Search & Rescue - North Pacific Flight Leads U.S. Submarine to Dramatic Rescue in Storm
The Triumph of Instrument Flight
Copyright 2009
Contact Franklyn E. Dailey Jr.
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"I signed up for naval (aviation) cadet training in June 1941 just prior to graduating from Southeastern Louisiana University. I was very happy to be accepted in the pilot training program because I had been rejected a year and a half earlier due to my being colorblind. The old white-haired Navy doctor said to me on that earlier occasion, 'Son, you passed everything except the color blind test; you go back and finish college for we cannot let you fly in the Navy.' This was good advice. Still, I was young and stubborn and not ready to give up."
"I returned to college and it so happened that an Army Air Corps recruiting team appeared on campus with a full medical trailer and doctors. I went through the same test and the corpsman got the colorblind book and I struggled to read the numbers. (Author's Note: This is a book of numbers, formed of different colors in irregular patterns. The colorblind person cannot discern certain numbers because of the intentional confusion of colored patterns raggedly outlining the numbers.) I struggled to read the numbers but it was mostly a guessing game for me. The corpsman called in the full Colonel doctor and told him I was pretty colorblind. The Colonel said, 'Sign him up. We need as many as we can get.' Well, I knew then that I must try once more to get in naval aviation."
"I hitchhiked down to New Orleans and went to the same Navy recruiting station and told them I had never taken the test before. I had some difficulty reading the color chart pages but I had experience now, so when the corpsman got to the last few pages, the numbers showed up good to me but I said, 'I cannot see any of these numbers.' Those were the numbers I knew now from experience had been made for the colorblind to read. I was accepted and I suppose that proves that good guys win most of the time."
(Author's Note: To Burris, "win most of the time," meant not just acceptance by the Navy, but bypassing the Colonel, who had accepted him in the Army Air Corps.)
"I completed my flight training at Corpus Christi in multi-engine, flying PBYs. In 1943, I was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet. I was then trained and checked out in PB4Y-1 aircraft and assigned to Fleet Air Wing (FAW)-7 with headquarters at Plymouth, England. My squadron was VPB-110 and we operated out of Dunkeswell, England."
"The Dunkeswell aerodrome had only a non-directional low frequency homer ('homer': a homing beacon; a ground located transmitter broadcasting a radio frequency signal in all directions) so we had lots of instrument flying and alternate field landings. (The 'alternate' airfield is the one designated for the aircraft to proceed to if the primary airfield is below instrument minimums for landing.) Primitive GCA was established at Dunkeswell in late 1944 or early 1945."
(Author's Notes: GCA stands for Ground Controlled Approach. At a point on a plane's incoming flight path, a GCA operator in a shack on the landing field near the pre-designated "GCA Runway", would "take control" from the control pilot. That operator would then help the pilot keep on the optimum flight path for landing by telling the pilot to go right or left, and to increase or decrease the plane's rate of descent. GCA operators also included redundant information such as you are a "little to the right of the glidepath" [or left] and a "little above the glidepath [high]" [or low], plus occasional affirmations that "you are doing just fine" if warranted.)
"My first GCA was at the end of an operational flight at night with dense fog and poor visibility. My confidence in the GCA operator and the equipment was not good but we were able to land safely after two tries. I will say that GCAs have made a great improvement and the same goes for the pilots."
(Author's Note: Burris' previous sentence needs a time qualifier. By 1945, GCA had proved itself to Navy pilots who were happy to have it in service. There will be more on the specifics of GCA in a later chapter.)
"When Germany surrendered, the Navy personnel were shipped from Dunkeswell to Norfolk, VA on a seaplane tender, the USS Albemarle Sound. Many of the pilots and crews were transferred to NAS Whidbey Island, Washington to re-form into squadrons and get checked out in PB4Y-2 aircraft. The Japanese called it quits before all the re-forming was accomplished and the personnel began to scatter and return to civilian life. I was ordered to NAS Crow's Landing (near Modesto, California) and was assigned to VPB-107. A goodly number of the pilots and crew were from the squadrons that had been at Dunkeswell, England but some were from squadrons in the Pacific area. VPB-107 was then relocated to NAS Whidbey Island and after a brief period of training, the squadron was deployed to NAS Kodiak, Alaska on Kodiak Island."
