From Best Of On Final, originally published in March 2010
In 1990, my small Dallas manufacturing company needed transportation that could span the country with 4-6 passengers to visit customers and build our business. Personally, I needed something to brag about to my friends. Not having the money to buy a late-model Citation or Learjet, I scoured the market, looking for the best bang for the buck. And I found it, the Sabreliner Model 40. Designed in the late 50’s as a T-39 for the military, the Sabreliner was an impressive looking airplane. It was built like a tank. It was heavy like a tank too weighing almost 20,000 pounds at maximum takeoff weight. And to lift all that metal required two Pratt and Whitney JT12 turbojet engines gulping over 7,000 pounds of fuel in about three hours.
We departed Addison, Texas, under clear winter morning skies bound for snowy Denver with my long-time pilot JC and newly recruited co-pilot Monte in the right seat. I rode in the back with several customers who had never flown in a small jet before. Climbing like a rocket in the unusually cold air, we quickly reached FL 450 and settled in for our magic carpet ride to the mile-high city.
There is nothing more regal than riding in the back of your own private jet, sipping orange juice, and eating a croissant. It just doesn’t get any better.
Unless you can’t see where you are going.
I glanced forward to check on the crew and noticed JC and Monte in an animated conversation. Not wanting to upset my neophyte passengers, I casually approached the cockpit to find the two pilots wiping the inside of the windshield with both hands. At that moment, our 1950s technology airplane chose to fail both windshield heat controllers simultaneously. Frozen moisture was forming on the inside of the windshield, and we were quickly turning into the inside of an ice cube!
Monte and JC grabbed handkerchiefs, Kleenex, Jepp charts and everything else they could find and began a symphony of dancing digits like you have never seen before. But the ice was forming faster than the two could remove it. And we were descending into severe icing and whiteout conditions in Denver. Without a clear windshield, we were in trouble.
And then it dawned on all three of us at the same moment. Grabbing our wallets, we produced three credit cards and began scraping furiously left to right, up and down. Me with an American Express, Monte with a Visa and JC with his Mastercard. We had enough shaved ice to have our own happy hour.
The passengers, with horrified expressions, needing reassuring. I confidently told them this was part of the “deicing” process and asked them if THEY had any credit cards. In the blink of an eye, they came up with three more: Discover, Sears, and JC Penny.
Now, with cards in each hand, the deicing process was in full stride. The three of us looked like an octopus at a NASCAR event waiving all those credit cards.
I don’t know if it was JC’s dexterity or the fact that as captain, he had the most to lose, but he had the most success on his side of the cockpit. All of us kept scraping until we broke out of the muck at minimums. In near-whiteout conditions, we had just enough forward visibility to keep our ice-covered popsicle on the runway.
Mastercard comes in handy for buying fuel, but this particular morning, it was much more valuable… for everything else.
Fly safe.
