The evening of the 16th I was to operate a simple military trip: ferry the airplane to Wheeler-Sac Army Airfield at Watertown, NY, load troops being rotated into Bosnia, and operate to Paris, where another crew would relieve us and take the troops on to Tuzla, Bosnia.

The added strangeness started when the flight engineer scheduled for the trip failed to show and couldn't be reached by phone. This problem was handled by stealing the flight engineer from an evening Miami flight about to depart. Tower doesn't maintain a hot reserve to cover such problems. Of course, that left 400+ passengers sitting in the terminal waiting for crew scheduling to find and steal an engineer from one of the early morning flights, etc. But, Morris Nachtomi had left orders that the military flight was to be given precedence over everything because we were in danger of losing our military contracts due to non-compliance.

So, I and my crew left operations for what could still be an on-time departure with everything supposedly working. Ha! We got to the airplane to find out that maintenance was still working on the APU—read that as they were still working on trying to get the air conditioning going—and that the aft lower cargo door could not be opened and closed under its own power—read that as meaning that a guy has to be raised to a port by the door and then spend half an hour to forty-five minutes cranking it open or closed by hand.

Now the military has stringent contractual requirements, as well they should to try and keep dirt-bag carriers like Tower in line. Those requirements include being on-time, having airconditioning, and not having to operate 747 cargo doors by hand. Maintenance did get the aft lower cargo door working, but we left two and one half hours late with no APU. I notified both operations and dispatch before leaving that upon arrival at Wheeler-Sac it was essential that a GPU (ground power unit—electrical), an air start unit, and a refrigeration unit be standing by for our arrival.

Guess what! We taxi in at Wheeler-Sac, and there is nothing waiting. We can't see anything that remotely resembles that equipment. That gives me no choice but to leave an engine running, because with no APU, we can't start without an air start unit—commonly called a huffer.

Now the military will not roll a stairs up to a civilian airplane with an engine running, so we sat for 30 minutes with an engine running while a GPU and a huffer were rounded up. There was no refrigeration unit to be had—read that as the troops would sweat and the cockpit crew would sweat more since the cockpit has the worst ventilation of any place in the airplane, especially the two pilot seats, which are at least five degrees warmer than the flight engineer position.

We get the troops loaded and are about to close up when the purser notified me that the General Declaration form supplied by U.S. Immigration has not been properly executed. The Immigration officer signed it but did not stamp it. The French bureaucracy is very unforgiving. Without a proper gen dec, as it is called, they could refuse to let the crew off the airplane in Paris. The solution seemed simple, go have the Immigration guy put the proper stamp on it. Not so simple, the Immigration guy was thirty miles away at the civilian airport, which is why the gen deck took so long to get to the airplane in the first place.

I had a little conference with our civilian ground handler there—who, by the way, was still maintaining he never received instructions from New York about our need for ground equipment—we would leave without the gen dec. He would drive to the civilian airport and get the proper stamp and fax a copy to New York. New York would fax it to our Paris station. Our Paris station would meet the airplane with the fax.

Finally, we were buttoned up and awaiting our ATC (air traffic control) clearance. Small problem, Wheeler-Sac tower couldn't find our flight plan, but said it shouldn't take them long. The troops were roasting, we were roasting. Okay, said I, let's start number four engine and get some air conditioning while we're waiting. We got the engine going and started cooling off, but then the tower called and told us there was no flight plan, period. I asked if I could read him our route of flight and have him enter it. We do that regularly at civilian airports. He'd never done that—incredible—but would try. I gave him the full route plan: out of U.S. airspace, through Canadian airspace, across the North Atlantic system, into Irish airspace, through U.K. airspace, and into French control. It took four iterations for him to get it, and then he couldn't talk Boston center into accepting one that long from him.

Plan B, or maybe it was C or D: we called Stockholm Radio on HF and had them phone patch us through to New York. Where, pray tell, is our flight plan. They checked, they don't know, they resubmit the system refused it, it's the middle of the night, they submit again, this has never happened, submit again, and again, and finally, after 40 minutes of sitting with an engine running—thus eating into our required fuel and making me tell the engineer to lie slightly about takeoff fuel—we get a clearance and are on our way.

Pardon the changes of tense. I'm rambling and I shouldn't do that, but I'm tired and this is email.

And guess what, the gen dec was waiting for us in Paris. It was nice to have something work.

On the night of the 19th we did what the crew that relieved us had done. We picked up a plane coming from Wheeler-Sac and took it to Tuzla. The airplane we had brought to Paris, N610FF, had been pulled off the Tuzla trips when it got back to the U.S. because of the non-working APU. It was replaced by N623FF, which had a working APU, and that was probably as far as the thinking got in dispatch and operations. From my standpoint, I saw this little INOP sticker on the body gear steering switch while doing my pre-flight check. No body gear steering, it's broke and instead of being fixed has been deferred, which means that the amount of room needed to make a 180 degree turn on the ground has been increased from 153 feet to 170. Now I had never been to Tuzla, but I had a taxi diagram that showed some very narrow taxiways and a runway 148 feet wide without turnarounds at the ends. Would I be able to turn around? Well, yes, in that I can pick up a little room where the taxiways enter the single runway. That would certainly let me turnaround if I had body gear steering, but without body gear steering I may well be screwed. Worst case would be to shutdown on the runway and have it tugged around. Do they have a tug that can handle a 747. This is a small 8000 foot strip in war-ravaged Bosnia. New York can't answer my questions. I tell them, look, we have to go or we'll lose our Balkan time slot—which could mean a many hour delay, it's the middle of the night. You get me answers and I'll phone patch you an hour into the flight.

We phone patched them over Italy, and they had the info. No problem, there was a new ramp—constructed by the U.S. military—at the end of the arrival runway, 272 feet wide. I would have been a happy man but for the fact that preoccupied with the potential turning problem, I missed the fact that given the airplane we were in, we had been illegally dispatched to the Tuzla airport.

N623FF is a one-of-a-kind airplane at Tower. One of its oddities is that there is no separate ADF display. The ADF (automatic direction finding) needles are on the HSI (horizontal situation indication) and they aren't really needles, just needle heads. Because of the lack of needle tails, the FAA has decreed that N623FF cannot fly an NDB (non-directional beacon, that to which an ADF points) approach, and the only approach the Tuzla airport has is an NDB approach.

Technically speaking, I should have called dispatch and asked them to which legal field do you want us to divert. In the middle of the night 400 U.S. troops would haven gotten to wait for hours in an airplane that they would not have been permitted off.

Obeying the letter of the law would have been ludicrous. I knew the weather at Tuzla was severe clear. When we got there we shot a visual approach; we didn't even use its lone NDB approach. And the FAA's insistence concerning the lack of needle tails is nonsense beyond belief. They have a favorite way of tracking NDB courses that includes the advice to turn towards the head of the needle when tracking to a station, turn away from the tail of a needle when tracking from a station. That will work, but a simpler way and the way that I have always used is to turn towards the head of a needle at all times. That works whether you're tracking to or from a station.