"I recall that our crew in plane #59645 was the last plane to leave for Kodiak and after approximately one hour in flight the #4 engine failed so we had to return to Whidbey Island for an engine change. We finally departed Whidbey Island on the seventh of September, 1946, and when we arrived at Kodiak, the ceiling and visibility were poor. We made one approach but when we crossed the Puffin Island marker beacon, I could not see the runway or lights so in conformity with the rules, I pulled up and went to Anchorage, Alaska. We finally made it to Kodiak three days later. The months of September and October were primarily spent in training, and familiarization with the airfields throughout the Aleutian Island chain."
"I note in my log that we flew two search and rescue (S&R) flights looking for three men on a disabled barge on November 4 and 5 for a total of 15.7 hours. We found the barge. We flew another S&R flight on November 15, 1946. The members of my crew should be commended and given credit for their perseverance in saving the lives of men on the barge that survived. I was transferred in late December 1946 (after the squadron's return to NAS Whidbey Island) to shore duty in the coldest place in the USA, Ottumwa, Iowa."
"In an N3N primary training plane (The N3N was a Navy built biplane, with fabric wings like the N2S. It was the original "yellow peril."), I had a student in the rear seat on his first familiarization flight. Another solo student in another plane was too high to land in the designated circle that was laid out on the ground, so he dove his plane down and landed on top of me and my student. We were about 50 feet in the air when this occurred and the two planes became locked together. When we hit the ground, the planes cart-wheeled and the student plane's propeller was turning close to my head and the wing gas tank. (In those trainers the wing gas tank was right over the head of the front seat pilot.) When the planes came to rest, I turned off the ignition and the fuel valve and exited the cockpit and helped the student do the same. I only received a small cut on my left hand. Lady Luck was with me."
"When I was in VR-3 (VR-3 was a Naval Air Transport Service-NATS, squadron.) I got into a situation that I was most fortunate to come out of unscathed. In 1952, we had a regular route from our home base, NAS Moffet Field, CA, to Adak, Alaska, with stops in between. Due to time taken at these stops to unload and refuel, it was deemed necessary to provide a relief crew at NAS Kodiak. This relief crew would fly from NAS Kodiak to NAS Adak and back to Kodiak with no stops in between. The month was February or March, 1952. As I recall, I was the pilot, and Lt. Hal Kelly my copilot for the relief crew. We were briefed at Kodiak on the weather at 0430 before departure for Adak and told that a landing at Kodiak on our return at approximately 1930 would be doubtful due to extremely heavy snow and winds. The flight went without trouble until we got back to the Kodiak control area. We were told that weather conditions at Kodiak were below landing minimums. I advised radar control that we wished to make one GCA try and we did. Lt. Hal Kelly was a very competent pilot so I told him to fly the plane and I would be copilot and I would give the command to 'pull up' if necessary. We commenced our radar approach and the air was quite rough at 1000-foot altitude but not so much as to cause concern. There is a navigation and landing approach marker beacon at Puffin Island; this beacon is approximately one mile from the end of the instrument runway that extends very close to the bluff at water's edge. When your plane crosses the marker beacon, if you do not have the runway lights in sight, you should make a pull-up, turning sharply left to avoid the steep terrain ahead and also to your right. As our approach continued and we descended, the turbulence increased and the snow was very heavy indeed. Lt. Kelly was having great difficulty physically controlling the plane. As we crossed the Puffin Island beacon (Note: The indication that the beacon had been crossed was that the needle on the Radio Direction Finder-RDF indicator in the plane would swing 180 degrees.), I could not see the runway lights but I let Lt. Kelly continue for 30 seconds. Finally, I saw a faint luminous glow of a light source. We had to land now; there was no other choice. We were both now having a real battle with the aircraft, trying in one moment to keep it from pitching into the water and in the next second to keep from going too high on our approach. We finally came over the end of the runway heading about 70 degrees to the right of the runway heading. As we got to the touchdown spot, we cut power and kept the right wing down and used left rudder. I thought surely we would at least wipe out the landing gear but the deep accumulation of snow accommodated us in a 'smooth, smooth' landing. We rolled a very short distance and called for a tow tractor to pull us to the terminal. I got by that time but my decision was faulty indeed. I learned and retained knowledge from this experience."
