[V8] don't call me Shirley

[Roger M. Woodbury]

My big airplane piston engine stories:  

A couple of years ago that last flying B29 was in Maine and took some folks on flyovers out of Hancock County Airport, which is known to some incorrectly as Bar Harbor Airport.  I stood watching it fly over the shopping mall in Ellsworth.  The sound was lovely, lovely indeed.  Perhaps call it an airborne Maserati sound....

But the piston engine sound I most remember I heard as a five or six year old standing on the beach one summer.  I heard several B36 bombers fly over head, one after the other. Those things lived in Bangor at the Dow Air Force Base (Now Bangor International Airport), and they frequently flew east which took them over our summer house at around twelve to fifteen thousand feet. They had six piston engines on the back of the wings (pusher props), each engine had seventy sixteen cylinders. They also had four (I think it was) jet engines in pods on the outer most hard points of the wings.  The noise they made was a deep angry brrrrring roar that shook the ground.  In case you didn’t know it, the real reason the Russian missiles were with drawn from Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis was that JFK threatened to restore several squadrons of them and have them do fly-byes over the Soviet Union, and so fearsome was their noise that Khrushchev begged Kennedy to never again let those things take flight.  (Well, I made up that last part).

Then there was the time I got to fly a loooooooooong way in a really old piston engine airplane.  I was part of a Norad evaluation team and flew from Syracuse, New York to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in a C54 transport. That airplane was non-pressurized and we flew the entire way at around 5000 feet.  That was the second most painful flight I ever had. The worst was flying from Syracuse to Aviano AFB Italy in a C130 many years later.  Although that C130 was pressurized, the entire trip was made in troop seats. (for anyone who doesn’t know, troop seats are just three 2 1/2” pipes that run from one end of the airplane to another with nylon webbing strung to hold the troops’ ass and back.  Fully armed combat soldiers transported that way are in so much pain by the time they land that they truly want to kill somebody.  My butt still remembers it.

Ok, ok, ok, so I am on a roll this morning.  I want to tell the story about welcoming new young airmen to the radar control site I was stationed at on Cape Cod.  North Truro Air Force Station was located on the edge of the bank about a 100 feet above the beach looking out toward Europe. The operations building where I worked was actually less than a hundred feet from the edge of the bank.  We often got newly minted airmen fresh from Lackland basic training sent to the site to fill time between graduation from basic and the start date of their first tech school. Those to be assigned to operations would be allowed in to the secured area to watch an active air control mission on the computerized radar displays we used.  Buic III was a pretty sophisticated looking system, with its computerized control consoles and “magic” light pistols that were used to send flight commands to interceptors by data link...this was the mid to late 1960’s and was as magic then as Star Wars much later to some.  

Anyway, one bright sunny afternoon we had an 18 year old newly created airman in Operations and he sat and watched the little lights dance across the screen, and listened to the controller working with the aircrew under his command.  At the end of the mission the young kid was asked if he would like to actually see the aircraft as they flew back to Otis Air Force Base, which was located about seventy miles away up Cape Cod.  Of course he was very enthusiastic.  It wasn’t unusual to request a “bubble check” from fighter aircraft who had been working off the coast, and they would usually agree to fly low over our radar site if they had sufficient fuel remaining.

On this one day we had been working with F101’s, the fearsome Voodoo.  We sent that young airman outside, opening the emergency egress doors in the “block house” and pointed him to the edge of the cliff. We told him to go stand right near the fence that bounded the secure area of the site.  There he stood in the bright sunshine, cloudless sky of that early spring morning, looking up searching for aircraft.  Meanwhile about ten miles out to sea the F101 was down at around fifty feet going, oh, maybe four hundred miles per hour.  About a mile from the edge of the cliff the F101 pilot pulled up the nose of his aircraft and suddenly all that young airman could see, seemingly right in front of him, was ALL THE AIRPLANE IN THE WORLD, looking for all the world like the nose was going to go right through him.

When I finally got a look, there he was flat on the ground, arms outstretched, I think trying to borrow into the sod.  

The F101 was a twin engine jet with afterburner, and I think there was nothing ever made by man that flew that was louder than an F101, close the ground with burners lit.  

We laughed like hell.