DC-3 Airways
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On the Beak of an Ancient Pelican

San Francisco to Samoa

Sometime in the early 1960s, Polynesian Airlines, who had been operating routes in the Pacific, with a single borrowed DC-3, decided to buy one of their own. A pilot was needed to ferry the "new" aircraft, named "Savaii", from California to Samoa, and EK Gann was lured away from his typewriter to fly his first DC-3 for nineteen years.

"Savaii" was equipped with a single ADF radio, but no VOR/DME/ILS radios (the latter would have been of no use in her new area of operations), and a pair of rubber 400-gallon ferry tanks (due to a plumbing fault, they stopped feeding after 770 gallons). She also had an astrodome, which was used to take sun- and star-fixes with an octant (bubble sextant).

The story of the flight is the last chapter of "Ernest K. Gann's Flying Circus" (ISBN 0 340 20693 4).