Readers may wonder if the physical battle that Burris and Kelly were having with their NATS aircraft, a Navy R5D (a Douglas DC-4; Army Air Corps C-54) was one of the reasons for having two pilots in the cockpit. Burris' story reminded me of the difficulty that those Lodestar pilots had with the storm over Baltimore when my wife was traveling with our first baby. Yes, stormy weather is a fact of life and wrestling with an aircraft's controls just to keep the wings level is an anticipated aircraft control situation. My own toughest wrestling match with an aircraft occurred in a twin-Beech on an instrument clearance out of NAS Brunswick, Georgia in the mid-1950s. My co-pilot on that flight was Ed Hogan, my second skipper during my Aleutian deployments. After Kodiak, he had commanded a hurricane squadron out of NAS Boca Chica, Florida. We both agreed that that Georgia storm cell, completely overlooked by meteorology during our briefing at Brunswick, and which had caught us in its grip just moments after takeoff, had been our closest to "losing it" in the air during our aviation careers up to then. I fought the controls, just to keep the wings level. Forget the altitude, as we did not control that, the storm did. He nursed the two engines, whose cylinder head temperatures dove toward zero. He managed to keep power on one while the updrafts kept us aloft until we emerged behind the front over North Carolina. We were soaked, not from sweat, but from the green water which dominated our cockpit during the worst of the battle. The machinist mate who examined our plane at NAS Anacostia after we landed there told us that one engine would have to be replaced.
Muscle challenges have receded into history as aircraft requiring direct pilot strength on the controls have for the most part aged out of the active inventory. With the advent of jet propulsion, most aircraft of any size use hydraulic systems to provide the muscle needed to move control surfaces. The SNB/JRBs, R5Ds and the PB4Y-2s came earlier in the aircraft design cycle and did require human strength to move the surface controls. There still remain many other arguments for having two pilots. Dual pilot, dual control, dual instrument aircraft have historically been provisioned so that one pilot can check on and back up the other and both can check on the instrument panel. Even with the advent of "boosted" controls, the "double check" that two pilots can provide is valuable, and essential if other lives are at stake. And not just strength, but the ability to get at least one set of hands on all controls, is another two-pilot factor.
In August of 1948, I was flying a JRF-5 (a two-engine Grumman amphibian aircraft) with Lieutenant Commander Gerry Peddicord (Gerry was a Naval Academy graduate, one class ahead of me in graduating from Annapolis) in the right hand seat. We were both attending the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School then located on the U.S. Naval Academy grounds in Annapolis. To get flight time, we were flying out of the Naval Air Facility across the Severn River from the Naval Academy. It was strictly a seaplane base so we would taxi on wheels and then waddle the plane down a ramp and then raise the landing gear when safely afloat. This day was just a couple of months after we both had first qualified in this type of amphibian. Each of us had made only a limited number of water landings. It was a brisk wind day but the Severn River is always fairly pacified and takeoff was smooth and uneventful. We had decided to make water landings to add to our experience but the Severn was usually crowded with Midshipmen sailors so we went down the Chesapeake Bay a few miles. I noticed that an old two-masted Chesapeake sailing schooner was heeled over quite a bit. It still did not quite get home to me that the water there was pretty rough. I came in for the first landing try and the plane skipped on a crest and started to settle into a big trough. It was all I could do to hold the yoke back in my lap with two hands. Gerry sensed the danger immediately and hit full throttle on both of the Grumman's two engines. She lifted straight up, we flew off, and abandoned any thought of adding to our small store of water landings. Thank God for Gerry or we'd surely have drowned in water we had no business trying to land in.
