Bowling for Fuselages: Invasion of the Saudimizers

“Life’s a dance you learn as you go
Sometimes you lead…sometimes you follow
Don’t worry about what you don’t know
‘Cause life’s a dance you learn as you go”
-John Michael Montgomery


It was 1981 and I was going to school in Waco, at Texas State Technical Institute (TSTI) getting certified as a gen-u-wine Aviation Mechanic. I moved there in August. Waco is a weird place, in the buckle of the Texas Bible belt. Its much bigger brother is Baylor University, a Southern Baptist college. On the cusp of the Texas hill country, Waco remains something of a holdout. It is much closer in nature to a town of the old pre civil war South, and in fact even had its share of slaves prior to the great war of Northern aggression.

The Campus of TSTI Waco is northeast of the town (which barely has any sort of recognizable nucleus in itself), and is near to the infamous David Koresch Branch Davidian compound. Religion plays a big part in these folks lives, no matter how cultish.

I was going to school with a lot of rather intelligent individuals, including my flying instructor, a 23 year old hotshot who had already amassed well over 3000 hours in the air, a lot of them as a flying hearse, shuttling bodies all over Texas and Oklahoma. Some of the other guys were college grads with degrees in fields like engineering, who for one reason or another decided that working on aircraft might be a lucrative means of earning an income. We were given to smoking giant Sherlock Holmes Meerschaum pipes and acting like avant-garde intellectuals instead of wrench turning grease monkeys.

The hanger where we all worked was filled with vintage, donated aircraft. There was an old DeHavilland Beaver, with an ancient Pratt and Whitney R-985 radial engine, a MASH era Bell 56 helicopter and various other salvaged pieces and parts. The hanger was a dirty collection of bird shit covered antiques, splattered with much excrement by the pigeons who had taken up residence in the rafters of the yawning cavernous old structure.

Outside resided an ancient DC-7 complete with engines and flight controls, where we’d disappear on breaks and smoke giant spliffs of bad ganja, pretending to be flying the ancient hulk, smoke billowing out of the hatches, windows and doors like there was an on board fire going on. I once saw a group of mechanic wannabes trying to hammer easy-outs into stripped screw heads on the wing panels, and it was at that time, like a revelation, that I made a conscious decision not to fly on commercial aircraft, unless under the direst emergency, knowing the quality of mechanics who happened to be headed for that field, a promise that I’ve kept for myself to this day…

Another aircraft sitting forlornly chained, like some sort of metal convict was the forward section of an old DC-3 sans wings and aft fuselage. This bird had killed a student just prior to my arrival in Waco when he leaned against the landing gear (which folds forward) while working in the wheel well, extruding his head though the nacelle firewall.

Around the back of the hanger were nine fuselages from old Cessna 150 trainers that the flight school operated, brightly colored little aircraft fuselages only, no interiors, engines, wings, or tail sections. The 150 is a tiny bird to begin with, and these sections were about 14 feet long, and 48” in diameter at the widest point, the engine firewall. They weighed less than a hundred pounds each.

One day we got the bright notion to set them up on end, on the firewall and arrange them like giant bowling pins. We’d take turns using an old tail wheel tire for a bowling ball, situating ourselves about fifty feet away. When the fuselages would fall, they made the most satisfying whack on the concrete, writhing and rocking in great metal anguish till they finally lay still on the hot August tramac, only to be picked up, re-set and bowled for by the next man up. Bowling for fuselages became a favorite pasttime along with hackey sack and copious ganja consumption which we did to alleviate some of the boredom of day to day life at TSTI, which could often resemble some sort of military training without the discipline.

Bowling for fuselages ended almost as soon as it began, when one day I launched a perfect strike ball, which, unfortunately took a hard hook after hitting an errant piece of two by four lying on the deck, bounced up and hit my friend John, who was the pin attendant, square in the nuts, causing him to immediately fall over in the classic Beavis and Butthead kicked-in-the-nads fetal position. The instructors decided to shut down our game then, before another lawsuit befell TSTI.

During that time, there were a number of Saudi Arabian guys going to school, taking aviation mechanics and flying. It was always a challenge being in the pattern with these guys. I was flying a lot too, and my flight instructor and I would often imbibe in a bit of ganja and then go out in the 150 aerobat to punch holes in the sky, doing screaming stalls, wing-overs and other fun maneuvers high above McLennan Community College, swooping down under the power wires that spanned the Bosque River, hoping that the pretty girls who went there would notice our valiant efforts. This all came to a halt one day too, when some shitstick decided to remove about six inches off of the top of the vertical stabilizer by flying too high under the wire…..fortunately he made it back, but the airspace around MCC was deemed off-limits for TSTI pilots. For our safety though, on the big flight board, whenever the Saudis were flying, there would appear in the Notice to Aviation Mariners (NOTAMS); “caution, Saudis in pattern!”…..

We renamed ‘em “Saudimizers” after the energizer battery, which just keeps going an going….Like the battery these fuckers would keep going and going allright, screwing up everything in their paths. You can’t polish a turd.

One day one of the Saudis walked in all covered with bandages, all black and blue bruises. Turns out that he’d crashed his new custom van (the old shag-vans from the ‘70’s and early 80’s) when he turned on the cruise control, and went to the back to mix a drink. Seems like one of the American students had told him that cruise control is just like having an autopilot.....

Because we’ve been in bed with the Saudis as a nation for a number of years, and due to the fact that they are a rich bunch of bastards from all of their oil and gas revenues, they were never failed in any aviation classes. I remember when we were all rebuilding engine magnetos, a complex job at best and damn near impossible without some sort of higher intelligence, the Saudi students couldn’t follow the directions, and got frustrated. Instead of reassembling the thing correctly, they just lobbed the parts inside and screwed the case halves back together. One of the instructors held up a Suadimized mag, and shook it like a fucking maraca before signing him off to go on to the next section of aircraft repair.

I enjoyed my tenure at TSTI Waco, and spent a good deal of hours flying, smoking ganja and in general having a good time. I finally graduated and passed my FAA exams. Later, I worked in San Antonio for Dee Howard Aircraft, modifying a giant 747 into a flying palace for the king of Saudi Arabia. I wonder if they allow Saudimizer mechanics to service it?