The airborne operations officer gets the tail numbers of everyone in the stack. He tells the lowest guy to shoot the approach and level off right on top of the cloud deck. From your perch, you watch the wingtip vortices of the olive drab C-46 make a furrow across the cloud before until the pilot starts a climb back to the stack . The ops officer already has the next Commando on the approach. That ship deepens the furrow. The guys in the tower have stepped outside and confirm that they can hear the airplanes going right over the runway. Two more airplanes make the approach. You can see the furrow widen and deepen as you work your way down the stack. Number five spots the runway and lands. That's all it takes. Tower clears one of the waiting airplanes for takeoff and the ops officer runs the lot of you in just as fast as he can. The combination of landings and takeoffs keeps the air stirred up enough that the fog never closes back over the runway, and eventually burns off altogether. By that time you've parked the behemoth for which you are responsible. Before you can even get out, the fuel truck is there and the loaders have the first forklift up to the doors.

You will keep doing this, in all weather, into 1946 because the end of the war doesn't end the demand for supplies, it takes time to spool it all down. You will successfully navigate to landings in visibility as low as a half mile using only that Bendix ADF, which you trust with your life. Its loop antenna, over a foot in diameter, is in a teardrop shaped housing that looks like a cancerous growth on the airplane. There is but one ADF in the airplane. If it fails when you are in the clag, you are absolutely, totally and completely hosed. Yet, at a time when your buddy flying Curtiss P-40s is putting up with an engine that often gets only 15 hours between overhauls, and you can never count on the heater or the autopilot working on a Commando, that Bendix ADF is the essence of reliability. It is so accurate that you are comfortable holding a course line through the mountains when tracking an NDB that is 100 miles away.

You survive this adventure, unlike some of your friends. In the year 2002, you will read of the recovery, that year, of four men from the wreckage of a C-46 at the 15,650-foot level and wonder if you knew them. Later in your life you will fly using GPS for navigation and sometimes be curious just how you did what you did over the Hump and whether pilots who think of an NDB approach as an emergency procedure can ever be referred to as accomplished.