Cold War Air Defense

[Music] foreign [Music] welcome to Peninsula seniors out and about we're at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance let's go see what Cindy has for us today welcome everyone to the Western Museum of Flight I'm Cindy Maca the director winning the Cold War the very definition of the Cold War was that we avoided shooting at each other by maintaining the strength to convince the enemy that we could gain Nothing by turning the Cold War hot this required a special kind of warrior one who maintained the strength and will to fight but the restraint and discipline to stand firm and we have one such Cold War Warrior today who will share his experiences of what it was like to stand on the wall ready to fight but remain leashed in ladies and gentlemen Captain David wensley [Applause] Cindy thank you very much uh amazing introduction you do such a tremendous job here we at the Lion Air Museum are a little bit jealous I think we have three or four people that do her job together they don't manage to do half of what she does so we'll talk to them when we get home really fine well it started off with a light story about this scarecrow and I think we can keep this whole presentation light and have a good time uh it was not always a good time uh doing this job of uh Cold War air defense I'm very happy to see a couple other f-86 pilots in the audience today I don't know how many total uh any f-86 Pilots how many we got at least two well let's make it three very happy to see you here today we have a lot of experiences to share that we shared together on cross paths I'm sure at one point or another the uh the time that I served was in the the mid to late 50s it was a very tense time in the Cold War the Cold War was rather rather New Rather fresh it began about 1947 when it became very clear that the Soviet Union was no longer our Ally but we're going to be our adversary and things developed very quickly after that by the time I went into the service in 1955 the tensions were very high people were fearful of what the Soviets might do and we were building up our armaments as fast as we could and they were doing the same thing on the other side of the fence so we're going to talk about that today I'm going to tell you about my experiences and I can ensure you that my short period of service in the Air Force was the most intense and most challenging period of my entire life and I'm sure others who have been through military experience can can verify it was a time when as you look back from our let's say older age that we are now you can remember nearly everything that happened and every day that you spent in that service and I can tell you that in my subsequent Life as a as an engineer and an engineering manager and so on at McDonnell Douglas uh I can probably quote some five-year periods when I can't remember one thing I did it's a very very different kind of a life I'm going to take us back now a little bit and talk about the evolution of the technology I just want to remind everybody that until late in World War II there were no jet aircraft the jet age got its start in World War II I'm going to walk you through a few points about these aircraft you see on the screen the only countries that had jet engines at that time were Great Britain and Germany the United States did not have a jet engine Russia did not Japan did not but Great Britain developed uh the invention of Frank Whittle which was a centrifugal flow type of jet engine into an operating aircraft engine that powered the Gloucester meteor there were two of those engines they call them the Goblins at that time and then they were subsequently built by De Havilland and also then by Rolls-Royce and went through a series of progressions in development to become a very widely used engine called the Rolls-Royce Neen ornane aircraft engine by the way that's an odd name n-e-n-e most people have never heard of it what it is is a river in England Rolls-Royce decided to name all their engines after Rivers I don't know why but they thought there was an analogy between the flow of the water through the stream and the flow of the air through the engine I'm glad we didn't do that or we might have some things named Mississippi and mananga Gila and a few other names we wouldn't like so I'm glad we just didn't do that j33 worked pretty well actually and j47 on the right hand side on the upper photo is a is a picture of a me-262 a twin jet engine that Germany introduced late in the war 100 miles an hour faster than the fastest aircraft we had at the time a very scary operation to be in a B-17 or a B-24 I would think and see a stream of those or even one or two coming at you so fast you couldn't train your guns on it the uh the me-262 was powered by two jet engines of a different type axial flow which is a type of engine that are used almost as universally today in the jet aircraft industry these were made either by BMW or by Younkers but Younkers won the basically the uh the the contract to build the production units for the 262 and also for the the erato 324 in the lower right principally because uh their performance was a little better and their reliability was a little better they could squeeze anywhere between 10 and 20 hours out of an engine before it had to be completely overhauled think about that 10 or 20. how would you like to be flying a commercial airliner today knowing that the engines were only going to last 10 hours a little scary the middle photo on the right is the famous Emmy 163 the comet I have a very personal relation to that airplane the instructor I had in jet school for t-33 was a former liftoff of a pilot he went into the liftoff at age 14 and he finished his career in the luftwaffa flying the comet what he did before that he would never tell me but I imagine there were a few uh American Pilots that perhaps