On another JRF flight out of the Naval Air Facility at Annapolis, Gerry was the pilot and I was the co-pilot. We went up to Rochester, N.Y., landed, chatted briefly with my mother and father who had come to the airport to see us, and took off for Annapolis. Afternoon thunderstorms dotted the Maryland and Chesapeake Bay area. The plane got pretty hard to control. Jerry and I were both wrestling with the controls. It suddenly got very dark. Jerry and I had been conditioned to worry about waves building up on the Chesapeake. We saw the old Baltimore airport on the peninsula next to Sparrows Point, Maryland. We called for a landing. The tower quickly grasped the situation and gave us a landing priority on the first runway we could set down on. Jerry put her down safely, we waited out the storm, then went over to Annapolis and called it a day. The JRF was a challenge to land in any kind of wind, especially crosswind on her narrow wheelset.
Just three years after the two JRF events, I was flying a night qualification flight in a P2V-2 (Lockheed Neptune, early version) at NAS Chincoteague, Virginia. The left seat pilot being checked out, at the controls, was an aging Lieutenant Commander. We were using the North runway and the approach to it was over the water and over a seawall, which is where the runway abruptly began. It was a relatively short runway, perhaps 5,000 feet. Our P2V-2 was a project plane, not encumbered with turrets or nose guns, so it was relatively nimble and the 5,000-foot runway was ample even in a light wind. My only reconstruction of the first landing that evening involved a question as to whether the guy flying the plane got worried about the length of the runway. Could he have been worried that it was too short since he was used to landing transport-type aircraft on Chinco's main runway, with its length of over 9,000 feet? Or had he just plain lost some of his night vision capability? It was very dark but the visibility was good and the runway lights were plainly visible. At any rate, he made a long final approach and kept getting lower and lower and lower. At the last moment, I could see that the seawall was above us, and the approach had deteriorated to one that a young fighter pilot might experience coming in for a carrier landing below the flight deck. I two blocked (shoved forward) the throttles with my left hand. She went up like an elevator and plopped down on the end of the runway. The man in the left seat was startled and upset. He finally cooled off and thanked me. I had done for him what Gerry Peddicord had done for me that day on the Chesapeake Bay.
One consuming objective in a young pilot's career is to build up flight time. Almost every rank, privilege or recognition in flying is built on how many flight hours you have. In early flight training, some distinction is given to "solo" time as opposed to "dual" time. Later on, hours, just plain hours, become the passion. I told about my first primary-stage flight in the back seat of a Stearman with instructor Verschoyle, and his more than 10,000 hours, and commented that that alone made him a marked man. He was an elderly man to the students, being in his early thirties, in a group where many students looked ahead to their 20th birthdays. I wanted to learn to be a good pilot. I was willing to "put in my time" as co-pilot as my contribution to the opportunity to learn from experienced pilots and from enlisted aircrewmen. I needed hours, and hours of instrument flight, and I was about to get all I wanted. I needed to become a skilful plane handler of a large aircraft, especially around airfields cradled in mountains on three sides. I was given that opportunity and surprised myself with my progress toward that objective.
There was in my new Alaska-deployed squadron another pilot whose ability, like that of Hugh Burris, all of our pilot personnel were quick to recognize.. He was Lieutenant Commander Leonard H. "Snuffy" Wagoner. He was our Operations Officer and we were exceptionally fortunate to have him. I occasionally flew as his co-pilot. He was great at decision making. We will come to some of those critical decisions later in the story. Snuffy had 12,000 flight hours in 1946. Many airline pilots did not have near that many flight hours. Snuffy Wagoner put every bit of his experience to our advantage individually and collectively during my two years in the squadron. (For accuracy, let me note here that VPB-107 was re-named VP HL-7 just before our second deployment to Kodiak in June 1947. The new nomenclature stood for Heavy Land Patrol Squadron Seven. It did not mark any change in mission.) More than any Operations Officer I encountered in naval aviation, LCDR Wagoner studied his pilots. He knew what experience they had and what they needed to acquire. He set about to address their lack of experience in this or that aspect of flying while keeping an even handed approach in their operational flight assignments. Wagoner never sent a boy on a man's mission. He built strength and then used it judiciously. Though he never bragged, I know Snuffy would not mind if I passed on to readers what an outstanding fly-fisherman he was. Alaska was a dream come true for fly-fishermen.
