Crazy Ted

I’ve said it before, the pilot you have to fear the most is the one who never shows any concern about the weather. To fear navigating through a serious line of thunderstorms is a good thing actually.

Sounds like an odd paradox — a fearful pilot — but in aviation, the safest aviator is the one who maintains a healthy dose of fear as it relates to flying. This is akin to swimming with sharks unrelated to a “shark adventure.” If you’re not at least a little afraid while you’re in the water with them on some Australian vacation, with the beach sign posted, “Sharks sighted,” you should be.

I used to fly with a fearless guy. Fellow charter pilot named Ted. He wasn’t scared of anything, let alone Mother Nature. He thought thunderstorms were over-rated, and if you had any fear of them you were a wuss. We could be on the airport ramp together, getting ready to take off, pre-flighting our respective planes, with a thunder boomer just to the north of us, lying across our path, and I’d be thinking, I need to postpone this flight at least until the storm moves out of the area.

With Ted, though, it was always full steam ahead. Screw any takeoff delay. Nothing was standing in his way. Certainly not a thunderstorm full of lightning and thunder. Ted would either flip it off and fly through it or around it, but it wasn’t going to make him postpone the trip.

Ted rolled the dice. He was a gambler. A high flyer.

So one day, he’s flying along the Mexican coast, on his way back from Vera Cruz to Brownsville, and he happens to spy what looks to be an abandoned shrimp boat, a shipwreck, lying on the beach. In Ted’s mind, this was pure gold, because he thought that an abandoned boat is fair game to anyone who can get to it first. Possession is ninetenths of the law, in other words. A salvageable boat belongs to the one who claims it first.

Obviously, this was during Mexico’s glory days, when the country was still pretty much free of serious crime, at least against civilians. There weren’t any shootouts between rival drug cartels on the beaches of Cancun, Tulum, or Acapulco, and you could still go to Reynosa’s La Cucaracha for dinner.

So Ted gets back to Brownsville and convinces three of his buddies they’d load up two pick up trucks, one with a big trailer attached to its rear end, and drive back down into Mexico, salvage the shrimp boat, load ‘er up and head back to Texas where they’d sell it and make a nice profit. Excited at the

Excited at the prospect of free money, they drive about two hours south, get to the Gulf Coast beach and unload the trucks. They walk to the shrimp boat and climb on board. That’s when all hell broke loose. What Ted and his buddies didn’t realize was that the shrimp boat was loaded with kilos of pot, and the Mexican navy was lying in wait in the sand dunes, waiting for the drug traffickers to re-appear to claim their contraband.

Ted and his three buddies were obviously the narcos since here they now were, from Texas, no less, climbing aboard the shrimp boat loaded with dope.

So over the sand dunes the Mexican navy troops race, automatic weapons at the ready. With hands raised, Ted and his three amigos are taken into federal Mexican custody and charged with drug running.

Back at the Brownsville Airport, I had no idea that this drug shake-down, if you will, had taken place. Thankfully for me, Ted hadn’t invited to cut me in on the deal. Being young and stupid at the time, I might have said yes, sounds like a plan, count me in.

Of course, knowing Ted, I might just as easily have said, no thanks.

Inside the charter pilot’s office, someone hands me the daily edition of the Matamoros newspaper, and there on the front page, above the fold, bigger than life, are the big mug shots of Ted and his three amigos, including the son of a well-known Brownsville physician. The headline read something like: “Four Americans busted for drug running.”

In the end, the doc coughed up a hundred grand to get his son out of jail.

It was a package deal apparently, because the money included the release of all four, Ted included. Back then, late 1970s, a hundred grand was a lot of money.

A few years later, Ted was back in the news.

Coming back from Mexico, U.S. Customs found some pot stems and seeds in the cargo hold of his plane and charged him with drug smuggling. He claimed it was all a mistake. Ted had loaned his plane out to a friend, wouldn’t you know it, and how could he be held accountable for what his friend might have done without his knowledge. Ted beat that rap, although I’m not sure how. Lady Luck was obviously his close friend on both the ground and aloft.

I once had an air ambulance flight to Houston. Got halfway there, just northeast of Victoria, and ran into a line of thunderstorms that I was unwilling to penetrate. The cells were stacked too close together and there was no space between them. That wouldn’t have stopped Ted though. Full steam ahead. Mother Nature can just get the hell out of the way.

Unlike Ted, however, I had a healthy fear of violent weather that had the ability to tear apart an airplane.

So I had to tell the patient and nurse in the back of the plane, sorry, but we have to head back to Brownsville. Can’t make it to Houston. We’ll try again tomorrow, which we did, with better weather enroute.

I later heard that Ted — Ted being Ted — had basically questioned my judgment. How could I turn back? Was I a pilot or a wuss? Who can’t navigate their way through a squall line?

To his credit, my boss, or so I heard, told him, well, sometimes, there are thunderstorms you just can’t fly through or between. Still true today.