lost their lives as a result of work that he did either in a focal wolf 190 or a me-109 but they only selected the best Pilots to try to fly that Beast on the lower left hand corner is of course the Lockheed p80 or f-80 as it was called later the interesting point here is that the when Kelly Johnson designed and built that first airplane in 143 days we didn't have an engine so we had to get the engines from Great Britain they licensed GE to copy their engine the same one that I mentioned was in the later models of the Gloucester meteor and that's the engine that went into the p80 also into several other aircraft of course the t-33 as you well know on the right hand or the next screen I'm going to bring up the Mig 15. Korea 1950 the U.S was caught with their pants down once again not prepared for what they ran into in Korea when the Russian migs showed up again here we are with a swept Wing jet-powered aircraft that we had no match for in the in the area at that time we had the p80s over there and we had of course p51s the Navy had the Panthers and incidentally the Panthers the p80s and the mig-15s all use the same engine after World War II the wonderful new Prime Minister of England granted Russia the rights to the Rolls-Royce main engine and he sold them 35 copies to make sure they'd get it right when they copied it so they did they reverse engineered it they improved it a little bit they expanded the combustion Chambers added a few more pounds of thrust and came at us in Korea with a mig-15 powered by a British engine stolen and converted into a Russian variation I might say not stolen they were granted the privilege they were not granted the privilege to copy it and produce it in thousands which they did approximately ten thousand produced by a combination of Russia and China we lost a lot of airplanes in the Korean War we lost I think about 250 f-86s we lost about maybe 300 p80s all of the numbers of all of our aircraft that were lost were very very very high in the in that range of 200 to 300 airplanes most of the airplanes lost in the Korean War were not due to air-to-air combat only about one out of ten were lost in air-to-air combat the others were lost in air-to-ground action or in accidents they were remember that we're at the beginning of the jet age here that's why I wanted to introduce that World War II stuff uh the engines we had were not very reliable the systems that we had to operate things uh on the aircraft were not very reliable there were no transistors it was all vacuum tubes and a lot of this technology was new and we were learning as we were going at least the engineers were the manufacturers the photo you see here at kimpo taking a Kenpo Air Base 1951 is a series of f-86s I think these are a models if you look at the Leading Edge of the lower aircraft here you'll see the slat the forward part of the Wings would slide forward gravity fed roll out on little rails and slide forward and give the the wing a larger cord enabling it to create larger lift at low speeds take off at a lower air speed land at a lower air speed but once it got underway the air pressing against the Leading Edge would push those slats back into alignment with the main part of the wing reduce the overall area of the wing and allow it to reach its high speeds the swept back feature was uh also adopted from German work in World War II at the end of the war some of the people that went over there both from the U.S and from Russia found wind tunnel results and analytical results that showed the superiority of the swept type Wing to a straight Wing to reduce the compressibility issue they had when they reached high-speed velocities it might surprise some of you to know that the very first f-86 that was undergoing uh development had straight Wings it was not until this information was brought back from Germany during the process of the developing the f-86 that the decision was made to use the German technique and sweep back the wings that made all a difference in the world otherwise our f-86 would have been very little better than the p80s that we had at the time while the Russians were building up their forces on the other side of our Cold War barrier we were building up our own we were building up a Strategic Air Force Under the Strategic Air Command uh and on the on this photo you see the famous uh Boeing B-47 stratojet first flew in 1951 an amazing airplane a beautiful airplane I'm sure most of you have seen one very high tech Leading Edge design if you've ever seen one fly I've I've flown in one as you know the wings drooped down and nearly touched the runway as it taxied out and started to take off but as it gained AirSpeed the wings would curl up like this and in flight they took on a shape as I'm showing like this a very awesome thing to see six engines j47s the same as the engine in the f-86 in this case using rocket assisted takeoff a rather difficult aircraft to fly any P-47 pilots in here or crew members good then I can say anything I want to and no one will correct me I would say a dangerous airplane to fly about 2 000 were built and over 200 crashed none of them in combat all in training and in simulated bombing missions around the world the B-52 on the right of the photo group of course is still flying today not the original version not the original engines a lot of modifications but is still the main Workhorse of our Strategic Air Forces while we were doing that the Soviets were busy on their side of the fence these are some of the bombers that we were tracking through our limited abilities to Snoop on the Russian Air Forces uh mainly through their Mayday parades where they showed off their best and latest accomplishments and through spies and defectors and a little bit of reconnaissance activity we didn't have satellites at that time remember so we couldn't really survey their airfields