There is at least one offsetting story to the high flight time pilot as the infinitely wise pilot. While our squadron was on its first deployment to NAS Kodiak, a major U.S. airline had a crash near Annette Island, Alaska. This was a passenger flight in progress between Seattle and Anchorage. In the accident investigation that followed, the pilot was deemed to have made a key mistake. The plane went down and all aboard were lost. That airline Captain had 15,000 hours of flight time. I thought an awful lot about that incident and that pilot. It was very hard to reconcile then though it would not be so hard now.
As Hugh Burris has noted, during the months of September and October 1946 all nine flight crews in VBP-107 flew out of their home base at Kodiak on an extensive series of probing flights along the Aleutian Island chain. Some flights were scheduled up into the Bering Sea to Nome, Alaska, on the Seward Peninsula. Pilots made sure that their flight crews had a good look at Big Diomede Island and Little Diomede Island which marked a dividing boundary in the Bering Strait between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). From the air, in decent visibility, that was easy to do because barely 50 miles of Bering Sea separated the two. The Soviets owned Big Diomede on their side of the boundary and we owned Little Diomede on our side. Another important aircheck was usually made over the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea northwest of Dutch Harbor.
I refer here once again to the ECM, or Electronic Countermeasures equipment that served as the basis for our new mission. We were, I suppose, "snoopers," though I never heard the term in those days. Our airborne missions were flown to detect Soviet radar installations, to log their frequencies, modes of use, hours of operation, and obtain bearings on their locations. With bearings from a succession of plotted positions of our own aircraft, we could determine locations of the Soviet's Siberian radars with modest accuracy. We had a radar frequency detection receiver with four crystals, covering four different frequency bands, to detect their radar signals. The operator had to insert and remove these crystals one at a time. We had a panoramic adapter to more precisely determine their frequency once detected, and we had equipment to determine the bearing of the Soviet radar from our aircraft. I believe we also carried a jammer but did not use it during my tour of duty. In my next squadron in 1951, Air Development Squadron II (VX-2) based at NAS Chincoteague VA, I became the Project Officer for the new APT-16 radar jamming equipment. That is not part of this story but one facet of that experience highlighted one of the "one time only" situations that only flying seems to bring. Here, I digress.
In 1954, I was ordered to fly a project plane, a P2V-2, from NAS Chincoteague, VA, to Fort Wayne, Indiana to have the Capehart-Farnsworth Company install the new APT-16 radar jammer that I would then be testing for its fleet operational suitability for ComOpDevFor. (Commander Operational Development Force). VX-2 was one of four "VX" aircraft squadrons under the command of ComOpDevFor. The Capehart company had "rented" a hangar from the Air National Guard of Indiana for a week to make the installation. I flew out to Ft. Wayne on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Ground Control there gave me taxi instructions to the National Guard hangar. Two Guardsmen were waiting there to open the hangar doors. They had parked all the fighter planes outside so we would have the whole hangar to ourselves. I was given visual instructions from the taxi man to taxi the P2V right into the hangar. I could see a floor made up of square concrete blocks, painted light gray, and scrupulously clean. As we taxied into the hangar, I heard a series of "pop pop pops." I saw slight dust clouds emerge from the floor. Our P2V's weight had put a crack in the corner of every block we taxied over, about half the blocks in the hangar. I had no experience with liability and I did not want to gain any. I prodded the Capehart engineers to get the equipment installed as fast as possible and made the return flight to Chincoteague on the following Tuesday. Almost record time for an electronic installation!
