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Fifty Thousand Feet & Nothing Running but My Watch Episode 52 · So There I Was

• 0:00
  Quiet numbskulls, I'm broadcasting! Greetings and welcome to the podcast, so there I was.
• 0:05
  It's how all great aviation tales begin.
• 0:08
  This is the podcast that takes you on thrilling adventures and heart-pumping journeys.
• 0:13
  This week's episode, titled, 50,000 feet and nothing running but my wristwatch.
• 0:19
  This is one you won't want to miss. Join us as we sit down with Slath. Slath Sr., in fact.
• 0:25
  Marine Corps aviator and father of our guest from two weeks ago.
• 0:29
  Slath Sr. takes us on a journey through his incredible career from his time as a naval aviation cadet,
• 0:35
  attending Aviation Officer Kennedy School in 1955, to flying the F-9 and the F-84 jets,
• 0:42
  and deploying on the USS Lake Champlain. He has some terrifying tales about that.
• 0:49
  What's so unique about the Lake Champlain? Well, that was the last of the straight deck carriers in service in the United States Navy.
• 0:56
  This week's show is so packed with exciting stories, we had to split it into two parts.
• 0:59
  Unfortunately, Fig is on vacation and the pre-recorded preamble we did together got corrupt.
• 1:05
  So don't worry, Fig will be back next week and he's here with us in this show.
• 1:09
  And as a special treat, this week we also get to wish a happy 89th birthday to Slav Sr.
• 1:15
  We are honored to have him join us and hope that we have half the energy and mental sharpness if we get anywhere near the age of 89.
• 1:21
  So folks, sit back, relax, and get ready for another great guest on So There I Was.
• 1:27
  And remember, don't sit on the ejection handle.
• 1:30
  At night, in the world's smallest cockpit, on the tanker, through the weather, oh, and
• 1:39
  to the tanker crew who did that, thanks a lot, we really appreciated that.
• 1:42
  Music.
• 1:57
  So there I was, 21 years old, I'm on the airplane for the first time, leaving Chicago, thunderstorms
• 2:12
  outside of Pensacola. We land in Mobile and have to be bused to our initial home away
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  from home, arriving at 3 a.m. and expected for calisthenics at 4.30.
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  By such a smiling and warm welcoming faces of Marine Corps staff and COs, I'm certain
• 2:35
  that's how all great aviation tales begin. You're listening to the podcast. So there I was welcome.
• 2:40
  This is repeat coming to you from home in New Hampshire today with my co-horse fig.
• 2:46
  Hello and I am, I am in Kansas city, Carney, and we have with us a very special guest.
• 2:54
  Oh, uh, it's the first, another first. This is Slaff.
• 2:59
  OG SLAF, the original SLAF. Not just any SLAF. Not just any SLAF. It's the SLAF. Former Naval
• 3:07
  Marine Corps aviator and the creator of the other SLAF. From a couple of weeks ago, right on.
• 3:16
  Exactly. This is a real treat. A real treat. There's a story about that.
• 3:22
  I can't wait to hear it.
• 3:24
  Wait, this is, this is an R-rated show, not a... Oh, that's outstanding.
• 3:31
  So did you say that was your first flight in an airplane?
• 3:34
  I think so. I built model airplanes. That's what got me into aviation.
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  I loved model airplanes. And I said, wouldn't it be neat to have one of these military
• 3:45
  airplanes all by yourself? Yeah.
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  And that was the goal at that point.
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  So if I remember correctly from a previous interview with Slaff Jr., you initially were
• 4:01
  a NAVCAD, is that correct?
• 4:03
  That's correct. And that's where I was headed that night. I was there where I was headed that night.
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  To be a NAVCAD, you have to have two years of college. So I decided when I got out of high school, I better get two years of college and become
• 4:20
  a NAVCAD because that's the best flight training you could get in the world.
• 4:26
  And so that's what I decided. That's why I ended up in Pensacola that dark and windy night.
• 4:34
  So you actually set out to get two years of college specifically to get in the NAVCAD program.
• 4:39
  Is that correct? Absolutely.
• 4:42
  Holy cow. That's awesome. That was my goal.
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  At three o'clock in the morning and up jumping around at four and there I was
• 4:51
  going in to the final physical you have to pass to get into the NAVCAD program.
• 4:57
  We go over to the hospital, get the physical.
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  And I flunked the 2020 test in my left eye. Yeah, because you had no sleep.
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  That's what my thought was. And that's what the corpsman said.
• 5:11
  But you're coming back tomorrow to take another test. Well, you had a restful night that first night at OCS, I'm sure.
• 5:17
  Oh, absolutely. It was great. No stress involved. So I got up in the morning and went back.
• 5:23
  Oh, they took me by myself.
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  And so there I was. There was that eye chart. And then I looked at that eye chart and I closed my right eye first and looked out my
• 5:35
  left eye and repeated from the 2020 line H-E-L-E-A-T H-E-L-T.
• 5:42
  And that's to this date, the 2020 line on that chart.
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  And that was almost 70 years ago. Nice. I got it. Yeah. Something, something stick with you.
• 5:56
  Wow. That's right. It was an eventful week because a number of things happened.
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  You guys didn't have the choice to go through with something like this, but one week of
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  hazing, which I didn't know that they were hazing us.
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  They showed us these movies with the nine Navy airplanes off the carrier going out and
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  none of them come back.
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  Well, I thought that was just kind of normal. But by the time we finished that week, we had lost three guys that were hazed out.
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  Well, I don't think they like the 4.30 in the morning calisthenics either.
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  So, anyhow, there's that. Well, how many guys started in your NAVCAD class?
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  I mean, when you showed up there, it was about 50.
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  Okay.
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  And they started falling fast. And yes, that's right. They did.
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  But when we got out, we had a Marine captain in charge of this first week.
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  And he said, well, you'd noticed that we'd showed these movies on purpose because we didn't want anybody that had any doubts to go any further.
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  And I shook my head. I didn't notice anything, you know, he says, but I'm going to tell you one thing.
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  Next 18 months are the most dangerous part of your naval aviation career.
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  And if you get killed in this next 18 months, the chances are four to one, it'll be in a car.
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  Wow. So that was, that was the message.
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  So stay out of cars, stay out of the bars, stay out of the cars.
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  And that was very easy.
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  So one other very important thing happened in this first week, and then we'll get
• 7:43
  on with some airplane and stuff.