and their factories and uh and their their production activities we had to take make guesses at how many they were producing and they were good at trickery at least on the Bison when they showed that in the MayDay Parade they showed a large stream of those aircraft flying over Red Square but they were circling around and coming back from the other end and just going around and around in a racetrack but who's going to know those are the aircraft that we were concerned about in the middle 50s when I went in I got my commission in 1955 and was soon in the in the pipeline training to fly the f-86 DNL interceptors and our job was going to be to find those aircraft intercept them and take them down by the way if you think the Cold War is Over think again see what this says one of the latest Russian bombers nuclear carrying bomber long range high-speed I think about a Mach 1.5 aircraft I'm not sure about that someone might correct me the the tupolev 160 two of those at least at the the end of last year were in Venezuela right on our back door I don't know if they're still there now and I don't know if they're carrying nuclear weapons but there is still a cold war going on and some some uh opinions it is escalating let's hope not so when the Air Force began looking at the threat coming from these Russian bombers that they knew were being developed and produced they looked to the Arsenal of interceptors that we had and principally the best that we had online was the f-86 but it was a day fighter it was designed for air-to-air combat and air to ground it was not designed for night work or all-weather work it was not designed to take out a bomber with one shot and that's really what we needed or they needed oh by the way I want to mention that the f-86 was a fast airplane at the time I believe it set a record of 560 miles per hour in 1948 and in 1953 the D model which I flew and and a couple of uh our my new friends here flew as well as the L model which was almost the same airplane uh anyway the D model in 1953 uh reached a speed of 715 miles per hour right out here over the Salton Sea flying about 100 feet off the deck much faster airplane we had all-weather interceptors in the early 1950s we had the f-94 on the right side of the photo group and you'll recognize the f-94 as being a stretched p80 we're right back to that same old original airplane from Kelly Johnson that he designed in 143 days only now it's got a stretch fuselage set at an afterburner and it's got a radar on the nose and it's carrying Rockets that was our one of our front line all-weather interceptors in the 1950s on the left is the Northrop f-89 scorpion a twin engine airplane also with afterburners also carrying rockets and in both cases these are aircraft that require two crew members a pilot to fly the airplane and a back seat crewman to operate the radar in the Fire Control System I want to divert to a little personal anecdote while I was waiting to get a an assignment in flight school I had some time to kill I just graduated from University with a degree in electrical engineering so I came out here and I got a job at Douglas aircraft I had a lot of offers from companies like RCA and GE and Westinghouse and so on but Douglas paid more money 448 bucks a month and that included Saturday overtime so I jumped on that after a couple of weeks of making design changes on DC3 airplanes and DC4 airplanes with rolls of drawings piled them on my drawing board every morning when I came to work with an engineering order wrapped around them anybody know about EOS yeah yeah okay there are a few in the crowd I said this is not for me so I found a way to switch over to the missile Division and I was assigned to the genie project it was under development at the time and within a few weeks I was only there a few months about six months but within three or four weeks they assigned me to design the fuse assembly that triggered the atomic Warhead in this air-to-air missile right out of school well after a few days working on that I was having some trouble I had to feed a detonation signal into the Warhead but I didn't know what the electrical characteristics were so I asked my boss for some help he reached in his desk and pulled out a phone number and a name and he wrote it copied it down for me on a piece of paper he says call this guy I said okay I call this guy who happened to be somewhat of Sandia where they assembled the atomic warheads and I told them my dilemma he said you got a pencil and paper I said yeah so he dictated to me the electrical circuitry that was in the Warhead and I drew the diagram on the paper and assigned the you know the resistance and the inductance and the capacitance of the components and all that and stuck that in my drawer that's how we did things in those days security was not very high level by the way uh that rocket was only fired once to test it with an actual Atomic Warhead it was launched from an f-89 out in New Mexico and miraculously the f-89 survived it's on a pedestal out there somewhere I don't think it was flyable after that mission by the way so the Air Force decided we need a better all-weather Interceptor and we we got to get rid of that guy in the back seat he's taking up too much space and weighs too much so we'll cram all the jobs into the Pilot's compartment let him do all the work so they came up with the uh what was originally called the f-95 but be because they were having difficulty getting funding out of Congress they change it to f-86d it retained about 25 percent of the original f-86 componentry and design features such as the entire wing for example and the tail but not obviously not the fuselage and some other components of the aircraft they were all new it was to carry a an afterburner a radar you see the big black radome on the nose you see the characteristic Leading Edge slats on