Our 1946 ECM flights were a far cry from the quality of the missions of the EP-3 that made an emergency landing on Hainan Island on April 1, 2001. In 1946, we had no intelligence officer in the squadron and I do not recall that there was even one attached to Fleet Air Wing Four. Certainly, there was no one trained in electronic surveillance intelligence. We learned by doing. We read the equipment handbooks, listened to our CO, the XO and the Operations Officer, took off and did our best. A lot depended on the native intelligence of the radiomen and radarmen in our flight crews. One officer, Lt. Ted Rice, in a sister squadron at Whidbey, a man I had known both at the Naval Academy and in flight training, helped get many of us moving in the right direction in acquiring this new skill. In a series of informal sessions, Ted taught us what our ECM equipment was capable of telling us if we operated it properly. Though not directly involved in operating the equipment, our Navigator was key to the success of those ECM flights. We had to know our own aircraft's position accurately in order to obtain a "fix" on a Soviet radar installation.
We found a welcome at all of our Aleutian landing destinations except one. For reasons we never determined, NAS Attu seemed inhospitable even though the Japanese were gone and we "were all on the same side." Possibly the station personnel felt "put upon" when itinerants would come in to stay overnight and would ask for tours of the battlefields and caves where so much blood was shed just three years earlier. We did not ask for such a tour, having heard that in each short summer the caves containing undiscovered bodies still had the stench of death. On one trip to Attu, our aircraft took a pass over the abandoned U.S. airfield on Amchitka Island. We discovered that it would not be an optimum choice for an emergency landing due to the enormous amount of debris that had collected on the runway in just the two years that had elapsed since U.S. forces had ceased operations there.
I will set forth some data from the September 1946 entries in my flight log. Our narrative has already covered the 21.0 hours elapsed flight time just getting from NAS Whidbey to NAS Kodiak, and the first eleven days of September 1946 that were used in getting there. On the 16th of September, we took a local familiarization (fam) flight at Kodiak because we had never really seen it up close before. The logbook shows a flight with a limited crew so we probably made some landings and takeoffs. Then, with a full crew, we departed for Adak on September 19, taking 7.1 hours elapsed, with 7.0 hours instruments and an instrument letdown and approach. On the 20th we flew from Adak to Attu, a 3.1 hour flight of which 2.0 were instruments, including an instrument letdown. On the 21st, we flew 5.2 hours to Umnak I., landing at Ft. Glenn, all on instruments, including the letdown. After gassing, we flew on back to Kodiak, a 4.3 hour flight of which 3.5 hours were instruments including a letdown. I recall that day particularly because I was doing the regular checks on fuel usage and fuel remaining. I created a repetitive error in my calculations. After checking Kodiak weather and being informed of instrument landing conditions there, I announced to Burris that we would have to land at Ft. Glenn on the way back to Kodiak for fuel, a stop that had not been scheduled on our eastbound flight plan. After overseeing the refueling operation on the ground at Ft. Glenn, I was chagrined when the plane captain told me that the tanks all "dipped" full and we had taken aboard only a portion of the gas I had told Burris we needed. It was my simple arithmetic error, and it had caused Burris to make an instrument letdown at Ft. Glenn to obtain fuel we did not need. I have thought about that mistake many times.
On the 30th of September 1946, with no navigator, Burris and I and our crew of eight made a 2.8-hour flight around Kodiak Island, all on visual flight rules. One highlight was flat hatting an enraged Kodiak bear who reared up on his hind legs to challenge the low passage of our aircraft.
Although the crew of 59645 already had an ample opportunity to become familiar with Anchorage, its Elemendorf Air Base and its barracks at Ft. Richardson, October was apparently set aside for squadron crews to visit some of continental Alaska's airfields. The logbook shows that as the month began I had a solo flight with our Navigator Orville Hollenbeck as copilot and reduced crew in local VFR conditions and I assume we made some practice landings and takeoffs at NAS Kodiak. The main flight schedule for that month took the full crew of 59645, using aircraft serial number 59838, to Anchorage and then to Ladd Field at Fairbanks, Alaska. Both segments were instruments and at Ladd we made a low frequency radio range approach until we were on "final" and then shifted to GCA because of the heavy snow that obscured visibility.