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  But I learned in this first week that...
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  Only 45% of the guys that got their Navy wings and stayed in the Navy got to fly single-seat jets
• 7:58
  when I was getting out. And I learned that 85% of the Marines were getting single-seat jets.
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  That was my goal. And however I needed to do it, I was going to come out a Marine.
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  Tanner Iskra How about that?
• 8:14
  Dr. John Barber I would talk a little bit about how that happened, but it took a while, but obviously it did happen.
• 8:20
  Okay, yeah, because so somebody said that there was a MARCAD program at one point,
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  so a Marine cadet program, but so you were a NAVCAD and on track to become a naval officer,
• 8:31
  not a Marine officer. How did you manage to get that inter-service transfer?
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  Anyhow, MARCAD came out after me.
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  Okay.
• 8:38
  Okay. And I knew about it, but it was all NAVCADs when I was there.
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  But the rest of the flight training class, he had all of the commission guys, the boat school guys, coming in as ensigns or second lieutenants in the Marine Corps.
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  And so they were a whole separate group and kept well away from us.
• 9:03
  They had the cars. We had no cars. Yeah.
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  Yeah. You were getting no pay and they were getting officer pay.
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  No pay, no cars, no wine glasses. No wives allowed.
• 9:14
  Yep, that's right. Although we had one guest who was a NAVCAD who was not married.
• 9:18
  That was his story and he stuck with it.
• 9:21
  Right. Yeah, well, that's right. We had a guy like that too.
• 9:26
  Yeah, he wasn't married. He just smelled a lot like it, that's all.
• 9:31
  So we can go on from there.
• 9:33
  I flew for seven years after I started flying as a NAVCAD. And I just counted them up and I had seven important airplanes that I flew during this period.
• 9:47
  Nice. What were they? And how many hours did you get total? I'm sorry to interrupt.
• 9:52
  Total of a thousand hours, a little over a thousand hours. And I just call them off here.
• 9:58
  Obviously the SNJ, that's all the only trainer we flew until the T28 came along.
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  Okay. I have a, so there I was with my six carrier landings and back to Softley Field for
• 10:15
  instruments. And they had these new yellow airplanes, the T-28B. And I was the first.
• 10:25
  Cadet to, well, first guy in the naval training program to fly one.
• 10:32
  Tanner Iskra Oh, they were new to the new training airplanes?
• 10:34
  Dr. Ken Sparks New training airplane. And I got some stories there. But anyhow, so the T-28, TV-2, we picked that up, the T-33, when it went up to Memphis,
• 10:48
  actually, in Warrington, which is a very few people got that. Then into the advance that
• 10:55
  Sherman, came back to Sherman for an F9, F2s, and then into the fleet, Banshees for a gun squadron
• 11:03
  tour and then F9, F8 Cougars for an F for a gun squadron tour, both in the same squadron,
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  and then into the air guard flying F84Fs for a third gun squadron tour. So, I was really lucky,
• 11:22
  very lucky. Nobody gets to do that. Tanner Iskra
• 11:24
  Oh, yeah. John Ligato Right, yeah. Three gun squadron tours,
• 11:27
  unheard of. Tanner Iskra Yeah. Tanner Iskra,
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  What air guard unit? John Ligato I was going to Purdue.
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  For my, to get finished my degree. And they had one in Fort Wayne. I needed money. So, I joined
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  the guard and had a wonderful tour with those guys. I was writing at a furious pace. I think
• 11:50
  I missed. So, in between, what was after the T-28? You had a jet trainer. Yes, it was TV-2.
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  The T-33, TV-2, Navy called it TV-2.
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  Okay, so it was a T-33. Single engine.
• 12:07
  Yeah. Yeah. TV-2.
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  Same as the T-33. Okay. And then when you had the story of our ace there flying the F9F-2,
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  that really got to me because I flew it in training, and we did gunnery and the whole thing with it. thing with it.
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  And those airplanes came from Korea because they had a bunch of patched up bullet holes in them.
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  Yeah. Weird. You may have had time in his jet.
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  Might have. Yeah. Yeah. He, what did he, I think captain William said it, it, it flew again.
• 12:43
  It might've made it back to the train command.
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  Do you remember? Yeah. Cause Wikipedia or somebody, one of the stories said, yeah, they
• 12:49
  shoved that overboard, but he said, oh no, no, they, they, they patched her up and she flew.
• 12:54
  It could be. Yeah. Wow.
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  Well, okay, so somewhere in here, you got the opportunity to transition services.
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  How did that work? So, in the flight training program, probably a lot like what you guys did,
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  we got a chance to answer a questionnaire. It says, would you like to be a Marine?
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  And I answered positive on that, of course, and a few of my other buddies did. There's a lot of the
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  swabbies didn't want to go anywhere near there, especially after the first week.
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  In any event, we were interviewed and they waited until we were about halfway through
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  the flight training program. So they've got a good solid record on how we were flying. And then we
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  get an invitation to become a Marine. And that came at Barron Field when we were transitioning
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  and doing gunnery in our first formation flying. So, from there on, I was designated to be
• 14:00
  commissioned a second lieutenant.
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  Okay. After you got winged, is that, did you have to go to the basic school or anything
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  or how to, I mean, what- No, that was my good luck, more good luck. I didn't have to go to basic school. I gave
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  the NAVCAD training as what it was. So, I never had to be a platoon commander.
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  Okay. Okay. That was easy. Why pay dues if you don't have to, it sounds like you paid enough already to get there.
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  Right? That's right.
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  I think so. One of the most memorable. So there I was off the boat with my six carrier landings, knowing I was going to be a Marine.
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  Getting in my first super powerful airplane, the T20AB.
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  At that point, it was the fastest airplane to 10,000 feet anywhere.
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  Because of the large reciprocating engine it had. And I had a Marine captain who was going to show me how to fly it.
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  And he got me in the cockpit in the front seat and he says, this is the first airplane
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  since the Corsair that will do a loop on top of an Airman.
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  And I'm going to show you how to do it. If we went brand new airplane, gets it up to a red line, going downhill,
• 15:22
  pulls it up into a loop and sure enough flips it over and turns it into a.
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  A loop and it's kind of shaken at the top.
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  Then he comes back and he says, see that now you do it.
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  I didn't stall. There you go. Perfect. There you go. So that's, there I was, and I survived that one.
