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.

A Note to a Friend

--> I found this while cleaning out for an upcoming move and figured it might seem funny to some who were involved in these events.  It comes from a letter written just after Desert Storm and deals with what was then the 39^th Special Operations Wing (now 352^nd SOW).

“Dear Mike,

I hope this letter finds all the XXXX’s in the very best of health.  I know it has been quite a while since I’ve written but the past nine months have been a very busy time for the Townsends.

As you are aware, in January I got to go to Incirlik to take part in the CNN special “Desert Storm the Renovation of a City.”  Well right after we came home George called and asked if we could head back to resupply the Kurds.  It seems they took us at our word and attempted to overthrow Saddam.

Operation Provide Comfort evolved into a three-phase program.

Phase I: “FIND A KURD.”  During this stage aircraft loaded with MREs, bottled water, and toilet paper (for dysentery), flew into northern Iraq looking for population centers (i.e. refugee camps), and dropping supplies to them.  After a few Kurds tried to catch the 16,000-pound bundles we moved into phase II.

Phase II: “ADOPT A KURD.”  In this stage, the aircrews were assigned specific areas to fly.  The theory being the aircrews and Kurds would get used to each other’s quirks (like an aircrew who always drops into the center of the camp).  Just about this time the Kurds threatened to report us to the UN as inhuman for providing so many MREs.  So, we moved into phase III.

Phase III: “HERD A KURD.”  Here American ingenuity really came into play.  The diplomats figured out it would be nice to establish large refugee camps in major Iraqi cities like Zakho.  To get the Kurds out of the mountains we staged a two-part campaign.  First, we dropped large quantities of MREs to the camps (ensuring an end to all dysentery in our lifetime, and at the same time chasing the refugees out of the shelters) … as an aside I don’t think the pork patty was a favorite!  After we had moved the refugees from the tops of the mountains, we started dropping real food just a little beit in front of them as they began their migration towards the cities.

After 45-days of this fun, I redeployed home to continue planning for the wing’s move from Frankfurt to England.    Well enough about me… how have you been?"

One Step Forward, Two Steps (not forward)

This post is a recollection of a couple of stories from an IP I flew with once upon a time.

I was told he had gotten a C-47 out of UPT.  It was an aircraft whose speed ideally suited his thought processes.  It always seemed to me he was just a touch behind the aircraft at the blazing speeds found in a C-130.

Taxiing at NAS Cubi Point –

One day we made a wrong turn down a taxiway that had no outlet.  We went about a hundred or so yards down it before tower called and asked us where we thought we were going.  We had a co-pilot in the left seat on his very first AC upgrade ride and Milton (not his real name), in the right seat providing the instruction. 

The taxiway was not wide enough to turn around so we would have to back up about 100 or so yards until we could turn and get onto the right taxiway.  This is ordinarily not too big a deal as long as it’s not too hot and the engines don’t overheat.  We would lower the ramp, and the pilots would follow the directions of the loadmaster who was scanning behind us.  There was one cardinal rule “DON’T TOUCH THE BRAKES.”  Speed was controlled by using the engines and the prop pitch. 

We started to back up with the loadmaster doing a great job of telling us how far we had to go, and when to begin slowing down.  Unfortunately, Milton was busy telling the co-pilot all the things he should be doing, like listening to the LM, that he wasn’t paying attention to the spiel about “straight back, 50-yards, begin slowing down, slow down, we need to slow down, we need to STOP.”  It was that last word that finally broke through and got his attention.  At that time both pilots stepped on the brakes.

I was standing behind the IP (in the right seat), and as we came to a stop the nose of the aircraft rose up until the ramp hit the ground and stopped further travel.  All the sudden I was in the air and the roof of the cockpit smashed me on the head as we came crashing back down.

We limped into parking, noted there might be a small problem with the nose gear and headed off to the club for lunch.  I think it took a couple of days to fix that problem of a compressed nose gear and how it attached to the rest of the airplane.

