Warbird Information Exchange

In 1979 I got to go to the Civil Air Patrol's Air Training Command Familiarization Course held at Columbus AFB, in Mississippi. I was in the CAP and NJROTC in high school. Anyway, we stayed in a former SAC alert barracks between the runways used by the T-38's and T-37's at that time. Inside the barracks we found stashes of that lemon and cherry hard candy to be used in an emergency and canned water for 'SURVIVAL USE ONLY'. The candy was old, stale and oxidized and was terrible. The water tasted like water. There were no windows and all of the rooms had little reflective signs shaped like wings that said LATRINE and such. In a way it was like a time capsule, seeing first hand how SAC crews in the 50's and 60's lived waiting for the klaxon to sound. Wish I had owned a camera back then.

During 1961-1962 while at Castle AFB as Control Tower Operator, the SAC base was a bee-hive of activity in training B-52 & KC-135 crews plus participating in Chrome Dome missions. I will never forget the day a fully loaded KC-135 taking off south towards Merced lost an engine past critical takeoff point (runway was 2 miles long). The tanker continued on takeoff roll, continued on 1000' overrun before pilot (Instructor) simply retracted landing gear while hugging ground. The KC remained airborne, flying over a house blowing down TV antenna and began dumping fuel. Everyone in tower was waiting for crash, but an elongagted 20 minute pattern allowed all fuel to be dumped and thus a normal 3-engine landing. I understand some folks in Merced got a petrol shower! Those days would see many varied aircraft in pattern. As in a movie of the period (I believe Bombers B-52), we had a Marine C-117 suddenly appear on downwind with one prop feathered asking for emergency landing. Base security reacted properly, and the Surprise visitors (a General or two) were met with plenty of AP's. I also recall my first contact with a flight of 2 C-119's requesting landing instructions - they wanted an overhead 360 pattern vs normal downwind entry. What a spectacular sight watching them come in at full bore and peeling off over runway. We had C-133's coming in weekly, B-47's using RATO were occassionally at hand, Army H-19's & H-34's on temporary assignment to look for downed aircraft in the Sierra's...Many memories............Leon

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Be happy to serve your fellowman

Wow! As a current ATC, I'd love to hear more about some of the stuff you saw. Very cool!!

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

I grew up in far northeast Nebraska and have many of the same remembrances as Vlado and John. My school buildings had Civil Defense shelters in them with the barrels of water and foodstuffs in the basement. We did the Duck And Cover drills (led by the nuns that taught at our school) and took it very seriously.

Our farm was along the route that fighters from the Sioux City ANG took to get to their bombing and gunnery ranges. I saw RF-84s, F-100s, and later, A-7s go over very frequently while I was growing up. We lost a couple of windows to a Super Sabre one day, and heard sonic booms frequently in the early sixties.

I used to sit on the ground and watch KC-97s and KC-135s working their refueling tracks way up there over our little part of the Midwest. The '97s were usually refuelling their B-47 consorts from Salina, Topeka, and Lincoln. Later it was just the '135s refuelling B-52s, RC-135s, E-4s, fighters, etc. The sound was always rather faint because of the altitude, but eventually you could catch sight of the operation if you scanned the skies long enough. My father and I would often be doing chores in the evening during winter and we would spend a few minutes listening to the jets way up in the stratosphere. I'm a little to young to remember them, but dad would mention how the B-36s flying over would make everything vibrate as they passed.

I hadn't thought of a lot of these experiences for a long time, Nathan. Growing up with cold warriors over my head as a kid is one of the reasons I'm in aviation today. Thanks for the thread.

