Flying Wildcatter

In a Tegucigalpa bank one morning last week, Joe Silverthorne grasped ten $1,000 bills in his fist, waved them jubilantly in the face of a friend. "You see these?" gloated the lean, pistol-packing Texan. "Well, when I get to Miami next month, I'm going to swap them for a $10,000 bill. I've never had a $10,000 bill, but I'm going to get one and wave it under the nose of every s.o.b. in Tegucigalpa."

The ten crisp bills represented part of the profits that have rolled into Silver-thorne's hands in the year that he has been operating a wildcat airline called ANHSA (National Airline of Honduras). Though the little republic already had two major airlines, TACA of Honduras and SAHSA, a Pan American affiliate, the newcomer had somehow skimmed off the cream of the freight business.

"Just Turn on the Radio." Old Barnstormer Joe Silverthorne, now 40, knows all the tricks; he learned them from one of the smartest air operators ever to hit Central America. Back in 1934, after a hitch in the U.S. Navy, Joe Silverthorne became a crew chief for New Zealand-born Lowell Yerex's TACA airline. Brassy and hardfisted, he soon caught the eye of Yerex, who made him his personal bodyguard and general handyman.

After World War II, which he spent ferrying Allied planes across the Atlantic, Silverthorne completed his education by operating a Nicaraguan airline in partnership with Dictator Tacho Somoza's son Tachito. Two years ago he sold out and, with a DC-3 and two Lockheed Lodestars, moved on to Tegucigalpa to form ANHSA.

Keeping $65,000 worth of the company's $100,000 capital stock for himself as compensation for the three planes, he judiciously sold the rest to influential Honduran politicos. Though Silverthorne denies it, many Hondurans. believe that President Juan Manuel Galvez's son Roberto got a piece.

For headquarters, Silverthorne rented a shabby, $100-a-month building, then sublet half of it. "Hell," snorted Joe, "I don't need a chrome-plated office. I was fetched up on salt-rising bread and black-eyed peas." He parked his planes in the open, repaired them in Honduran air force shops. Since TACA and SAHSA already had radio range and weather stations, Joe saw no reason to duplicate them. "I just turn on the radio and listen to their weather reports," he says blandly.

"You Gotta Take It." Nor was Joe hampered by the fact that his competitors owned most of the country's airstrips. Under Honduran law, any private field may be used for government freight; Joe took care to have some government cargo aboard any of his planes landing on TACA or SAHSA strips. That way he could use them without even paying landing fees.

No matter how hard TACA and SAHSA fought for profitable official freight contracts, the bulk of government business gravitated to ANHSA. Officials of the rival lines found it harder & harder to ignore Joe and his flashy sport shirt, hand-painted pink necktie and high-heeled boots. Sneered Joe, who quit school in the third grade: "These guys are finding out that it takes more than a fancy education to run an airline." And if some Hondurans had begun to frown at his unabashed wildcatting methods, Joe did not care. "If you want what the world's got," he said last week, "you gotta take it. Nobody ever tried to give Joe Silverthorne a nickel."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.