Air Intercepts over Korea –

Our electronic warfare officers had a semi-annual requirement to train against air-to-air threats.  Usually, this was a simple sortie where a couple of F-4s from Kadena would come out and intercept us. Occasionally, we could get some good training at Cope Thunder or head up to Korea to play with them.  There were, I recall, three levels of threat maneuvering we could do, depending on the adversary and what we had briefed.  Level 1 was pretty benign, level 2 more aggressive, and level 3 allowed us to maneuver pretty aggressively (aggressively being a relative term in a C-130).

  Any who, we were sent up to Korea to be a target for some unidentified fighters.  It was a crappy day on the surface but beautifully clear above 10,000 feet, so that was where we went.  A big black and green aircraft about 4,000 feet above a solid white cloud deck.  We were cleared for level three maneuvers allowing 45-60-degree banking, a couple of thousand feet in altitude change, and use of our chaff and flares.

We droned around for a short while, when all the sudden our EWO called a threat break to the right.  We rolled smoothly into 10-degrees of right bank while Milton explained to the co-pilot how important situational awareness was.  The EWO called a break to the left and we rolled smoothly into a 10-degree left bank.  I think this was about that time the pitch on the EWO’s break calls went up just like the RWR gear.

I was looking out the right windows for the threat when I saw an F-15 come screaming down at us.  I heard “Fox 1, Fox 2, Fox 3, off target.”  Then his wingman called out “Fox 1, Fox 2, Fox 3.”

The AC’s comment was along the lines of “That went well, if we hurry we can still make lunch at the Osan O-club.”  I don’t think the EWO was especially happy.

You Want to Do What?

I know some of the things I will talk about in this post will be alien to anyone born after 1980 but trust me these things really worked when used correctly.

When I was assigned to the Pacific Air Forces as part of the 1^st SOS at Kadena AB, Japan we had a theater orientation program that took our aircraft to some places we seldom got to go to, both to familiarize ourselves and the hosts. It also served to establish a presence if we should need to go there on a real mission, so perhaps it wouldn’t raise as many alarms.

My PACOM trainer took us go to Singapore for a few days, a small island off Malaysia called Penang for a couple of days, and then Diego Garcia, a British owned, US controlled atoll in the Indian Ocean.  By the way, if you ever get to Penang stop into the Cobra temple and see all the stoned (as in high) hooded cobras hanging out watching and hissing as they slither by on the ground and in bushes.

When we got to Diego Garcia we needed to fly about six-hours of local training so the AC suggested we do a navigation trainer.  I could only laugh, but okay whatever.

For those who’ve not had the privilege of visiting Diego Garcia, it is an atoll that sits south of the Maldives and east of the Seychelles.  Its coordinates are about 7⁰18’ south and 72⁰25’ east.

The MC-130E we flew was pretty advanced for its time with a basic INS that had 9 waypoints, a really good multi-mode Radar, a navigation system called Omega, another called LORAN, as well as a sextant and a radar altimeter for something called pressure navigation.

We were going to take off at about noon and buzz around the Indian Ocean for 6-hours practicing our long-range navigation.  The same skills we had actually used to find the damn atoll in the first place.  The only problem was, neither the Omega, LORAN nor the pressure worked well in that part of the world.  LORAN had about a 2500-mile range, but there were no stations in the Indian Ocean, Omega had 8-stations worldwide and worked like an INS giving lat/long and course guidance (but coverage in the middle of the Indian Ocean was spotty) and pressure, which helped determine a line of position using the difference between an aircraft’s absolute altitude and its pressure altitude.  Unfortunately, within about 10 or 15 degrees of the equator it was worthless.  That left us celestial with the sun, and dead reckoning, as our basic navigation skills to practice. 

The only problem -- it was the middle of the day and the sun would only give us a single line of position.  So, while finding the sun was easy, getting a good line of position not hard we would never really establish a fix and would have to use the INS to really back up what we were doing.  While we were pretty good at turning the INS on and off so that wasn’t a problem, without some kind of fix how do you update it to know it is working okay?