The following day we pre-flighted for a hop directly back to Kodiak. Almost all of the Ladd Air Base support facility is underground, with good reason. It was very cold, the temperature dropping to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. When we got back to our aircraft that morning to prepare it for the flight home, we faced an extensive preflight. Our alcohol filled instruments had frozen. The engine oil was so congealed we could not pull the props through. Fortunately, the Army Air Corps support folks at Ladd Field had huge gasoline-fueled heaters. These functioned like the Southwind heaters that were standard in some U.S. automobiles for a few years, the only exception being that the ones at Ladd Field were big enough to fill a huge shroud that supplied an entire engine nacelle with heated air. Once mounted over the nacelle, this big heater system could blow the hot air directly into our radial cylinder recesses and warm them and our engine oil. It took about an hour to melt the snow and thaw our fluids and then we could pull the props through and start our R-1830 engines. The flight home was a little dicey because some of our radio equipment was not working and Mt. McKinley at over 20,000 feet was off our starboard wing, obscured in clouds. Thankfully, our RDF was working, and we knew that Kodiak Approach Control could give us vectors followed by a GCA approach when we got close enough. Fairbanks is a continental city not too far from the Arctic Circle. Kodiak is a coastal town south of the Alaska Peninsula. While it could snow hard at Kodiak, the snow usually melted quickly. Each area has its hazards and the "prevailing weather" can present a variety of situations for pilots.
One flight in my logbook on October 1946 surprised me when I re-discovered the entry in 2001. I have mentioned in the early pages of this story a tragedy that had occurred at North Whiting Field in Milton Florida. Two other planes in my training squadron's flight of three collided in formation flight on a day when our plane was down for maintenance. All aboard the two planes were lost and I had always wondered why the training command would ever schedule formation flying for Navy patrol bomber aircraft that would never fly missions in formation. October 26, 1946 was Navy Day in Alaska, and all over the world. This was before Armed Forces Day in May of each year was designated to replace all such commemorations. My logbook shows 4.4 hours in PB4Y-2 aircraft #59645 with Burris and myself as pilots, and a restricted crew of just four men, with the "Remarks" section labeled "Formation Flying Extended-Navy Day." I have no recollection of that flight and hold to my earlier view about formation flying. I am sure that Burris kept well clear of any plane he was flying wing on that day. In our second deployment I will note another exception concerning formation flying in which my new PPC (and CO) and I played a small part. The locale was Big Delta field, an outlying field to Ladd Field at Fairbanks, Alaska. It was another of those "odd" duty assignments that always seem to occur in the Navy.
On our early first deployment flights, we not only became acquainted with places, especially places to land such as Ft. Randall, Adak, Ft. Glenn, and Attu, but also became acquainted with some on board instrumentation that was not in our aircraft for navigation purposes.
The first visit to Attu was important because it gave us a good look at Shemya. This was an atoll to the east of Attu on which there had been constructed a 10,000 foot runway with full landing lights, a good, unobstructed low frequency radio range approach and a GCA unit. Shemya had very low minimums (Cloud ceiling limits were set low and visibility limits were set low for qualified pilots. 300-foot ceiling and 1/4-mile visibility would be an example.) Very little of this small atoll was much above sea level. Ft. Randall and Ft. Glenn also had good low frequency radio range instrument approaches but mountainous terrain nearby required higher weather minimums. Adak, with its jagged mountains demanding precision approaches and an early pullup like Kodiak, had a GCA and it was just as busy as the one at Kodiak.
On the 30th of September 1946, with no navigator, Burris and I and our crew of eight made a 2.8-hour flight around Kodiak Island, all on visual flight rules. One highlight was flat hatting an enraged Kodiak bear who reared up on his hind legs to challenge the low passage of our aircraft.
Although the crew of 59645 already had an ample opportunity to become familiar with Anchorage, its Elemendorf Air Base and its barracks at Ft. Richardson, October was apparently set aside for squadron crews to visit some of continental Alaska's airfields. The logbook shows that as the month began I had a solo flight with our Navigator Orville Hollenbeck as copilot and reduced crew in local VFR conditions and I assume we made some practice landings and takeoffs at NAS Kodiak. The main flight schedule for that month took the full crew of 59645, using aircraft serial number 59838, to Anchorage and then to Ladd Field at Fairbanks, Alaska. Both segments were instruments and at Ladd we made a low frequency radio range approach until we were on "final" and then shifted to GCA because of the heavy snow that obscured visibility.