• 15:49
  That's amazing. You know, in the last week, we had a guy who was told to take his very first
• 15:53
  Harrier ride. No, no solos, no simulators. He goes out and he gets told how to depart the aircraft
• 15:57
  and stall it purposely. Oh, man, the things that if we'd only known then how crazy some of the
• 16:03
  stuff we were doing early on was, we might never have gotten through it. So did you actually depart
• 16:09
  that airplane on purpose? You could. Fortunately, it would be docile enough to come back for you.
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  If you just kind of let go of everything and neutralized, she'd go nose down and
• 16:21
  you could get her back, but his first ride, he was talking about the fact he
• 16:24
  opened the show talking about it, how he was told to get to 25,000 feet, pull
• 16:28
  the nozzles into 90 degrees and just keep coming up on the power until it lost so much airspeed, it departed.
• 16:35
  And here's how to recover.
• 16:39
  Yes, it did. Which was terrifying. I mean, cause some of those airplanes that you couldn't depart it, you know,
• 16:44
  the 14 was known for, you know, you could get that thing out of control and not
• 16:48
  regain it if you weren't careful.
• 16:49
  And I'm imagining a lot of the airplanes you flew were the same way.
• 16:53
  Yeah. But so there I was, uh, an F nine eight B just out of, uh, overall, I think,
• 17:03
  and it needed a test flight and I, I was, uh, we'll get into it.
• 17:09
  I was flight officer in my second tour and Marine tour, which is a great what squadron
• 17:16
  what squadron was at 533 533 went back with Scott and they were flying out of the same
• 17:24
  ready room that 206 was in out.
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  I think it was 206 whatever the squad, the carrier, the Harriers had two gun squadrons
• 17:36
  at Cherry Point, I think.
• 17:38
  Uh, uh, recently?
• 17:41
  Uh, it was done 15 years ago. 10, 15 years ago.
• 17:47
  Okay. So yeah, it's Cherry Point. There were 231, 542, and 223.
• 17:51
  The 331 flamed out shortly after the first Gulf War.
• 17:55
  So, okay, he commissioned, okay, it was one of those. And, and it was in the same ready rooms
• 18:01
  that that 533 was fighting for the 33 had left and gone to West back to the West Coast. Okay,
• 18:10
  after I left. So, okay, here I am. The we call the F nine, the F nine eight,
• 18:20
  Well, we called all the F-9s Grumman tanks, that's basically what they were.
• 18:26
  But anyhow, got up to 25,000 feet and I'd heard a lot about how the airplane had a very nasty
• 18:34
  high-speed stall characteristic. So, I put it in to a high-speed stall and that baby went into
• 18:41
  a inverted spin and corkscrewed into the, into the, uh, atmosphere.
• 18:49
  And by the time I got it out, I was at about 9,000 feet.
• 18:55
  Oh boy. So that was my departure, uh, activity. That was about it for me.
• 19:03
  I wasn't going to do that again.
• 19:06
  That's the Banshee, correct? No, no. That's the F9, the Cougar.
• 19:10
  Oh, the Cougar. Okay. Is the Cougar is a twin engine?
• 19:13
  No, the Banshee is the twin engine. We'll go back to that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Holy shit.
• 19:21
  So anyhow, that with you guys, even coming close to doing that, and we had, we had
• 19:29
  problems with that high speed stall, actually, the airplane had to be redesigned.
• 19:35
  Uh, before it went to the feet and they put a flying tail on it.
• 19:39
  By the time I got it, it had the flying table tail and a good thing.
• 19:43
  It did, but, uh, so anyhow, I'm sorry to interrupt.
• 19:48
  Can you describe what that is and why that's important?
• 19:51
  What, what it is that did for you? Okay.
• 19:54
  It didn't have enough, uh, tail surface to get itself out of a, uh, of, of an
• 20:00
  inverted spin. And, and it, it really wasn't, wasn't a good tail design. So what they did
• 20:09
  is they use the old design with a normal elevator and whole thing and use that at low speeds.
• 20:15
  And then you, you hooked in a thing where the whole back elevator would move up and down.
• 20:24
  The whole thing, the whole thing. Yeah. Okay. And that was a flying tail.
• 20:31
  So they had some problems with that, but there's another case where that can cause problems
• 20:44
  also because you had to be able to get it out of flying tail in a hurry.
• 20:52
  So he had a big switch on the left hand side and you could bang that switch and it would
• 20:58
  would come out of Flying Tail.
• 21:02
  The T-28B, I did the loop on top of the Immelmann, but when I finished instruments in the T-28,
• 21:15
  they were sending a few guys up to Millington, Tennessee, just outside of Memphis.
• 21:23
  And it was a big Navy electronics training area and they had a good airfield and they needed more room.
• 21:29
  So they put a bunch of T-33s up there and T-28s and they went did advanced instruments.
• 21:37
  So the next thing after basic instruments was the second bar for a NAVCAD and sent us up there.
• 21:47
  And so it was a nice kind of a nice thing. I am one of the few naval aviators that went through flight training and never went to
• 21:56
  Texas.
• 21:57
  I don't know, maybe they're doing more of that now. I never went to Texas.
• 22:01
  Certainly, Scott did, and you guys probably did. Sure.
• 22:04
  Yep. But we went to Memphis.
• 22:07
  So we got there, and a nice, small, little group. They had four, we had four students and two instructors to get into the hot
• 22:19
  and heavy instruments and then get through it, starting in T-28s and then our first jet instruments in the TV2, the T-33.
• 22:32
  So before we went under the bag, we got to solo in it and fly that.
• 22:37
  The first thing I didn't tell you, I met these seven different airplanes that I've described
• 22:43
  you, and I never met one that didn't try to kill me.
• 22:48
  Right. Right. All right.
• 22:52
  And as, as you get further and further through, you begin to look at the, for these idiosyncrasies. Well, right.
• 23:01
  The TV too had one. And we kind of learned the hard way with these four kids.
• 23:08
  We had three.
• 23:13
  We had three NAVCADs and one kid from the boat school. And so he was headed, he was already an ensign.
• 23:25
  And so we transitioned to the T-33. And what the kill you on the T-33 was, you had to keep, had a 95 gallon tank right behind the pilot.
• 23:39
  And you had to keep that full by using a series of four switches down here on the lower and, and certain, certain sequences,
• 23:49
  sequences of valves and pumps, valves and pumps to keep, keep the airplane balanced and, and pump the wing.