Scott

I went through the duck-and-cover drills in grade school during the 50s, remember Castro taking over Cuba, and later the Bay Of Pigs, and the missile crisis. In 68 I enlisted in the Air Force and went into SAC where I became a B-52 crew chief. I spent quite a bit of time on the Alert Pad in my various assignments. It's was quite sobering to be part of the team that went through the prep stages for an airplane "cocking on." Nobody allowed near the plane unless there were two of them to insure no mistakes, security unbelievably tight. The convoy comes out, the Munitions guys upload the weapons. The missile guys come out in a convoy and load the Hound Dogs under the wings. Finally the flight crew comes out and preflights the plane, downlocks are pulled, bomb doors closed, etc, just like they're going to take off. The crew accepts the airplane and calls command post. The plane is now "cocked." I was 19 the first time I went through this and it was a lot of responsabilty for me at the time. We lived in underground hardened bunkers for a week at a time and every morning we preflighted again. Practice wars happened 2 1/2 times a week on average, everyone running to the planes and starting engines, maybe taxi to the runway, simulate take off and chop the throttles, 3 hours to park all the planes again and top off fuel tanks. We called it The Elephant Walk. 5 to 7 bombers and the same number of tankers all fighting to be the first to reach the runway. What a thrilling sight! The Chrome Dome missions were already over with by the time I got there so I can't tell you anything about them. Just the ground alert was more than enough activity.
In 1969 we starting splitting up the alert forces to prevent the Russian subs from having it too easy in their targeting. 3 bombers from Ramey in Puerto Rico were taken off the Ramey pad and sent to Homestead near Miami, and put on alert there. 3 tankers from Ramey went to McDill near Tampa for the same thing. Crews and supplies flew back and forth every Thursday. I was out on the flightline one day with another crew chief, and we were servicing our planes. I couldn't go near my own plane unless I had another qualified crew chief with me. We'd work on his plane first and then go work on mine. This was called the Two Man Concept. Anyway, we're out there draining the fuel surge tanks on the wingtips and a strange plane made a low level high speed pass over the runway with it's gear already lowered. I'd already spent some time in SEA working Buff operations against VietNam and had become familiar with every kind of allied aircraft, and this was a plane we didn't recognize. Then it was gone and we went back to work. A few minutes later a defecting Cuban Mig 17 taxid right in front of the 3 alert bombers. We saw it and realized it was the plane we'd just seen in the air, big red star on the fin and all. It just taxid right past us and turned the corner. Then the klaxons all went off. The fighers (F-102, F-106, F-4) all got airborn right away. I should mention that Homestead was an Air Defense Command base and their job was preventing anything like what just happened. They were the interceptors. The bomber crews ran out and we started engines, but they didn't move and shut down again. The fighters that launched were the alert birds of ADC and they were way too late. That was in Oct of 69 and you can still find bits and pieces about the event on the web, but not as much information is out there as there used to be. Nixon and Air Force One were on the base when this all took place, and heads rolled for having screwed things up so badly.
Once or twice a year we'd go through a graded Readiness Inspection. It always started with an alert excercise and the alert planes were graded on the initial response. Then they had the real weapons downloaded while other Bomb Wings took up the slack by putting extra planes on alert. The rest of the bombers and tankers had 24 hrs to be prepped for war, using dummy weapons for ballast. And then the klaxon sounded again and they all took off in 15 second intervals(minimum interval take off or MITO). Everyone involved was pretty pumped up to watch as many as 30 planes launching in EWO conditions. The air would be black from the water injection systems and the noise was unimaginable. The tankers didn't have the sonic baffles in their exhausts like the bombers did and they really crackled when they hit the water injection. All planes flew assigned missions including high and low altitude weapon delivery, navigation legs, in-flight refuel, etc. Every plane and every crew was graded along with all the ground crews and supporting personnel. It was definately a big deal for us all. And it worked. The Russians tried to compete with us and they went bankrupt. We won.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq6Hpxyrhyo&feature=related
Here's a link to a short video from the early 60s movie, "A Gathering of Eagles." This was filmed at Beale AFB in California.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCnCXAhPDts
And another link to another MITO filmed at Griffiss AFB in New York during the late 80s

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Ramey AFB, asst crew chief 58-0235, crew chief 58-0232. Mather AFB, crew chief 59-2566, awarded Master Crew Chief 1 Dec, 1971.

Y'all mentioned the Cuba Missile Crisis. I don't really remember all that much about it other than there was news on TV and the folks were tense. One of our parts counter men at the car dealership I used to work at was a ground crew member of an F-100 unit that was sent to Florida during the Crisis. When he told his part of that operation he still looked scared to death, over twenty years later. He told me he was pretty sure he wasn't going to see his wife and family again as they thought the airfields near Cuba would be the first to take a strike if things escalated.

Does anyone know when the schools stopped doing the Civil Defense drills? Our school still did them during my first couple of years of grade school, but that was in the early sixties. Perhaps we were just being extra cautious or it was a school policy along with tornado drills.