the wing that were retained on the f-86d and f-86l it also contained Rockets you can't see the rockets in this photo but there's a rocket pod that dropped down under the nose that exposed the rocket array of 24 Rockets they could be fired off and the the tray dropped down the rock is fired and a tray or a pod retracted back in the fuselage and what was it two seconds I think very very fast uh so that was to keep the the Pod from uh adding drag to the aircraft and enabling it to maintain and maintain its high speed so that was the airplane I was destined to fly well before I could do that I had to learn to fly something I didn't know how to fly anything when I started obviously so uh I went to primary flight school in Moore Air Base in McAllen Texas and started flying the t-34 you'll recognize that if you haven't flown one or seen one before it's basically a Beach Bonanza but with a tandem cockpit and a conventional tail very easy plane to fly a fun thing to learn in after about seven hours you got to solo and that was a really big deal from there we went to at that time in the training process we were out of the tail dragger classes of aircraft and we were into tricycle gear the Air Force was using the T28 this was a much larger aircraft and for someone stepping out of a t-34 which was a toy and walking up to this Beast it was quite a shock you mean I have to fly that you know well it turned out to be very easy to fly I don't know how many people have flown a t-28 air force or navy quite a few in here oh we got some Navy people uh-oh uh oh you're not going to like the next slide and the next story all right so the T28 was fully equipped for aerobatics for instrument flying training for night flying and a wonderful airplane to fly I had a unique experience when I finished the course again I had to wait for an opening in jet school so I had two or three weeks I forget how long and they said well just go out and take an airplane anytime you want and just keep current so I would tell my wife be out in front of our apartment house at 10 o'clock in the morning I'm going to be flying over and I go out and check out an airplane and I'd go fly over the apartment which was in downtown McAllen Texas and I do everything I had learned in the syllabus you know rolls Shondells figure eights uh you know Loops vertical recoveries when I got through the whole syllabus then I'd go back and land and wait till the next day and do it all over again so that was a lot of fun okay the Navy flew the same airplane except with a bigger engine a heavier landing gear and they also came with two grandkids I've often been asked well why did the Navy use a bigger Engine with three bladed prop now why they have to have a heavier landing gear and all that well I don't know anything about carrier Landings but what I've been told is when they approach the carrier deck the typical Navy pilot just turned his head and clever covers his eyes and lets it crash I don't know am I wrong about that that's pretty much it all right I'm going to walk you through a series here of about four photos of the t-33 I love this airplane any of you have flown the t-33 I'm sure you'll say the same thing what a beautiful machine that Kelly Johnson designed and unbelievable that he got so much sophistication into that very first jet at the that the United States produced this of course is the same as a p80 but it's stretched that put a a larger canopy and a dual cockpit in there instructor would be in the rear and the student in the front I'm showing it taking off don't tell my instructor but I was taking photos as we started going through formation training here and over in the left hand corner this is my version of the Scarecrow it turns out as I mentioned earlier my instructor pilot was uh a second Lieutenant named Carl grosh who got his training in the luftwaffe since he had flown the rocket plane the comet each of the instructors had a poster above their table that had their call sign on there and some kind of a symbol representing their call sign so he asked me to make a poster of a rocket and he wanted to call his flight the rocket flight so I designed and painted that rocket that of course is my instructor sitting on the back with a whip and the poor student on the front cowering as he streaked through the sky I didn't know it at the time I'd already had some experience working on a rocket for a few months at Douglas but that was going to be the the the rocket as a as an emblem or as a a symbol or a product of of a modern technology was gonna going to be woven through my life for the rest of my career I'll tell you more about that later the next photo just shows a close information I pulled up tight to the lead aircraft and the instructor in the back is giving a signal for leveling off and as those of you that flown formation are well aware in general there are no voice commands it's all hand signals it's all uh rocking the wings to shift you from Echelon right to in trail or to Echelon left and back and forth and so on and those are the things you learned during training it comes in very useful in the Squadron when you're flying a single engine jet aircraft in a Fighter Squadron your information every day at one point in another with one other or three other uh pilots and aircraft so this just shows a sequence of photos of the Maneuvers that were made typically during the training in the t-33 well it was time now to move on I finished the work in the t-33 hopefully I learned everything I was supposed to learn and move on to uh the next choice and I had my choice I could have chosen day Fighters night for all weather Fighters bombers tankers uh transports or whatever and I chose to go to the f-86d all weather because I thought it was more complicated be a bigger Challenge and I think I got my wish it was a it was asking asking a lot to