• 23:57
  They both, they all had always had wing tanks. So you had to pump those down evenly.
• 24:01
  So you didn't get them. But when you come back and get into the pattern, you make damn sure that that 95 gallon tank
• 24:09
  is full because if that runs dry, the engine quits and that can kill you.
• 24:16
  And it did.
• 24:17
  It killed this Hanson while I was in the pattern, actually. So that was kind of my first up close and personal brush with death.
• 24:29
  But my 95 gallon tank was full. I'll tell you that it stayed that way from this fourth.
• 24:39
  So these four guys and these two instructors are not very lucky because two days later, uh,
• 24:49
  the instructor and one of the navcads, obviously not me, we're doing a, a, a
• 24:55
  high-speed jet penetration and flew in to the Mississippi river.
• 25:00
  Oh, wow. So here we had four guys.
• 25:05
  And two instructors, and we lost three of them in a period of two weeks. So there I was.
• 25:14
  Understanding what military aviation is like. Yeah, that's a gut check right there.
• 25:24
  It is. It didn't bother me. I was fearless until I started flying night FCLPs.
• 25:33
  So that's field carrier landing practice to pretend to go to the boat and get ready to go to the boat.
• 25:41
  So that the rest of the, uh, the rest of the period in flight training was good.
• 25:48
  Uh, I'd looking forward to getting into a squatting and getting a assignment, figuring
• 25:52
  out what that would be and, and make sure I have just one seat.
• 25:56
  And then I'll, I'll be very, very happy. We got into the F9, F2, and a lot of, had a good guy out of Korea that was a Marine,
• 26:08
  taking us around.
• 26:09
  And we learned a lot then. It was a lot much more like a gun squadron experience.
• 26:16
  But by that time, we were down, back down to the main side to fly in with the Blue Angels.
• 26:25
  So we were in the same hangar and we were there for I don't know how long they did that,
• 26:31
  but not very many advanced guys got to go through F9s there.
• 26:36
  So anyhow, that ended up my period until I was a full-fledged naval aviator and a gold
• 26:45
  bar and probably the greenest nugget that ever came out of there.
• 26:51
  So just so I got this, did you go to the boat in the T2V? in the T2V?
• 26:57
  No, no, we went to the boat in the SNJ.
• 27:04
  And the SNJ, did you go to the boat in the T-28? Nope. Okay.
• 27:10
  They went to the boat later. They began to fly them to the boat, but it was just
• 27:14
  instruments when I went through. And so, was the F9F your advanced jet trainer? Is that when you got winged after that? F9F2, right. We're just getting there. And we
• 27:25
  didn't go to the boat in the F9F2. Remember, they were all straight deck at that time.
• 27:30
  Oh, yeah. Okay. Wow. Wow. And I'll tell you about that.
• 27:35
  Yeah, that's terrifying. I'm eager to hear about that, what that was like flying on and off a straight deck.
• 27:40
  Yeah, I think we might as well move on here. Oh, let's just go there.
• 27:44
  And anyhow, I finished, got my wings. My fiancé and my mother came down and got my wings and went home, got married, and I.
• 28:02
  Not no, not quite then I and I got my assignment. F2H4s. I didn't know what a Banshee was,
• 28:10
  but I knew it had been in Korea and I knew it only had one seat and I knew it had two engines.
• 28:15
  So it sounded pretty good. So they sent me to the MFA 533 in Cherry Point. So I was happy to
• 28:27
  get there, they there were two other nuggets, and myself, and a couple of other fairly junior guys
• 28:37
  in the squad. And when I got there, they locked it down, no more new pilots, because we were
• 28:42
  deploying within less than six months. And we were going to go to see on the forestall.
• 28:54
  So, that was very exciting because I looked at the list of missions that the F2H4 had.
• 29:01
  It had an air-to-air radar in it and a big nose cone and the whole thing.
• 29:09
  The only problem, it never worked.
• 29:11
  But that was one issue. Loved the two engines.
• 29:16
  The airplane flew very well. But we were on a fast track.
• 29:22
  Three flights a day for me, you know, I hear I was hadn't been in a gun squadron,
• 29:27
  had a lot of training to do. So there I was three flights a day. We do one low level because we
• 29:36
  had the mission, the missions we had special weapons. And so we had to go to go to a special
• 29:44
  weapons school, get qualified in that. We and the special weapons were all low level deliveries.
• 29:51
  We had two deliveries, the low-level, the over-the-shoulder, and the pitching.
• 29:56
  And we had a way to deliver them from 20,000, 30,000 feet, which we never used.
• 30:02
  Do we need to discuss what special weapons really means?
• 30:06
  Mark-12s, nuclear weapons. Yeah.
• 30:09
  Tactical nuclear. Tactical nuclear. Thank you. And that was the, yeah, the, I don't know what to say.
• 30:17
  Not the golden years of the Cold War, but the Cold War was in full swing then. Yeah, it was.
• 30:22
  That's what the Sixth Fleet was all about when I went to it.
• 30:25
  Duck and cover, baby. Get under that desk in case there's a nuclear blast.
• 30:29
  Yeah, that's right. That'll help. We'll get into that a little bit.
• 30:32
  But anyhow, very one item.
• 30:39
  I was in the squadron and doing all this flying, so I was always in the ready room, and the
• 30:44
  other guys too because we needed to get some hours before we got into the nitty-gritty of this
• 30:50
  deployment. And so we got an airplane back from.
• 30:55
  From, uh, O and R and O and R was for the band. She was in Cherry point.
• 31:01
  So we got it back and I need somebody to go and fly it and be up there and it didn't have tip tanks on it.
• 31:07
  And so I had heard through the grapevine that, uh, that, uh, F2H4 without tip
• 31:12
  tanks would go to 50,000 feet.
• 31:15
  And I wanted to go to 50,000 feet. So I got there and headed up.
• 31:19
  And, uh, so there I was.
• 31:22
  Beautiful. Oh boy. 50,000, 49,800 feet, 900 feet, 990 feet, just a little more throttle. And everything quit.
• 31:38
  Oh boy.
• 31:45
  Nothing wrong with my wristwatch.
• 31:49
  I don't know if you guys ever did anything like this, but, uh, I I never told anybody, never, never told anybody till now.
• 31:57
  Oh my God.
