The Spirit of Adventure - Michael McCafferty

Day 3: A Lesson in French Hospitality
Paris, France
Great news! Sometime around mid-morning, Bernard Chabbert called to
announce that the Waco would be trucked into Le Bourget by late afternoon. I had given
up hope that the plane would be delivered on Friday, assuming that the truck driver
would most certainly delay to avoid Friday afternoon rush hour traffic, making up some
excuse to postpone until Monday. Fortunately, I was wrong.
At mid-day, the world's greatest Waco biplane pilot called me on the phone and
said he had just checked into the hotel and would be right up. Carl Dye, the chief pilot for
the Waco factory, and certainly the man with the most knowledge about this awesome
airplane than any man alive, had graciously agreed to come here to Paris to oversee the reassembly
of my plane and to test fly it when it was all put together.
We spent a couple of hours going over some aeronautical charts of England and
Ireland that I had brought from the US. We were looking for the differences in chart
notations between the US and Europe maps. (There were plenty!)
To my surprise, I then received a call from Francois Bricheteau, the Directeur
General of Euralair Industries. He was calling to inform me that my biplane had arrived
at their hangar at Le Bourget (only a half mile from my hotel) and would I please come to
his office to deal with unloading it. Carl and I set out immediately.
Within an hour we had half a dozen Frenchmen and two Americans standing
around this 40-foot container on a truck, all trying to figure out how we could get the
plane out of it and onto the ground. We all had our own ideas, and it was more than a
little difficult to try to communicate to each other with our limited understanding of each
other's language. We finally settled on a method which involved leveraging a mobile
loading platform and a winch, and within four hours, we had the plane out of the truck
and safely on the ground.
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