20 November--Baslers on the Mind

I've been wondering about Baslers since we got here.  Why Basler?  They're really just DCs or C-47s, right?  Well, sort of.  I got a lot more of the story this morning from a young Canadian who just got in the other day and who works for Kenn Borek Aviation of Calgary.  It turns out that they are indeed C-47s or DC-3s, but with a big difference.  [Later correction: they are only C-47s.  The DC-3s are just slightly enough different that they won't work for this purpose.]

The C-47s and Dc-3s were built during World War II and, according to this guy, they were built knowing that they were likely to be shot down in pretty short order and so why build them too good?  The engines were designed to only last for 1,000 hours.  But it turned out that not only were they supremely airworthy, they had the strongest airframe ever (?) built.  They were what allowed the US to fly supplies over the Hump from India to China to supply the Nationalists against the Japanese and the Communists. And probably a thousand other things, in addition.

When the war ended, there were lots of these that were still flying and they were disposed of all over Asia and many made it to Central and South America, Alaska, and Canada.  I flew in one in the Amazon, as I think I wrote earlier, and thought then that they were pretty old back in 1970.  But that was then and this is now.

Somewhere along the line someone had the great idea to take the basic plane, gut it, and rebuild virtually everything on it.That's where Basler of Oshkosh (B'Gosh!) Wisconsin comes in.  They take a sound airframe and add 6 feet in length to it; replace the landing gear with beefed up replacements; replace the old rotary engines with turbo props for more power; and completely update all the hydraulic, electrical, and avionics.  What comes in an old derelict, comes out as a  virtually new $6,000,000 workhorse.  And that seems cheap to me!

Kenn Borek Aviation scouts these out in out-of-the-way places and gets them to Oshkosh for Basler to convert.  A crew member earlier told me that one of their planes came from the Guatemalan Air Force.  The Guatemalans had 5 or 6 of them and none could be flown.  KBA came in with their infinitely resourceful crews--working in the best bush pilot tradition-- and got them all working.  In return KBA got to keep one of them and take it to Oshkosh.  KBA is supposed to have 55-60 of them.

As an aside, KBA works in Alaska, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic during the boreal summer flying mining crews around and delivering groceries to First Nations villages.  (Another KBA employee said that most of the groceries they flew in were chips, cookies, soda pop, and white flour.  Sadly, it sounded so much like the situation on the reservations at home.  Nutritional deserts.)  When it comes time to shift to Antarctica for the austral summer, they take a few days and hop down to the US; the Cayman Islands; Guayaquil, Ecuador; Ushuaia, Chile; and Rothera Station of the British Antarctic Survey in western Antarctica.  From there they fan out to various stations on the continent.  The seven that will come to McMurdo will hop to the South Pole one day and then to McMurdo the next.  In February the process runs in reverse.

I asked where their pilots come from and didn't get a real answer.  But I also asked whether they had retired Air Force pilots working on their staff and he said absolutely not, that they don't have nearly enough flight hours to work for them.  Their pilots usually have in excess of 20,000 hours.  My impression is that Air Force pilots might only have 1,500 hours.  I'll check on that at some point.





Scary thought:   I recently heard that the Fuelies get a regular blood test to detect levels of petroleum in their system.  Those folks are so fragrant of jet fuel or diesel that sometimes when I pick them up in a shuttle vehicle, I have to open the windows and crank up the heat to clear out the van.  They have to hang their work clothes outside their dorm rooms to air them out and avoid driving out their roommates.  And to think that I interviewed with Fuels before I got the Vehicle Operator position!

A Skua in its unnatural habitat.