• 31:59
  So what happens? So the airplane is an electrical monster.
• 32:03
  So all you can think of battery, battery, battery. Can't stop. It can't start.
• 32:08
  They can't do an air start until 20,000 feet. And here I'm at 50 and electric speed brakes.
• 32:16
  And what if I put the speed brakes out and can't get them in?
• 32:20
  And all of those things, I'm not going to test the speed break handle.
• 32:24
  I'm not going to do this.
• 32:26
  And I'm not going to talk to anybody. So the radios go off, everything goes off.
• 32:32
  And then I was feeling a little better because I was starting to lose some altitude, maybe already down close to 40,000 feet.
• 32:42
  But the good news was we shut down engines all the time and started them and shut them down.
• 32:47
  But we never shut down two of them.
• 32:49
  Right. Okay. Who would do that? So, then the next problem comes along.
• 32:59
  The cockpit starts to fog over because you've got no air conditioning, and I have to do this thing blind.
• 33:07
  But I was in a flame out pattern by the time I was at 40,000 feet, round and round.
• 33:14
  And I looked at those long runways.
• 33:16
  You know those Cherry Point runways. amazing airfield in the world, any place for somebody to fly off of, it was just incredible.
• 33:26
  The bottom line, the engine started right up at 20,000 feet.
• 33:31
  Both of them started up and I went back and learned from my experience.
• 33:37
  Anyhow, that was a good one.
• 33:40
  Fortunately, you were able to learn from your own lesson instead of somebody else learning
• 33:43
  from your lesson the hard way. Well, that's right.
• 33:47
  The fuel pump. Yeah.
• 33:49
  Yeah. Well, do me a favor here, gents. Let me tell you about a couple of folks that helped bring this show to you.
• 33:54
  Hey, Fig, you got your private pilot rating before you went to the Marine Corps, didn't you? Yes, I did.
• 34:00
  And it was a lot of work and a lot of effort because the information I needed wasn't readily
• 34:04
  available at your fingertips like it is nowadays. It was a lot to get prepared to take my aura on my check ride.
• 34:09
  Well, as you know, I got my private certificate in college as well.
• 34:12
  And here's something that I wish I'd had available when I was working on becoming a private pilot.
• 34:18
  There's a new podcast perfect for the student pilot or current pilot wanting to refresh their knowledge.
• 34:24
  It's called the Audio Ground School Podcast. The host, Nick Smith, founded and created the online ground school and student pilot
• 34:32
  resource website, parttimepilot.com.
• 34:35
  That's parttimepilot.com. Part-time pilot has the sole objective of decreasing student pilots hurdles when training
• 34:42
  to become a pilot.
• 34:44
  If you check out the podcast, be sure to look in the show notes of each episode because
• 34:48
  in them, you'll find video lessons, downloads, and other helpful resources.
• 34:52
  I highly recommend not only listening to the podcast, but subscribing to it so you can
• 34:57
  get notified of each episode and keep track of many promotions and scholarships they put
• 35:02
  out at Part-Time Pilot.
• 35:03
  What a great resource for anyone learning to fly, refreshing, or coming up on a biennial flight review.
• 35:09
  You may remember, I mentioned my son is working on his private pilot certificate.
• 35:13
  The timing of this couldn't be better.
• 35:15
  Thank you to Nick over at the Audio Ground School podcast at parttimepilot.com.
• 35:20
  I'm excited to watch how much easier this will be for him with a great resource like this. Right.
• 35:27
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• 36:46
  Did the F2H have hydraulically boosted flight controls or was it all cables and pulleys?
• 36:53
  It was pretty much cables and pulleys, I believe. I don't think we had...
• 36:59
  So you didn't have any problem with the engine shutdown, you didn't have any problems with controllability?
• 37:04
  No, no, none at all. The other nice thing about when you shut down the engines,
• 37:09
  they had a flap on the intake, they would completely go down to zero. And so a lot of
• 37:15
  of the drag was reduced by that.
• 37:19
  And that comes to another story, but it'll come. So I got into carrier aviation and it all of a sudden it becomes really big in your
• 37:30
  windscreen when you know, you're going to go to sea first of the year.
• 37:35
  And here I was in July, August, already had a plan for my wife.
• 37:42
  She was going to go home and work and save up for a car that I could buy when I'm in Europe.
• 37:49
  So that was all planned. So the next thing I wanted to say, so there I was looking at how it is to land on a carrier
• 38:00
  and angle that carrier.
• 38:02
  The four star was quite new at this time. This was its first tour under the Sixth Fleet.
• 38:11
  And it was going to go January of 1957. And so we had to get ready. So off we go. We set up the
• 38:19
  CLP, which is a piece of cake with the pattern for an angled deck because you've got the meatball,
• 38:25
  you've got the mirror. We'd all learned that when the Brits invented the mirror for their carriers
• 38:33
  And we adopted it, it reduced accidents on these carriers by about factor of four,
• 38:41
  which is really very big. And it's beginning to look at the pattern. The pattern was 500 feet.
• 38:50
  And the old patterns that we were flying, even the flat patterns that we flew in the training
• 38:57
  program were, uh, about, uh, 150 feet off the ground.
• 39:03
  So that was a big, a very big difference. Yeah.
• 39:06
  And margin for safety built in that way. Oh yeah. That's right.
• 39:10
  And so we went down to Gitmo.
• 39:14
  The FDR was down there and FDR earlier angled that carrier. She went down there to qualify, uh, six, 10, 15 landings, but we were day night.
• 39:25
  We had to be a night fighter on our deployment.
• 39:28
  So we had to do day and night. So that was a, that was very nice weather down and off of Gitmo and the carrier
• 39:35
  kicked up a nice wake that you could see from 200 miles away because all the algae and the water.
• 39:42
  So anyhow, that was a straightforward. And we come back.
• 39:47
  And we get the word when we get back from that with two months to go.
• 39:53
  So that was September, October.
• 39:57
  We get the word that they're taking us off of the forestall and putting us on the Lake Champlain, the last straight deck carrier.
• 40:07
  Oh, boy.
• 40:08
  To go to the Sixth Fleet. It's going to be, it was going to be the last one.
• 40:13
  But guess who was going to be on it?
• 40:15
  So that lucky you, we all saw that.
• 40:20
  So we started immediately, very quick to get into the FCLP because the FCLP
• 40:25
  on a straight deck, they're really a lot different. It's you got to fly down.
