Flying Naked - An American Pilot in the Amazon Jungle

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The C-27A Spartan was a twin-engine turboprop cargo plane used by the U.S. military in Central and South America during the 1990s. Modified from the Italian G-222, it was large enough to carry several tons of cargo and people but small enough to get into most of the airstrips scattered around the jungles of the region. That mission was called tactical airlift. For ten years the C-27 filled an essential tactical airlift niche by supplying locations too remote for helicopters to reach and too small for bigger aircraft to land.

The C-27 wasn't sleek: a bulbous nose and squat fuselage made it look chubby – some compared it to a baby seal. But it was rugged enough to pound down onto rutted clearings carved into the forest and durable enough to bounce through thunderstorms over the Andes mountains. Crews routinely mistreated the airframe and engines by carrying too much, landing too hard, or driving it like an off-road vehicle through grass, gravel, sand, or mud to get where they were going. Many of the crews flying the "Mighty Chuck," as it was affectionately called, amplified their harsh treatment by being inexperienced. Others came to the plane with lots of hours in the air – and then misapplied lessons learned in other aircraft. Yet the C-27 never complained and always persevered. In a decade of operations it rarely broke, never crashed, and won accolades from those who had the privilege to fly aboard – in both the cockpit and the cabin.

The C-27 had one home, Howard Air Base in Panama. Crews also staged temporary operations from satellite fields in Honduras and Peru. From these locations they reached sites as far north as Guatemala and as far south as Bolivia, from the Pacific coast to the jungles of Brazil.

The C-27 fleet left Panama in 1999 when the United States gave the Canal Zone and its military bases to the country of Panama. The Air Force retired the planes shortly thereafter.