Another thing I just remembered was a Huey and Cobra landing on the parking lot at our school to do a recruiting visit in the late sixties timeframe.

Scott

My dad had finished his stint with the AF Intelligence in 59, with the Cuban thing in the works, he got a notification that he should be ready for a call-up with a 48 hour warning. Fortunately that did not happen. Though he did have his Reserve unit activated for a few days in Desert Storm I to help process units embarking from the Port of Houston.

He was stationed at a forward OP/Intel island just south of a North Korean island and they could watch the NKA flak guns follow their supply AC as they landed. Much to close for comfort. Glad no-one pulled the trigger there. It was still very tense there. He got rousted out of bed one night after not cleaning his tracking chart exercise before he left shift. Next fellow on looked at the chart, did some figuring and spotted an incoming AC flying faster than anything we had over there. They nearly scrambled the nearby fighter base.

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I have a few more thoughts to add. I remember my father taking me over to see the jet fighters at the Peoria National Guard in the very early 50s. They still operated the F-86 Sabre at that time. Boy, was I ever impressed because the Korean War was just barely over and the movies of that event included the Mig killing Sabre jet. Who could ever forget seeing Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the podium at the UN, and saying, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” That was some pretty serious talk, and the US took it seriously. I remember Gary Powers being shot down by the Russians while spying on them with his U-2. Things were tense at times during those days.
SAC didn't want anything to do with Viet Nam. Their primary mission was nuclear deterence, and they saw a small brushfire war like that as an impediment and a distraction. The cold warriors at the SAC bases started getting stretched very thin as SAC was ordered to Guam for the Arc Light bombings in 1965. Lots of SAC crews were being rotated in and out of SEA on 6 month TDY tours that were becoming more frequent. Crew members were getting out rather than keep up with that schedule. It wasn't easy being a cold warrior during the Viet Nam era.
One time I came home to central Illinois on leave from Ramey, and decided to hitch hike over to Indiana to visit a pal I had gone through basic training and tech school with. He had been assigned to the 305th bomb Wing of B-58 Hustler fame near his home town of Kokamo, Indiana. I got over there in the late afternoon and contacted his parents. They said I'd be better off to go straight to the base and meet him at his barracks when he got off work. So I hitched a ride to the base and checked through the gate next to the runway. I no sooner got checked in than the red light stopped all traffic passing the end of the runway. It was just turning dusk out when a B-58 taxid down and stopped at the hold line for a few minutes getting ready for take off. I was really excited because I knew what this plane was, but had never seen one before. I was less than 100 yards from the plane when it released the brakes, rolled forward and straightened up with the center line. All four engines came up to power and then the afterburners kicked in. 4 huge blue flames erupted from the exhausts and away she went, quicker than anything I ever saw before, and disappeared into the eveing sky pulling long blue flames behind it. That was a thrill.
Another time a few years later, I was stationed at Mather AFB in Sacramento and we were pulling alert at Mt Home AFB in Idaho. We were sharing this duty with the Bomb Wing at Beale AFB just north of Sacramento, and always stopped there on our way to Idaho to pick up their guys going up with us. We had picked up the guys and were getting ready to take off again when the navigator came back into the cargo/passenger area of the KC-135. He told us were we NOT to look out the windows on the left side of the plane because the top secret SR-71 was about to take off. As soon as he went back into the cockpit everyone rushed over to the port side to see the blackbird launch. it was a sight alright, but I think the KC-135 almost falling on it's left wingtip must have been a sight too. One day not long after that another Blackbird made a low level fly-by at Mather and we all got a big charge out of that.
Those are some pretty fond memories, but none of them can match the feeling of actually flying with the BUFF when the opportunity presented itself. The first time I found myself at 40,000 feet and sitting in the IP seat behind and between the pilots, listening to rock and roll on the intercom was a very strange feeling to me. I was only 19 and thinking, "A year and a half ago, I would never have believed it if someone told me I'd be doing this right now."
Flying over West Virginia, Tennesee and Kentucky at low level on training missions and seeing the hillbillies come out on the front porch of the mountain shacks and waving at us, we'd waggle the wings and zip across the clearing on the mountain top, and gone.
Heading back to Puerto Rico in the evening after 10 or 12 hours on the radar bomb ranges and running into the thunderheads over the Gulf of Mexico. Trying to thread our way through the openings in the clouds and having them turn into blind canyons before we could get through. Turning around trying to stay clear of the thunderheads, and getting hit by lightning anyway. These clouds towered over us by miles and miles and the mighty BUFF seemd so insignificant. Sometimes it still seems like an unbelievable dream to me that I was allowed to take part in it all.

