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My dad, Fon Moore was a pilot of a C-47 in the CBI (China,Burma,India) theater where he flew troops from India to China over the Himalayas, which was called jumping the Hump. As a Hump Jumper he would fly this heavy laden C-47 at night, in thunderstorms over the most treacherous mountains in the world. Since the Japanese had occupied the area to the south, they had to fly their C-47 "Skytrain" over a northern route which took them over three ranges of mountains. The first range was 10,000 ft tall, the second range was 14,000 ft tall and the third range (which was referred to as "The Hump") was 15,000 ft. This may not seem like much of a problem today. But for a heavy laden C-47 filled with troops or cargo, it was a hard task. The moutains almost always had storms on them and they did not have GPS or even the use of VOR vectoring. All they had to navigate their direction was a simple NDB radio beacon here and there and then, if and when they got above the clouds, they would navigate by using the stars in the sky. If they went too far north, they would be confronted with a mountain range that would be too tall for the C-47 to cross and if they accidentally went too far south, then Japanese troops would shoot them down. Almost half the planes were lost! So many C-47's were lost in the mountains that they would actually send patrol's out to collect parts from crashed planes to fix the planes back at the airbase.
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