Flying to the DEW Line (or Taking Oil to the North Slope)

In the fall of 1975 I was a freshly qualified C-130E Navigator in the 773^rd Tactical Airlift Squadron, 463^rd Tactical Airlift Wing, Dyess AFB, Tx.  The C-130s had been transferred from TAC to MAC a year earlier, while I was in survival school, and our squadron was tasked to provide three or four aircraft to help resupply the Distant Early Warning Radar sites along the northern perimeter of Alaska.  It seems the summer thaw for that year came late and the barges that would normally be used couldn’t get to the sites and return before the winter freeze set back in.  I was on one of the crews chosen to support the operation.  This is just a simple "there I was" tale.

Our deployment was a simple two-day trip.  Day 1 was from Abilene to McCord AFB, WA, with Day 2 a straight overwater shot from McCord to Elmendorf AFB, AK.  McCord was my first experience with a MAC (now AMC) command post and it taught me that for a CP controller -- having all the squares filled was actually more important than having the right information in the squares. 

When we had arrived the evening before I had worked out the flight plan and the fuel loads, adding a few thousand pounds of gas just to be on the safe side.  I had done this with the performance charts we carried.  For us, at Dyess, we had not yet been fully MACemsized so we used the C-130E 1-1.  MAC had taken the data from the 1-1 and put it into an approved MAC book (whose number escapes me).  When we submitted our planning to the Command Post (CP) the only question they asked was what page in the MAC book I had used?  I had to go find the book, find a chart that approximated my fuel load, and then give them that page number.  Once that square was filled we were approved to step to the aircraft, crank up the mighty Allison T56 engines and wing our way northward.  After about six hours, we arrived at Elmendorf where our newly issued winter parkas proved to be a critical piece of gear.  The temps were just above freezing and a C-5A stood off at the end of the ramp bleeding hydraulic fluid from a number of points.

We checked in with CP and told we would get our orientation brief the next day, and we should head to billeting to check in.  Since we were all pretty new to this MAC thing we thought about how the C-141 and C-5 crews always seemed to get off-base hotel quarters and were pretty excited about spending time in downtown Anchorage.  Sadly, we learned there was Big MAC and Little MAC and we were in the wrong one.  We were billeted on base, but right next to the O’club and it was King Crab night!  All you could eat for about $12 (if I remember correctly).

The next day all the crews from Little Rock, Pope and Dyess assembled as they laid out the plans for resupplying sites with names like Barter Island, Lonely, and Oliktok.  We would be carrying all the stuff they needed to sustain operations until the next thaw in late spring.  This included foodstuffs, toilet paper, and heating oil (carried in bladders that filled the floor of the aircraft like a big waterbed).  We would fly from Anchorage to the northern sites, offload and then return to Eielison where we would refuel and reload to make a second sortie.  Some of the crews would RON at Eielison and fly from there the next day with their second sortie returning to Elmendorf.

A couple of days later we were on our first sortie.  Elmendorf to Lonely, back to Eielison, then to Barter Island with a return to Elmendorf.  It would be about a 12-hour day and I think half of that was in the air.  If I recall correctly, takeoff was about noon and with sunset at about 2 or 3 pm at Anchorage, most of the flying would be in the dark.

The things that stand out in my memory are pretty simple.  The Alaskan pipeline was being built and there was a highway of white lights that went north from Fairbanks for a hundred miles or more.  When you were 200 miles out from the DEW line site you could easily identify the stations on the radar since they were the only returns you saw.  The night was completely dark and the heavens so close you could touch them, except on the nights the aurora was present -- when the show was unforgettable.

It was during this operation that I knew I had chosen the right profession and had somehow stumbled into the right aircraft for me.