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Ramey AFB, asst crew chief 58-0235, crew chief 58-0232. Mather AFB, crew chief 59-2566, awarded Master Crew Chief 1 Dec, 1971.

Check this link out.....

http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/stories.html

I have a second hand story. In A&P school we had an instructor who used to crew P2 Neptunes out of Brunswick NAS in Maine. (Closed just last year.) He told about a multi pass low level buzz job of a Soviet trawler. On the last pass someone on deck with a mop tossed the mop straight up in the air. They were so low everyone on the Neptune held his breath until the mop reached its apogee and fell away.

I remember a couple of sonic booms growing up in Southern NH. Never heard another one until the early 1990s in Laconia, NH we heard a loud boom while in the hangar. We rushed out looking for smoke or a fireball but there was nothing. That night I heard that a one of a pair of F-16s from VT ANG had broken the sound barrier while dogfighting.

I had a sister who dated a Colonel at Pease AFB. We went there for dinner and got a tour of the base. I remember there was a hulk of a KC 135 used for fire training and that the guard dogs were vicious and trained only to recognize one master, when a dog handler AP was given an emergency transfer they had to put his dog down. Another thing was "Use of deadly force authorized" placards painted on to ramp at Pease.

One last remembrance was the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Pease AFB cut the town of Newington, NH in half when it was built. Years later a Senator got a road cut right through the base in order to reunite the town. My school bus went down that road every day and we used to look for aircraft on the flight line. Typically KC 135s, C 130s and T-29s, rarely saw the FB-111s. One day in October I saw white 747 on a ramp pretty far away from the regular ramp. One of the Air Force brats on the bus said that it was near the ammo dump. That night there was video on TV of El Al airliners loading ammo at Dover AFB in Delaware. (Operation Nickel Grass) I remember telling my Mom that they were doing the same thing at Pease. The next morning the road was closed and it remained closed until after the end of the war.

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"I can't understand it, I cut it twice and it's still too short!" Robert F. Dupre' 1923-2010 Go With God.

I don't remember doing duck and cover drills after about 1966 or so???

I was a co-pilot on a select crew (B-47) at Whiteman AFB during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember several incidents during that time. Some scary, some humorous (now). I gave a couple of Powerpoint presentations a few years ago and could probably dig up some personal observations if ya'all are interested.
Hugh

I certainly would be interested! Even though I don't remember it plainly I was very impressed when my co-worker told me how he felt on that TDY to Florida.

Scott

WOW......would love to hear some stories. Can't beleive we got a B-47 pilot here on WIX. COOL!

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As I've mentioned before, I grew up near NAS Glenview (IL). I started kindergarten in the fall of '65, and over the years we had some tornado drills and a LOT of fire drills (the deadly Chicago parochial school fire of '58 was a recent memory) but no duck-and-covers. There were war exercises in the Chicago area at the time, and I heard enough sonic booms to recognise the whooshing sound of an approaching jet in enough time to clamp my hands over my ears before the boom hit. There were a few crashes back then in the area, including an FJ Fury that crashed and destroyed a house in Northbrook in '63 and a Skyhawk that hit another house in Glenview in '68 and killed a young girl inside.

My dad was in the Air Force in Japan between WWII and Korea, but fears of Communist uprisings in 1948 resulted in all base personnel carrying sidearms. Near his base at Bofu some disgruntled Japanese guy on a fishing boat took a couple potshots at him and missed.

His youngest brother served in the Air Force in the mid-60s in West Germany with a unit that monitored East German communications. He once mentioned something to me about C-130s on his base that had some kind of microwave eavesdropping equipment that supposedly could cook you if you got too close - anyone have more details on that equipment?

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All right, Mister Dorfmann, start pullin'!
Pilot: "Flap switch works hard in down position."
Mechanic: "Flap switch checked OK. Pilot needs more P.T." - Flight report, TB-17G 42-102875 (Hobbs AAF)