• 40:30
  You're just over the ground at maybe 7,500 feet.
• 40:35
  Oh my God, because the straight deck pattern is flat where the angle deck pattern, you start at 500 and you end up at 180 feet.
• 40:44
  And so you're coming down and you've got the meatball to guide you and particularly important
• 40:52
  at night. But straight down here, we got LSOs. Yeah. And you don't have a glide path. It sounds
• 41:00
  like you just flew it straight onto the back of the deck and tell me, I'm terrified right now.
• 41:06
  Yeah, oh, you see, and and the big difference is, all of a all of a sudden, you go from.
• 41:14
  Just just you being in control, the LSO on an angled deck carrier is a safety officer, right?
• 41:21
  He can see some dangerous techniques or something like that, but he doesn't doesn't control it. But on an angled deck carrier,
• 41:29
  The LSO is in charge. He's as much flying the airplane as you are. You mean on the straight deck carrier?
• 41:36
  On the straight deck carrier, yes.
• 41:38
  And okay, now just let me tell you about the night, the night on a straight deck carrier.
• 41:47
  Oh, please don't.
• 41:49
  The LSO has lights on his arms and his legs to make a signal to the pilot.
• 41:59
  He has to move. Very. If he gives you a cut, a fast cut, you can't see it.
• 42:04
  But if he gives you a cut, I can't, I can't do it here.
• 42:08
  He gives you a cut like that. You can see it.
• 42:11
  So he has to always have blue water between him and you when he gives you that cut.
• 42:17
  So he has to exaggerate his movements, but do it slowly.
• 42:20
  And it sounds like he's got Christmas tree lights wrapped around every arm and leg.
• 42:24
  That's right. That's right. That's right.
• 42:27
  It is. So on into that. So Lake Champlain was in Norfolk at that point.
• 42:35
  And so we could go up there and qualify on it. So we concentrate on that part very heavily, you know, particularly the night and night
• 42:47
  is just awful, but you get a good night and it's okay.
• 42:53
  All about having a horizon. If you have a horizon, you're fine.
• 42:59
  So, we went up there. Is it still four wires?
• 43:03
  No, it was like seven, seven or eight. Well, more important that you don't bolt her on a straight deck.
• 43:10
  Uh, yeah, they don't have, didn't have such a thing. They call that a crash.
• 43:15
  Okay.
• 43:17
  Seven wires. And then the barricade 18, 18 foot barricade was the final thing that they had.
• 43:24
  But then they also had a, uh, a resting gear that flipped up and caught the main
• 43:30
  gear if you missed all the wires and that would be kind of hard on the airplane.
• 43:35
  So we went aboard with our group and the skipper couldn't qualify.
• 43:41
  Couldn't qualify. He was a World War II guy, a neat guy, I don't remember his name, but anyhow, not too important.
• 43:51
  They had to take him off. And so we went with the exec.
• 43:54
  So we had a pretty senior, pretty senior major as an exec, but we didn't have a light Colonel
• 44:00
  We had about four majors that were the flight leaders and all the rest,
• 44:04
  lieutenants and a couple of captains.
• 44:06
  Hey, Slav, at that time, how many planes were in a gun squadron and how many, uh, pilots?
• 44:12
  Depends if it was employed or not. But if it's in a gun, gun squadron, we'd have about 14 to 16 airplanes,
• 44:19
  and 22 to 26 pilots, something like that.
• 44:24
  So we went to see, we had about, I think we had, uh, 14 airplanes, depending
• 44:29
  and how many we broke that week.
• 44:32
  And, uh, we had about 21 pilots. Cause you couldn't just pick a pilot up and send him out as a replacement here.
• 44:38
  Uh, if we lost somebody, we had to go without them. Okay.
• 44:43
  Oh, there you go. That's terrifying though. The, the, being at night with no margin for error at that altitude and, and the
• 44:51
  lights and barricades, no bolters allowed.
• 44:54
  Oh, yeah. Yeah.
• 44:57
  Easy. Yeah.
• 44:58
  You found yourself all qualified and ready to go. Where did that bring in?
• 45:02
  Dr. William Reilly Okay, so there I was just off the coast of the US and we have our first casualty on the F9 squadron.
• 45:14
  The exec takes off and that flying tail must have gone berserk because he flew
• 45:19
  out to about the point where the flying tail would kick in and he flew into the water.
• 45:25
  And so, and that was kind of a sad kind of thing.
• 45:31
  But we had an accident almost every week on this carrier. So there I was, we had a little exercise.
• 45:40
  We did a lot of flying individual airplanes. You know, we took divisions up and we took sections up,
• 45:48
  but we did a lot of missions that were fly out 200 miles and be a CAP, and you can do that all by yourself and pretend the radar works, but.
• 45:57
  But. And CAP is Combat Air Patrol, right? Yeah.
• 46:03
  You're providing perimeter security for the carrier group. That's right.
• 46:06
  We had a exercise, communications exercise, where they shut down all the communications
• 46:10
  on the ships and both carriers that were headed for the, for the Med with us.
• 46:15
  And we were about halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.
• 46:19
  And so they had this exercise, and they had a broken cloud layer about 4000 feet, 3000 feet.
• 46:27
  And so they catapulted me off and I went up there and looked around, I couldn't see anything.
• 46:35
  I said, Oh, crap.
• 46:37
  How am I going to get back to the ship? Where's it gonna be?
• 46:41
  So I did some quick thinking and I picked a vector and I went out that vector by halfway
• 46:49
  and I came back and dropped under the clouds and I did find the ship, they didn't leave me out there.
• 46:55
  So that was a very interesting one. As we went, we flew nights from the first day we left and
• 47:06
  the deal was nobody was happy about the night flying. We had lists, the flight officer had a
• 47:14
  list of the lieutenants and the wingmen and the flight leaders, which there's only four or five
• 47:21
  of them, we did it off that list. So nobody skipped a night. So if you got a good night,
• 47:26
  you were very lucky. And if you got a bad night, well, that's just the way it goes.
• 47:33
  But we did have a favorite guy and that was our flight surgeon. Love this guy.
• 47:39
  Nice. We all got a half a coffee cup full of old Fitzgerald when we got back.
• 47:48
  Love it. Absolutely love it. For medicinal purposes only, right?
• 47:54
  That's right. That's right. That's right.