As a compromise, I suggested we stay within 200 miles of the atoll (so I could find it on radar or TACAN), and sight-see the 60 or so smaller islands were part of the group. The guy who represented the British interests on Diego Garcia asked us to look for a boat that had been reported in the area but had not checked in with them to gain government approval to stay. 

We now had a new mission.  We would do “sea surveillance.”  This was one of our secondary chores back home; we would go around trying to identify various ships and report their location back to the squadron.   Kind of like a Navy P-3, but without torpedoes and any real training.  

You would be surprised how many good-sized sailboats with naked people hang out around Diego Garcia. 

Why is That F-14 Sitting on Our Wing?

In late April 1980, our crew was flying over the Arabian Sea in a big, black and green, C-130 without any national markings, when all the sudden an F-14 was sitting off the right wing.  We were about FL 180 minding our own business, just killing time until we could RTB so this came as somewhat of a surprise to us, especially since we had an EWO who was supposed to alert us of such things.

We had taken off from Masirah Island about an hour earlier and had another hour or so of droning before we could go home.  We’d been on Masirah for about a week or ten-days and the routine had become somewhat loose.

As we stared at our new friend (he seemed pretty friendly because he was waving at us), and wondered why he was there.  Then it dawned on the pilots and me that perhaps those weren’t waves, so much as numbers, as in a UHF frequency.

We dialed up the UHF to say hi, and they came back with a simple question.  “Did we happen to know the IFF/SIF codes for today?”  Duh!

In our scramble to get out of the heat and into the air someone had forgotten to set the codes or to even turn on the set.  It had been turned off for a mission a couple of days earlier.

Once we turned on the set, dialed in the codes and told him we should be good now, he waggled his wings, selected AB and went screaming off towards the heavens.  About 30-seconds later his wingman came over the top, also in AB, and also climbing for the stars.

About this time the EWO woke up and asked what all the excitement was?

Launch the Fleet

I think it was a quiet Saturday sometime in 1983.  I was assigned as an instructor navigator to the 452 FTS at Mather AFB, California and lived on base.  The morning started with a call from my DO or CC asking me if I had been out partying Friday night.  After some assurance I had not, he asked if I had anything planned for the day.  Again, I told them I didn’t.  We were planning just a quiet day around the house.

At that point, he said he needed me to meet a couple of pilots at base ops to take a T-43A to Illinois and pick up the Wing Commander.  Being a nav school we had a rule that any time the aircraft left the local area it had to have a nav onboard, even for a simple airways flight within the US.  I asked if we were carrying students – he said no, it was just me and the pilots, with the expectation we would pick up about a dozen passengers coming from Chanute.

About 30-minutes later I was at base ops where we laid out the flight plan, briefed the mission and took the bus to the jet.  We completed preflight, launched, and departed for the east along one of the jet routes.  About three hours later we arrived, had the jet gassed, ate our box lunches, and waited for the O-6 and his party to arrive.  Once on board, we headed home. 

The passengers were mostly senior enlisted and a few Colonels who asked about the navigation equipment but were otherwise not too interested in anything other than catching some sleep.

Total day was about 8-hours from phone call to pulling back into the driveway.  The pilots had my info for the 781, we were Alpha 1 with no write-ups, so after saying goodbye at base ops I headed home.  We weren’t gone long enough to file a travel voucher so I didn’t think about the day’s adventure other than considering it a nice break from the routine.  I guess I was wrong.

This was just one of the events that led to an IG investigation and ultimately the dismissal of the Wing/CC.  The flight had been written off as a training flight, even though we had no students, and when the copilot attempted to file a travel voucher for reimbursement the questions started coming up.  All I know is I logged NN time and the IG never bothered to ask me any questions.

Sometimes it is the weirdest things that get you into trouble.