot") the Phillips rep
called to inform me the company had changed the venue in order to make nice
with a customer in Colorado Springs, 1,000 miles west of Cleveland. With
nothing to lose but a couple of days in the office I re-planned for the trip to
Colorado.
I had a right-seater on the first leg of the trip, a friend who
needed to get to Jackson, Mississippi and I welcomed him aboard. I was well aware that Jackson is a long way south of the direct course from Ohio to Colorado…but
isn’t that what friends are for? We had an enjoyable trip and I was glad to
give him a helping hand.
As the crow flies, Colorado Springs is a little more than
800 nautical miles from Jackson, a distance that was doable in the 340 but with
strong westerly winds aloft I didn’t care to test the airplane's ultimate range. Enid, Oklahoma turned out
to be the near-midpoint of this leg and was also the home of Vance Air Force
Base where I graduated from pilot training in 1956. Lots of memories—including
the sign at the main gate which in our current culture might be offensive to
some—but I prefer to think the Indian-head motif honored the original
inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory.
I topped the tanks at Woodring Airport in Enid and pressed on
to Colorado Springs. When I arrived the Phillips people and the video crew were
there but the only snow in sight covered the mountains to the west. An
unseasonal warm spell had melted all the snow in the Springs so we went to Plan
B which meant moving the entire operation to an airport deeper—therefore colder—in
the mountains.
We put our heads together and settled on the Eagle County
Airport, 90-odd miles northwest of Colorado Springs. Airports are few and far
between in the western half of Colorado, nearly all of them located in narrow
canyons. The Eagle County airport is typical, with a field elevation of 6500 feet MSL
and peaks higher than 12,000 feet all around, making for a lot of brown terrain levels on the
sectional chart.
The camera crew packed their gear and hit the road. I
chose to spend the night in Colorado Springs and fly to Eagle the next morning and guess what…no
snow on the ground there either, but the video troops—an ingenious lot—had already
arrived and were working on the solution. Bear in mind this project took place
in an area well-populated with ski resorts, whose operators don't depend exclusively on Mother Nature for snow...when need it they make it themselves.
The crew had rented snow-making
machines from a nearby skiing facility (a stroke of genius) and had started to
build a circular patch of snow on the ramp. When the sun went down the outside
air temperature plummeted into the teens and shortly thereafter the video crew
had a virtual blizzard underway.
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| Typical snow machine |
In the original script for the commercial I would have taxied the 340 to the
ramp, opened the cabin door and off-loaded the kidney container to the waiting med
techs. Unfortunately the circle of artificial snow limited the video image area, which cut out the arrival portion of the commercial and turned the
exercise into a static operation; I taxied the airplane to the center of the
snow patch, shut down the engines and sat in the cockpit until the filming was completed.
This was a matter of "…if you can't move the snow to
Colorado Springs, you must then move Colorado Springs to the snow." The
video crew and their ingenuity saved the day; the fake snowstorm was most realistic, the Phillips dealer was happy and the TV commercial was
a success.
During the filming I noticed that one of the helpers held a hinged board in front
of the camera before each take and "clapped" the board (a loud crack) to provide the
synchronization of sound and picture in the editing process. Shortly after I returned home a package from
Phillips showed up with a memento—my own personal "clapperboard"—that
has hung on my office wall ever since.
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