• 47:57
  One thing I did, I wasn't supposed to do, I don't suppose, but I kept a a log or a diary of what happened to me every day on this ship. My dad gave it to me. He was a,
• 48:09
  civil engineer and a pretty smart guy. He said, here, take this book and write down what you did
• 48:13
  because you're going to forget it. I give a presentation now to the local clubs and whoever
• 48:20
  wants a freed that I call the diary of a carrier pilot. And I go through the diary and pick up
• 48:27
  the high points of each day or where I found interesting things.
• 48:32
  So there I was days and I read one to you.
• 48:41
  Here, just. OK, this is awesome. But boy, you know, his father is a wise man fig, because I can't tell you
• 48:48
  how many things I've forgotten that I wish it, you know, the details are gone.
• 48:53
  I know.
• 48:55
  The March 27th, 1957, here's what my diary says.
• 49:00
  I got up early and stood duty all day. I ate supper and got ready for night flying.
• 49:07
  Merle, me, Ferg, and Jim Coleman, but it wasn't Jim, it was Satch, who was actually on the flight.
• 49:15
  I got that wrong in my diary.
• 49:17
  Got off about 1900, and it was just getting dark. and I could see that the weather was going to be very bad.
• 49:28
  And certainly it was very dark. We climbed, we were flying on Merle Davis.
• 49:35
  He was a flying Sergeant in World War II.
• 49:40
  And one of the best pilots I ever came up with. He was a maintenance officer in the squadron,
• 49:46
  but by this time he was a major and nobody that I'd rather be on their wing
• 49:52
  through a night like this, because we got in a soup,
• 49:56
  and climbed up above 25,000 feet.
• 49:59
  And we were in a soup all the way, got up on top and four of us, we got together and not much.
• 50:07
  We were supposed to do a cap and we did what we could. We know it was gonna be tough when we went back down.
• 50:14
  By the time we headed back down, there was some rain as we got down below the overcast,
• 50:21
  but it was really a dark night.
• 50:24
  Came into the four planes, came in for a break. We broke about six seconds apart.
• 50:31
  You're always very close to the guy in front of you, because the captain of a carrier,
• 50:36
  the worst thing that he,
• 50:39
  the thing that he really doesn't like is to keep going in one direction
• 50:43
  that's predictable for more than two minutes
• 50:47
  or something like that.
• 50:48
  So we all had to get on.
• 50:50
  But it was a dark night.
• 50:53
  Ferg was flying number three, and I was number two. And Merle broke.
• 51:01
  And here we were at 300, probably broke at about 300 feet, dropped down to about 150 feet.
• 51:08
  And you actually had to watch out for the plane guard. It was at the 180 position because it stuck up in the air almost 200 feet.
• 51:19
  But anyhow, Ferg was having trouble with his lights.
• 51:23
  Something was going on. This airplane was an electrical monster,
• 51:27
  had almost 60 circuit breakers down 30 on either side, either left leg, right leg.
• 51:35
  And you can't see down there. You got a flashlight, you can't see anything.
• 51:39
  Some of them would be kept open on purpose.
• 51:42
  And so Ferg was having trouble getting a hook light.
• 51:47
  And you had to have a hook light at the break or they'd start yelling,
• 51:53
  everybody would start yelling at you.
• 51:56
  Okay. He didn't have, that's where you want to be at night at 150 feet off the water.
• 52:00
  Anyway, with your flashlight on heads down into a circle. Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 52:08
  You don't want to be looking out the window. So you don't hit anything, you know?
• 52:11
  So Fergie was very nervous about this. I think, I think really, he, he really clutched up and, um, and that happened.
• 52:21
  So, you know, you know, I'm nervous about it. 66 years later.
• 52:27
  Yeah, that's right. Anyhow, so he was, he was, he was a little impulsive.
• 52:31
  The guy was a little impulse, a little too much impulses for, for, for a fighter
• 52:36
  pilot, but he was a senior first Lieutenant and I, he, he didn't ask me what he should be.
• 52:42
  Anyhow, he broke early and he got in front of me. So I had the problem of taking spacing on him, but that's not too bad because you
• 52:53
  can see him, uh, fairly, fairly well.
• 52:57
  Uh, I was number two and all of a sudden I was number three.
• 53:02
  Um, Ferg, we're still having trouble. The LSO is there hard to see.
• 53:08
  Very, very hard to see. No, no horizon.
• 53:12
  So we were plugging along and Merle gets a wave off for a foul deck.
• 53:18
  They weren't quite ready for him and he gets a wave off. So he takes away Roth and Ferg.
• 53:26
  Gets a wave off but lands anyway, crashes into the deck, through the pack and into the water.
• 53:34
  We get the call, look away from the ship because we're going to put the lights on,
• 53:37
  we got a pilot in the water. We got the word right then very quickly that the forest all
• 53:44
  is 85 miles away and you're going to have to go there. That's the only place you can go.
• 53:48
  So here's where we really like the second engine.
• 53:54
  So we singled up, joined up the three of us and headed for the forest.
• 53:58
  All didn't know what was going on with Ferg, but we had to get ourselves there.
• 54:02
  You know, coming back to a carrier in those days, we didn't have buddy tankers, no way to get fuel.
• 54:11
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was my, going to be my question. You don't come to the back, back to the carrier with a full bag of gas.
• 54:16
  Bag of gas, either about, uh, we, we came back that night with about 1500 pounds.
• 54:24
  And, uh, we're supposed to come back with, uh, with three, uh, three passes.
• 54:30
  And if you can't do it in three passes, then, uh, we had our three passes, but not a lot extra.
• 54:38
  So we singled up and headed for the forest stall, but couldn't have a better guy leading us.
• 54:44
  And so we headed for the forest. So we get into, to radio distance and, uh, we knew the LSO on the forest.
• 54:52
  All we had flown off the forest. All sure.
• 54:55
  Uh, angle back and he asked us, did you want the paddles or the mirror?
• 55:01
  Oh boy, give us the mayor. We hadn't had seen a mirror in six months or five months.
• 55:07
  And we weren't getting, we wanted the mirror.
• 55:10
  So we get back there and I think I got back there with about 400 pounds,
• 55:17
  something like that, and Merle makes his landing.
• 55:22
  I was second and I get a bolter and Satch makes his landing.
• 55:28
  So two down and one to go.