master this thing anyway there's a photo of it and there you can see on the lower part of the of the nose you can see the rocket pod carry 24 Rockets you could select 6 or 12 or 24 as you made your pass against the enemy aircraft or the simulated enemy aircraft which is what we used in training also shows the fuel tanks dropable fuel tanks under the wings which were pretty essential a typical mission in this aircraft ran what 45 minutes less than an hour typically and I'll I'll point out later the maximum you could possibly squeeze out of a long endurance flight was two hours that turned out to be a significant number to me in a later point that I'll tell you about after training at moody in Valdosta Georgia oh and by the way there is a feature of the f-86 that I'm sure my compatriots over here recall very well we were warned and by the way there are no two-seat aircraft so the first time you flew the f-86d or L you were Solo in the aircraft you got some paper instruction and some advice from an instructor who then took off and in formation off to your side and watched you through your first flight and you were warned that uh on rare occasion after takeoff the aircraft could become unstable in pitch and start doing this uh that happened to me on my first flight and they they described that or they call that the JC maneuver because every time it happened to a pilot a student he would say Jesus Christ what's that the solution in the book was to let go oh the control stick and let the aerodynamics damp the aircraft oscillation out I ain't doing that so so my solution was to grab that stick and hold it as tight as I could avoid putting some more motion into the uh the oscillation which is what you would do because you couldn't track the the motion of the aircraft uh fast enough so anyway that never happened again I knew I knew how to avoid that on all subsequent flights so at Westover Air Force Base I entered the 324th Fighter Squadron we were flying f-86l's again there was no great training program for that here's the manual take a look at the cockpit get familiar with it those are the differences and have a nice day well my first day on the job was quite an experience I don't know if I mentioned but where I went to school was at the University of Miami I was born and raised in Miami and I had never seen snow so again I got my choice of what Squadron to join and there was an opening in the 324th in uh at Westover Massachusetts so I said oh boy snow I'll get to see snow I'll take that so I went up there in December and the snow is a well I'm kind of short but it was a little bit taller than I was everywhere and it's pretty exciting except the first day on the job the squadron commander said well go check out an airplane and go fly around and get familiar with the area locate the other fields around take a good look at Westover so you recognize it look for the landmarks watch out for the mountains you know and have night have a nice time so I took off and it was pretty gray day and uh I was VFR visual flight rules it was overcast and gray it started getting darker and darker and after a half an hour 40 minutes I decided I better get back to this field and land this thing because I can hardly see by the time I got back to the field all I could see was Westover underneath me I started orbiting around and called for a clearance to land they said negative we have a squadron of four taking off so I orbited the field while I watched these four take off and disappear into the gloom and then I was clear to land I came came in and landed and as I was rolling down the runway opened the canopy and snow started coming in oh wow this is pretty exciting great big chunks of it like that I couldn't wait to feel it on my face and uh but uh after a few minutes of Glee that sensation went away I went into the flight Shack and we could hear the ground controllers and uh and the and the pilots on the uh on the radios that were broadcast in the in the flight Shack and three of the aircraft were uh four aircraft were recalled to land three of them landed on uh radar GCA approaches and the fourth one couldn't land the ceiling had dropped below minimums we all went out of the flight Shack and the runway was right there right we could we could hear his airplane but we couldn't see him and he made three or four passes over the runway and we could hear him come down then hear him punch the throttle and climb up again and on the fourth one the engine just stopped and suddenly it was dead silence we all went in uh wondering how it happened and after about a half an hour he walked in the flight Shack with his parachute under his arm he had ejected over the field and the plane had crashed and the city dump this is what it looked like on a good day at Westover this is a more like a normal day in the winter at Westover this is a very old photo showing in the center the alert hangers and some other maintenance buildings that were added long after I was there but that's kind of what it looked like the job at Westover was to protect the B-47 bombers that were stationed there and again the mission was very simple if the bad guys come over the North Pole and uh across Canada and head for our cities and our air bases your job is to go up there find them and shoot them down and that's what we train for that's what we practiced every day and every night in between practice missions we stood alert or we flew as a simulated bombers either in a t-33 or in an f-86 here's what the field looked like at Westover if you take a look at the lower part of the picture you see an angled taxiway going out to the main Runway is on about a 45 degree angle and at the lower lowest part of the photo you can see those alert hangers that we stationed our aircraft in we would have two aircraft on five minute alert two on backup stationed right behind the