At 7,000 feet you see some lights on the ground, the ADF and directional gyro advise that you're on course, and you know the area very well, so you decide to cheat a hundred feet. You'd rather not miss the approach; there is another airplane letting down about two minutes or so behind you, and you aren't allowed another chance. If you do miss, you get to slog all the way home with the cargo still on board. Your copilot calls the runway lights and confirms that the gear and flaps are down, good lad, and you scrub off the altitude. You three-point the monster right on the numbers and feel your tension level rise because the airborne pussycat manners of the C-46 instantly turn sour once the tires start rolling. You don't relax a bit until the aircraft is into the chocks and secured.

After a visit to the latrine, some coffee and a chat with the weather folks, you head back out to the airplane. They, whoever "they" are, have defueled it to 600 gallons, total. You're not crazy about that, because you suspect fog will be a problem when you get to Mohanbari about dawn, which means holding. You should have said something when you first walked into ops but it's too late now, you are required to be in the air before an hour has passed.

The return leg is longer than the outbound leg; it's offset to the north, making a long, arc. It also has minimum altitudes that are 500 feet higher, but that is okay, as your Commando is a few tons lighter than it was an hour ago. Luckily, it's not winter when you've personally experienced more than 100 knot headwinds on the return leg and can recall once taking exactly one hour and twenty minutes to fly the 120 miles between two NDBs.

Over India, the eastern sky is getting lighter out your left window and you find that the monsoon thunderstorms have dissipated for a little while, something that gives you no joy whatsoever. You won't have to wrestle your way through them, but it means Mohanbari is probably covered in ground fog. Sure enough, your radio operator hands you a note, the base is far below minimums, so it's time to pull the power way back and mentally kick yourself for not hanging on to that extra gas. You enter a holding stack with a dozen other C-46s, orbiting and wondering when things will open up. Sunrise reveals a cloud deck barely 50 feet thick, right on the ground, as far as you can see. After about 15 minutes a C-46 with a qualified operations officer aboard arrives in the stack above you. He confers with the tower and then, exercising his prerogative, takes command of local air traffic control, something you hoped he would do.