tween Nashville and Chattanooga and that it would be advisable to sit in Nash ville until the weather moved through Chattanooga. While sitting on the ground for a couple of hours and still wearing that damn overcoat, I decided to ex ercise my knowledge of mountain flying. Wh y not? I'd flown this route before and didn't have any prob lems-no sweat! I proceeded to give Ted a snow job about pushing on, but Ted was not quite ready to buy my line of bull. We sat for another hour, and by then I was really getting antsy. I checked the new Chattanooga weather and it was better; in fact, it was good. I put the arm on Ted again, and this time he knuckled under and agreed to go. Yep, you guessed it. Thirty minutes out and the clouds were pushing us down. I dropped down about a thou sand feet to where the visibility improved quite a bit. For the next 30 minutes I kept going lower and the ter rain kept getting higher until we were into the moun tains. As the visibility deteriorated, I kept turning, trying to keep sight of the mountaintops. Ted was busy with the map, trying to trace all my turns with one eye while keeping a lookout for trees with the other. Someone suggested that we turn back and land at an airport that Ted spotted in the lower ter rain, to which I replied in classic form, "Don't worry, Ted, I'll fly along the ridge, pick up a road and follow it over to the other side." We continued blindly for about another 10 minutes when I spotted a saddle on the ridge. I turned and we squeaked through only to find total obscuration.
Ted Linnert tying down the T-Craft at Miami. Holding Ted's head is another Howard Aircraft engineer, Ted Patecell, who is now a captain for Pan American. After World War II, Ted fixed up a DGA-15 to look like Mr. Mulligan, including the original NR-273Y registration number. He also was the first sales representative for Lear Jet aircraft sales. Jim Mer rick's Cub Coupe is in the background.
As I made a turn to parallel the ridge, I said to myself, in your mess kit!/I Ted was "Nick, I think you just not saying a word, but I knew what he was thinking. The next five minutes convinced me that this flight was going to terminate in the boondocks, when sud denly I spotted a field out the left window that looked like an Iowa hayfield. I chopped the throttle, and with a nose-high turning slip, I was on the ground in sec onds-nary a ripple.
Ted Linnert and the T-Craft somewhere on a mountaintop along the Walden Ridge in the Crabapple Mountains north west of Chattanooga. Ted, a fonner engineer for Howard Air craft, is now with the A.L.P.A. Safety Board.
Airport manager at the mountaintop airport in Tennessee collecting his landing fee. S
JANUARY 2006
As I taxied up to the fence-or did we roll out to the fence?-I turned to Ted very assuringly and said, "See! I told you I knew these mountains." As we shut down and got out, Ted handed me the map and said, "Show me where we are!/I My 2S,OOO -word vocabulary shrunk to "Ah! Ummm! Ah!/I We spent the next hour or two exploring the moun taintop, trying to figure out a way of spending the night without freezing to death. By then the weather kept im-