first two and then others on 15-minute alert somewhere on the base and in the second hanger set of hangers over to my right was another Squadron the 337th and they had also f-86l's and they are also on five minute alert and 15 minute alert and backup uh 24 hours a day seven days a week and if a scramble came you jump in the aircraft the crew jumps on on the aircraft helps you get strapped in and started and then you put it in a full throttle position and when the engine spools up it bursts you out of the hanger onto that 45 degree taxi way throttle back a little bit make a sharp turn try not to peel the tires off and down the runway and burner in your airborne boy was that fun am I right that was really fun this is what it looked like to the ground crew running out of the warm shelter they had and uh up onto the wing of the aircraft and getting the Apu started get the engine started helping the pilot get going now I want to show you what it was like inside the airplane and try to walk you through how the Fire Control System worked and what we practiced every day these are two shots of the inside of an f-86d cockpit not sure what versions of the f-86ds these were they're not exactly the same but I think you kind of get the idea down in in front of the pilot right in the center of the instrument panel is that little round radar scope it's about I don't know four or five inches in diameter and on the right photo you see the glare Shield that was normally over the display that's to keep out all extraneous light also if there's explosions going on around you they're not going to blank out the screen so once you started in the search mode for the Target you got your head down into that rubber glare shield and all you're looking at is that little round screen and the information that was displayed on it there were no heads up displays in those days that had not been invented yet so everything you got was on that little screen and there wasn't much you had no view of course of your instruments and no view of of your uh engine controls or anything else just the symbols and the the diagram on the screen we'll go to the next photo these are a couple of pages out of the training manual from 1957 uh the type of intercept was called the lead Collision this is not the same type of an intercept that a fighter a day fighter would fly let me try to put it this way the bombers we've expected to go against were probably just as fast as our Fighters so the best chance you had was to come at them from a broadside or a little bit ahead of broadside and or behind broadside but giving you plenty of closing speed on the bomber coming in from the side be almost impossible to catch from the tail even in burner we could go Mach 1 I did it once but you had to go in the f-86d OR L the way you went through Mach 1 the speed of sound was to take it up to altitude point it straight down at the ground and put in an afterburner and punch your way through so not something you would did on did on a daily basis I did it once it was fun on the right screen you see what's on the display you'll see two green dots and the photos up there one of them is the target moving down that vertical black line the target dot in this uh image is oh about 14 or 15 miles away we would typically typically pick up the target at 25 or 30 miles away and from then on you would be flying this screen you lock onto the target using another hand control off on the left side behind the throttle and then from that point the Hughes control system a fire control system would track the target automatically and then deliver you a steering Dot a second image a second little green image on the screen the steering dot in order to make a hill a hit or a kill had to be directly in the center of that screen right on the center and near the end of the run the the little circle that you see in the center would collapse into a line of about a quarter of an inch wide and you had to be on that line you had to have the dot on that line Wings level no turning and when you got to the right point in the approach path the Fire Control System would automatically drop the Pod release the Rockets pull the Pod back up and show you an x on the screen indicating you had a completed the Run you'd release your rockets and you scored a hit then you'd break away right past the tail of the bomber in front of you so the the control system the Fire Control System calculated a true Collision course and then calculated an angle off of that which compensated for the faster speed of the Rockets so that you would miss the aircraft not run into it oddly enough one of the one of the failure most of that of that system was it would calculate the collision course but not add the correction hello oh my I forgot to tell you something it was very important and this is what reminded me Let's uh think back to Westover when I was flying out of there often we would have and and you guys would remember this too we would have joint exercises with squadrons from around the Boston air defense sector and I was scheduled to fly in one on a particular snowy imagine that cold day in in Massachusetts and I was going to fly as a Target in a t-33 in a b formation along with two other t-33s from other bases and taxing out to take off my radio failed I didn't turn it off honestly anyway the radio failed so I had to turn around and go back I didn't have time to get another aircraft so uh they scrubbed my flight I went back to the flight Shack they scrambled another T-bird from New York from what was the name of it Stuart from Stewart Air Force Base and uh and that fellow that that crew of two uh went up and took my place uh uh along with my companion uh in in the uh Squadron that was coming in over uh from the Canadian border and coming down heading towards Boston they were intercepted by a squadron from Otis Air Force