Next day, we woke up early and went to Pamplona's aerodrome, a dirt strip I remember it was. It was my 7th. birthday and I thought how funny & contradictory it was to die on my birthday & go to the clouds, only the heavens know how cold they will be: after my three day walking through the Pirenees in 1948 with vasque contrabandits, to arrive in Pamplona for my 5th. birthday, I coul not sttand cold: my feet almost froze in that one. I started wondering if birthdays were not a little overrated..when I heard a familiar music from the skies, a thunder I heard many times during the last war years. I saw my first Tante Ju coming in to land towards me. For me, a magestic moment that I will never forget & my BEST BiRTHDAY present: finally, I was going aboard one flying machine (a lifetime dream!) to be transported to the Heavens!! That wont be so cold as walking the Pirenees in the winter. Uncle Otto, who I hadn't seen since 1944 when he trained german comandos as american troops at home in la Françe, came out of the passenger door to greet us aboard. My parents seated behind the cockpit & I seated on the legs of my uncle Otto, who was the copilot.
Bedtime Aviation - Rob Gonsalves
Radials have that feeling on your chest, like canons & thunder does: UNFORGETABLE & ADiCTiVE!! I was reading "Nils Holgersson's wonderful journey across Sweden" were he describes flight, as the terrain seen from above, seemed like the blankets made of good pieces from other old blankets stringed together: like my mother & sister did when hiding in the woods for 3 years, before going into Spain as refugees. My uncle Otto said something about the nonsense of medics "matasanos" (kills-healthy) and that I was like this aircraft, like this Tante Ju: now I was gone, now I was back. Now you see it, now you don't. Recently it came to my mind, and investigating what Ju-52's were flying in Spain for iBERiA in January 1950, poped out this one, the GUADiANA. It is a river that dies & disapears to run underground, and reapears & is reborn downstream. They retired this particular aircraft EC-AAI in October 1950, to be replaced by more modern DC-3. They flew from Madrid to Mallorca, I believe, but the data is very contradictory & insuficient, lost in times of post war poverty. I have no proof, only my uncle Otto's remark and no recolection of markings nor register, only that it was Iberia's property. When I grabed the controls for my first time, I decided that Jesus was not my thing: in the Heavens, I better control my wings than any invisible person that never helps when you need him.
We landed in Madrid and a doctor friend of my uncle & my father, had just returned from Tibet. He learned to cure with rice, and rice plus all the water I wanted was my breakfast, meal & dinner, FOR A WHOLE YEAR!! Nothing else or the runs started over again. Little by little some fruits, white fish & raw red meat was added, until I arrived to México & was 13 years old, I could eat most things. No chocolate, no egs, no avocado: they were poison to me then. But the mexican pepers reinforced my stomach, they are very rich in vitamin C wich heals: fire curing fire I call it. Now a days my stomach is a Panzer division!! Can eat anything, but rice I pass gladly: it cured me but also bored me too much. Also, with any disenterial event, very common in the tropics were I live most of the time, rice puts me back in shape immediately.
I used O. Fisher modell tweaking ZS-FAB Lord Charles Somerset with DXTBmp, Paint & Microsoft Office Picture manager, plus lots of Copy/Paste. My memory believes that this aircraft is my baptism of the air, my Tante-Ju godmother. If any one of my readers has flown in a trimotor like the Ford in Oshkosh, there are some armonics unique to unpaired engines, very different to paired engines (like two, or four: not comparable to 3, due to the central armonics of the fuselage: plus, that corugated skin really makes most wierd sounds too!)
San Sebastián Airport, Golden Wings Thunderstorm, 18 January 1950
There were movie theaters with D-150 screens & 8 channel sensoround in the sixties, were I saw "the Batle of Britain" & "Where Eagles Dare": the fligh on the Alps is like my flight in Navarra mountains, in 1950. "The Batle of Britain" Ju-52/3m flight with the General coming out.. well, my uncle Otto was a LOT taller!! I am also a Skydiver, rookie wit 30 jumps. It makes me admire the filming of Where Eagles Dare droping parachutist in that glacier on the Alps, no computer effects on those days, things were real (not the script, thought: terrible errors of fiction, like that helicopter..)
https://youtu.be/CB62qhgkn3Y
