Along for the bumpy ride

Vinyard recalls many life-threatening incidents. On one occasion, he had an engine blow out shortly after takeoff, and he suffered engine failure on two other night flights, one of which led to the crew throwing everything out to lighten the aircraft as they flew back on one engine.

"I've always told people that when you flew the Hump you needed three things－good luck, good decisions and a good pilot," he says.

"Well, if your luck ran out, the other two didn't matter because you couldn't do anything about it. You had to have that luck with you at all times. Yeah, all the time."

After coming back from the war, Vinyard got married, had three sons, and spent the rest of his career working as a civil air traffic controller in different cities, but he still considers his service in China as the most meaningful part of his life, and talks about it all the time.

In 1969, he joined the Hump Pilot Association founded by Hump pilots from the University of Michigan and helped to organize a reunion and conduct historical research. Vinyard served three times as president and later became the last president of the association in the 2000s. The association became inactive in 2005 due to the age of its surviving members.

In 2004, when he visited Yunnan province, he found that some of the old airfields he used to use had been turned into cornfields. He was happy to find that the Chinese had built a heritage park in Guilin as a memorial to the Flying Tigers－a name used to describe the American pilots who fought in China during the war.

Vinyard visited the park when it opened in 2015.

"That's a place where our common bonds are out in the open and plain for all to see, rather than just reading about it in books," he says, adding that most of his fellow pilots had passed away.

He can vividly recall landing on the airfields of China, when the people working on the runways would come and gave him a thumbs-up.

"That's what I am hoping for between the US and China. We have a very strong bond and there's no reason for us to be nibbling at each other," he says.

Vinyard can still recall the first time he flew across the Hump to China.

"It was daytime. With sunshine you could see the snow-covered mountains of the Himalayas 100 miles to the north. It was a beautiful sight－and a smooth ride."