Base flying f-94s one of the f-94s collided with the airplane that took my place and two pilots were killed uh so there but for the grace of God and all that okay back to the story here so one bright sunny day an f-104 arrives at Westover Air Force Base uh piloted by the commander of 337th uh Colonel James Jabara from Korean war fame I think he had 15 migs to his credit and he brought in the first of a squadron of f-104s we thought we were going to get f-104s guess what for every first prize there's a second prize we got City slimane Morocco where the hell is that well even with this uh photo a sectional chart you're not sure where it is but what you're looking at in the lower part is the northwest corner of Africa and in the upper part is the south end of Spain about 170 miles away you'll probably see a little red line down there near the bottom of the photo that's a city slimane Air Base Runway another Red Dot up there is Gibraltar that's probably some place that most people have heard of I wish they'd have said you're going to get you're going over to a vase right near Gibraltar everyone has said oh yippee we're going to have fun there well there's not a lot of fun in City swimming I can tell you that but there we were within a short period of time we all had our airplanes they were old D models they'd been shipped over from New Orleans by ship and a assembled in brindisi and then they had to be ferried from there over to City so the squadron commander and His Head Shed started bringing him back well we had 25 airplanes and 25 Pilots so our logic was that's one airplane per pilot let's go get them right they say they said no and the and the Ops officer came up with a reason a rationale which was you can't go unless you've been so that became our Squadron motto after that by the way there's that famous Rock of Gibraltar I think many of you have seen that on the Prudential Insurance ads this is a photo I took up there but I want you to look at the top of the peak of The Rock The Rock is not a pyramid like this it's a long thing maybe four times as long as it is wide and the wind comes from the north and sweeps up to the face of the Rock and starts to dump its water and then comes over the top of the cloud and from City slimane when you took off there heading north for the Mediterranean all you had to do was scan the Horizon it was usually clear you'll find one Cloud that's where Gibraltar was he couldn't miss it so we flew those missions doing practice intercepts in this case the mission was to protect the B-47 bombers that were coming over TDY from homestead they'd be over there for I forget what two or three weeks then they'd go back home and our job was to make sure that if the bad guys came they would be able to get off the ground and get uh climb out and get on their heading to their targets in the Soviet Union so we practice that day or night and we stood alerts of course uh 24 7. most of the time we were scrambled against unidentified aircraft a lot of unidentified usually turned out to be British or French military sometimes commercial but there was very little coordination between any of the agencies that monitored or tracked aircraft in the area so usually the the method of finding out was to go find them get up close read their markings and numbers and Report those back and they were always friendlies once in a while we got off the base and saw a few of the surrounding things this is something that the French named Fantasia the local Arabs would line up at one end of this field and then on a signal or a gunshot they'd all charge across the field firing these long Flintlock rifles and screaming and yelling I don't know what it was meant for but I called it the charge of the Moroccan Light Brigade I guess they were that was their version of standing alert and then the shooting with flintlocks another thing that was good Duty was if you got the opportunity to take a worn out bird back to Torino to the Fiat Factory for what was called Iran had nothing to do with the country it meant inspection and repair as necessary I'm sure most of you know about that and I was doing that one day uh flying wing on my good friend uh another uh another pilot in the Squadron and Lieutenant Jay Edwards Jay ultimately became a major general and head of the logistics Air Command in Oklahoma City where he retired and still resides anyway they're right I'm sitting on the runway at uh or on the ramp at Zaragoza we got Airborne out of there I had a few things wrong with my aircraft the attitude indicator didn't work one of the fuel tanks didn't feed so I was running short on fuel the airplane was lopsided so I had to trim that out so I was consuming more than my lead aircraft we got over Torino and it was supposed to be high scattered and seven miles viz and we were socked in all the way down to about 200 feet so we descended Jay finally got us below the overcast and again I landed in snow it was a Westover all over again and a taxied Off The Runway pulled into a parking slot and flamed out not a gas another thing I got to do over there is uh I won't explain the circumstances here but uh I got a hop in a B-47 from City to Homestead but I learned during that flight that they didn't fly direct they actually turned the transfer flight into a simulated bombing Mission so they flew over the Midwest I forget where Kansas City I don't remember what anyway running a bombing around making bombing runs on simulated ground targets before they finally turned and headed back Southeast to Homestead to land and why that was great for me is my wife and child were back there my son had been born in Massachusetts when we were on duty up there and this is my first time to see him since I'd transferred over to City Slam Maine so I had three glorious days at Miami Beach and as you can see uh my son wasn't having any of it