• 55:30
  And so I could take a fairly short pattern and come around and I got the board.
• 55:35
  That was all good. We'd heard was in the water. Doc was the doc on hand to extract that, uh, seat cushion from your backside.
• 55:42
  Yeah.
• 55:44
  When you talk about, we'll talk about the crew on this, uh, on this carrier
• 55:48
  because they were green as gourds too. So they tied us down and we got a place to sleep and we're going back in the
• 55:55
  morning, but we heard Ford was in the water and they hadn't got in.
• 55:59
  So we came back, got, got a little gas and one little added.
• 56:03
  And so there I was, gassed up, started the engines, and we were on the port side of the
• 56:10
  ship with a tail hanging over.
• 56:11
  I mean, these kids, you got to save a lot of room, somebody might want to use the deck.
• 56:18
  And so, the captain makes the turn into the wind with a,
• 56:25
  a lot of zealousness. And so when the ship turns into the wind, the starboard side, he was turning,
• 56:35
  to the port and the starboard side bends down. And the kid that had my airplane tied down
• 56:42
  takes the chain off the nose gear and it starts coming up. So I fortunately had the engines
• 56:49
  running. So I put on enough power to keep from going backwards over the side.
• 56:54
  Oh my gosh.
• 56:57
  So that was the end of our trip to the forest stall. We hope never have to go there again.
• 57:05
  Okay. So we did go back and it wasn't funny. We did a little searching from Fergie, but it was a kind of a nasty sea state and helicopters couldn't fly at
• 57:18
  night. So we didn't, we had no angel there, no way to get out except the small boats from the tin can.
• 57:26
  There was two small boats from the destroyer in the water. And even on top of Ferg's tragedy,
• 57:35
  one of the kids on the small boat got washed over and they lost him too.
• 57:40
  Oh my gosh. In the, in the process of looking for Ferg? Yep. Oh my gosh. They did see him.
• 57:47
  But they couldn't keep me in sight. You know, it was very rough.
• 57:53
  Oh my gosh. I would have thought the life preserver run mandatory, and I assume it
• 57:58
  probably was, but still difficult. That tells me the sea state was 10, 12 feet or more.
• 58:03
  Yeah, it probably was. Yeah. You don't know it until you get into it, but I wasn't going there.
• 58:11
  I had my 400 pounds of gas. I wasn't going to use it. So anyhow.
• 58:14
  Out every left out. So anyhow, that was, that was the worst night, my worst night.
• 58:20
  And, uh, it was very interesting. We were losing, we were having an accident at least almost once
• 58:28
  a week, some kind of an accident.
• 58:30
  Somebody bust a nose gear or, or, or something that we, we, uh, lost a couple of airplanes into the water, but, but not, not that many, nobody
• 58:42
  but we lost nobody but Ferg there.
• 58:46
  Anyhow, when we lost the pilot, that was the first and only pilot we lost in this,
• 58:54
  we never had another accident.
• 58:56
  I don't know why, nothing changed. We didn't quit going out on these nasty nights,
• 59:03
  but we didn't lose anybody else.
• 59:06
  Oh, thank goodness. Did that airplane, it had an injection seat, right?
• 59:10
  Yes, yes, but that's zero level.
• 59:13
  You're right. That was my question. It wasn't a zero, zero seat.
• 59:15
  No. And did you have to have the canopy open when you were coming aboard the ship?
• 59:20
  We had a canopy open on all landings on all, all three airplanes that I flew, except when I got in the guard, they didn't open canopies in the guard
• 59:30
  because I guess those guys didn't worry about swimming.
• 59:35
  Thank you to all of them who served regardless, everybody who stepped up, signed their name on the dotted line and signed their name on the, uh, on
• 59:44
  the blank check to protect and defend the constitution.
• 59:47
  So thank you for your service, sir. It was great.
• 59:50
  The way I did it when they play the anthems of all of the services,
• 59:54
  I get to stand up three times.
• 59:56
  There you go. Exactly. And you did indeed stand up.
• 59:59
  And as you mentioned, uh, pre-show, I hope you don't mind me mentioning
• 1:00:04
  you're going to be 89 next week.
• 1:00:06
  Well, it's incredible. That is incredible.
• 1:00:08
  I pray to God that I'm half as sharp as you at the age of 89 and that I make it to the age of 89.
• 1:00:15
  This has been a true privilege and we appreciate the time. Thanks guys for helping me record it.
• 1:00:22
  It's just a pleasure to see what you guys are doing and that you're having so much fun at it.
• 1:00:27
  I can't tell you what an honor it is to get stories, to hear stories from the actual source.
• 1:00:36
  And thank you for that and thank you for your service.
• 1:00:41
  Well, thank you guys for doing what you do, and glad you survived the Harrier. As are we.
• 1:00:50
  We got a couple other thank yous we need to put out there. First of all, Fig, first and foremost, who gets us there?
• 1:00:56
  We got to thank Dave Hamilton. My man, Dave Hamilton. Thank you, Dave.
• 1:01:01
  Over at the MacGeekGab and the Business Brain podcast and the GigGab as well for musicians.
• 1:01:06
  Thank you, Dave. Appreciate what you do for us.
• 1:01:10
  Thanks also to Robins Bird Brain Designs, our sponsor, and parttimepilot.com with the Audio Ground School podcast.
• 1:01:17
  Appreciate you sharing your podcast stories with us, and we're sharing them with everyone else.
• 1:01:23
  Also, if you want to reach out to us and ask us any questions,
• 1:01:26
  particularly about becoming a pilot.
• 1:01:29
  I don't care if you're 14 or 40 and you want to become a pilot,
• 1:01:33
  get out there and do it. Go over to the airport and start doing it. If you've got questions about
• 1:01:38
  that, write, first of all, to STIX at sothereiwas.us. Any other questions or feedback, feel free to write
• 1:01:45
  STIX or FIG at sothereiwas.us or repeat at sothereiwas.us. Also, there's Robinsburg Brain
• 1:01:51
  Designs and the folks that you were starting to hear in the background who give the Air Force a
• 1:01:57
  good name. Who's that, FIG? That's the Dose Gringos. Man, those guys are awesome. They were a lot of
• 1:02:02
  of fun to have on. They're amazing musicians, very talented, very clever and
• 1:02:07
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• 1:02:18
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• 1:02:28
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• 1:02:33
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• 1:02:35
  Music.