On this summer evening, you get the call to haul some 20 hours since your last endeavor. You mutter a bit because 16 hours is about the average interval between flights, so the weather in this monsoon season must be especially foul for things to have gotten backed up enough to give you some extra sack time. You get a weather briefing, on which you rely because it comes from reports of pilots who are right in it, and a load manifest, which you consider cheap fiction. You are probably going to be well over gross because cargo weights are estimates and, in your experience, lousy ones. In monsoon season, with its broiling heat and thunderstorms, the preferred cargo is avgas. While it can prove pyrotechnical if a Japanese fighter takes an interest in you, at least a 55-gallon drum of avgas always weighs 330 pounds, the ground crews have been given orders as to the maximum number of drums they can shove into the airplane, and most can count, so, carrying avgas, you will only be at gross weight. You learn that your cargo is not avgas so you and your copilot make some not so funny jokes about how good the loaders are at stuffing 10 pounds of, ahem, stuff, into a 5 pound bucket. As usual, you have full tanks, 1,400 gallons, because you won't be given any fuel in China and, if the weather is good enough, some of your fuel load will be considered part of what you are supplying your comrades in arms and drained while on the ground at your destination.

Tonight you are going to Kunming where there are clouds reported at 1,000 feet with about two miles visibility. That makes things marginal, for 1,000 feet just happens to be the minimum descent altitude due to the mountains near the airport. You take a moment to consider the fact that Kunming is at about 6,000 feet MSL, so even with 3 hours of fuel burned, a missed approach in the heat of a summer night means doing everything right to avoid the tall stuff, despite the initial part of the procedure being over a large lake. Here at home plate, it is raining torrents. The cloud base is high, but visibility is only about a half-mile. Technically that's less than minimums for the NDB approach, but you've heard a half dozen Commandos land just since you got the call for your trip. At the Hump, if you can't track 2.5 miles outbound from an NDB in a crosswind and find a runway during heavy rain, you need to go fly something easy, like fighters.