he didn't know who this guy was didn't never never wanted to see him again so I decided uh at that time I was going to refuse the offer from my squadron commander for re-upping for two years and bringing my wife and son over I decided I'd go back to civilian life return to a life of rocketry at McDonald Douglas or Douglas which then became McDonald Douglas so I made that decision so for the last month the squadron commander had the word out don't let that you know what fly he's not going to earn his earn his flight pay from me so I'd go to the flight Shack every day and hope that my my name would be on the board but it never was but I'd hang around all day anyway and one day an Airman Walked Out Of A administrative office with a with an envelope and he says I need somebody to take this back to division headquarters at Rabat I said I can do it I grabbed it and ran as fast as I could and jumped in the first airplane and I headed for a robot well guess how much time I logged two hours right and I've got to come back that's another two hours four hours means 150 bucks flight pay so before I left I took off from Rabat circled around called in and requested permission to do a high-speed flight over the runway and the tower operator said permission denied I said Roger understand affirmative coming down so I came down to the runway put it in burner pulled up in front of the tower did a series of rolls and headed back home for City swimming and collected my 150 bucks so I left the air force uh I did get back into rocketry and flight control from manned aircraft to manned spacecraft I had prominent roles on on many activities including being vice president for integration on the International Space Station and my last job I was a VP and GM for fully reusable launch vehicle that we tested out in New Mexico Pete Conrad the famous astronaut was my operations guy he flew the dcx in New Mexico and you're seeing a sequence shot here the the rocket would take off would fly vertically then translate like a helicopter go anywhere you wanted to and then go land somewhere else or come right back to where it took off and land on all four feet and be ready to go again as soon as you cleaned it up and refueled it unfortunately neither the Air Force who was our customer at that time nor NASA nor the company wanted to pursue that any further it was a huge investment required so that project died and that was at the end of my career and thank you very much for attending it's been wonderful to be here with you I'd be happy happy to answer any questions was a Target acquisition visual negative the target acquisition was with the radar you you were positioned by The Ground Control radar to that point about 30 miles away okay on a broadside angle hopefully although we practice approaching from a Stern as well as from head on but most of the practice was from broadside and you'd be positioned so that you knew approximately what angle the target would be at like 30 degrees to port or whatever and then you'd stick your head in the in into the glare shield and start searching for that dot then you lock onto it from then on the Fire Control System took over the question is did the combustion of the Rockets get the engine a problem the answer of that is yes it's possible you would get a flame out from the from the combustion of the Rockets we didn't practice with rockets we practiced with a tape recorder uh which recorded the image that you saw on the display and after every flight the pilot would remove the tape recorder and go in and put it on a monitor and then his flight Commander or squadron commander would review that and you would get scored on on each run that you made each day took me a while to start getting a continuous sequence of good scores did everybody get that he flew with rockets at the base he was at we didn't have a an area we could shoot in except out over the Atlantic and so he said that they would deploy the debris screens in front of the engine first and then also turn on the ignition so in case they did get a flame out from firing the Rockets they'd get a restart right away hopefully before the engines pull down question is when you had your face down in that glare Shield how did you fly the airplane if you recall the diagram there were two little horizontal black lines those are the wings of the airplane and those are that image was uh driven by the gyro so that if you saw the wings tilted you knew that was the angle of your wings and that's that's what you flew how did the fa6 compare to the f-89 it would climb faster it had faster uh maximum air speed I think the altitudes were similar maximum altitude however the 86 should get to altitude much faster it climbed at about 12 500 feet per minute so you get up to your intercept altitude very quickly that was the main advantage of the 86s uh the question was would the Nike uh Zeus or Nike Hercules uh any aircraft missiles that we had stationed in the U.S in the north the might mistake us as being a Russian Badger for example uh frankly I never thought about that uh now that you mentioned I'm kind of worried anything else that that's it okay we're done thank you very much thank you thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about I'm Betty Wheaton see you next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: PeninsulaSrsVideos

Views: 31,161

Keywords: Cold War, USAF, Fighter Pilot, F-86, 324th Fighter Intercept Squadron, Gloster Meteor, P-80, ME-262, ME-163, Arado 324, WWII, Betty Wheaton, Military History, documentary, MiG-15, Korean War, B-47, B-52, Tu-95 Bear, Tu-16 Badger, M-4 Bison, Tu-160 Blackjack, Venezuela, F-89, F-94, Genie Air-to-Air Missile, T-28, T-34, T-33, Westover AFB, Moody AFB, International Space Station, Douglas, McDonnell Douglas, air crash

Id: iCgcwxZF4fE

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019