He then returned, refueled the airplane and continued the trip. With not a drop of avgas on the island, they put the pilot on the first military shuttle back to Honolulu, where he had to arrange for a shipment of two barrels of fuel to Johnston. A Beech Baron A55 on the same route had landed there two weeks before when the pilot’s “howgoesit” suggested he’d misjudged the winds and wouldn’t make Kauai-the Navy hadn’t been sympathetic. Running short of fuel wasn’t considered a real emergency. “Doctor, I have this strange cough…”)įor obvious reasons, landing at Johnston was strictly prohibited, unless you had a real emergency. (Still, traditional wisdom in the general aviation ferry business was never to cross Johnston below 10,000 feet. If there was ever an accidental release of chemical or biological agents, it would have plenty of time and distance to dissipate. The trades blow so consistently across Johnston from Hawaii that the smoke plume nearly always blows straight toward the Marshalls, 1,300 nm away with not even a rock in between. Navy was systematically burning them up in furnaces at the southwest corner of the island.
Seemingly everyone knew it was America’s repository for chemical and biological weapons, and the U.S. Johnston was the worst-kept secret in the Pacific. Johnston was only 30 miles away now a rectangular island totally covered by a 9,000-foot runway, hangars and a clutch of suspicious Quonset huts cluttering its surface. I initiated an emergency descent to 10,000 feet, dumped the cabin, popped open the left storm window and leaned forward to breathe the cool Pacific air.
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