The following day we pre-flighted for a hop directly back to Kodiak. Almost all of the Ladd Air Base support facility is underground, with good reason. It was very cold, the temperature dropping to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. When we got back to our aircraft that morning to prepare it for the flight home, we faced an extensive preflight. Our alcohol filled instruments had frozen. The engine oil was so congealed we could not pull the props through. Fortunately, the Army Air Corps support folks at Ladd Field had huge gasoline-fueled heaters. These functioned like the Southwind heaters that were standard in some U.S. automobiles for a few years, the only exception being that the ones at Ladd Field were big enough to fill a huge shroud that supplied an entire engine nacelle with heated air. Once mounted over the nacelle, this big heater system could blow the hot air directly into our radial cylinder recesses and warm them and our engine oil. It took about an hour to melt the snow and thaw our fluids and then we could pull the props through and start our R-1830 engines. The flight home was a little dicey because some of our radio equipment was not working and Mt. McKinley at over 20,000 feet was off our starboard wing, obscured in clouds. Thankfully, our RDF was working, and we knew that Kodiak Approach Control could give us vectors followed by a GCA approach when we got close enough. Fairbanks is a continental city not too far from the Arctic Circle. Kodiak is a coastal town south of the Alaska Peninsula. While it could snow hard at Kodiak, the snow usually melted quickly. Each area has its hazards and the "prevailing weather" can present a variety of situations for pilots.
Here is the Navy's version of Convair's WW II Liberator, a PB4Y-2 Privateer. The next story finds everything but the ECM (electronic countermeasures) equipment in use to provide essential information in an improbable rescue at sea.
Aleutian Williwaw Tears Barge Loose into Gulf of Alaska with Three Army Soldiers Aboard
Two days in November 1946 provided an experience that will always remain vividly in memory. Those were November 4 on which we flew 5.8 hours to Ft. Glenn on Umnak Island. And then November 5, on which we flew 9.9 hours, all south of the Aleutian chain, ending back at NAS Kodiak. All of the 5.8 hours on the 4th were instrument. 8.0 of the 9.9 hours on the 5th were instrument, concluding with a night landing at Kodiak. I should note that there was no reliable ground-based instrument flight info south of the chain.
Both segments of our PB4Y-2 mission were code Z flights in Navy Flight Symbol language, standing for "Flight not falling within any of the above classes, but which are required by the exigencies of the occasion." One of "the above" classes that the keeper of the logbooks passed up was code W, "Emergency or relief work." Using long hand under Remarks, our log keeper had written "Search and Rescue" to cover those two days in November 1946.
Our secondary mission at all times while in the Alaskan area was Search and Rescue (S&R). The Coast Guard is now at Kodiak but was not then. Why the Navy had not assigned an aviator's logbook code for S&R I do not know. They had not used up all the letters of the alphabet. Those two days involved our full crew, using PB4Y-2 serial number 59643, in the search for three men in a self propelled barge (BSP) that had broken from its moorings at Ft. Glenn and was drifting helplessly and rapidly downwind in the Gulf of Alaska. The storm that had broken over the Aleutian chain was one of the most vicious ever experienced in an area of vicious storms. The barge had broken loose from its moorings with no warning while its occupants were asleep. Whatever the propulsion system was, that caused the barge to be labeled 'self-propelled,' its engine never functioned to our knowledge during the entire period of terror those Army men went through.
Four of our flight crewmembers formed the core strength for this flying mission. These were the Pilot, the Navigator, the Radar Operator, and the Plane Captain. Our radar was the APS-15, "centimetric" radar, as the British called it during WW II, "x-band" to us. It was a close technology cousin to the SG radar aboard many Navy surface ships in the latter years of World War II. Its small antenna required only a small radome. A radome is a faired bulge usually on the lower side of the fuselage. Ours was never a drag on the Privateer aircraft in flight. While not great in range, perhaps 50 to 60 miles reliably, APS-15 was a precision radar that could detect the smallest objects that could reflect electromagnetic energy. Submarine periscopes were susceptible to centimetric radar detection.
Our flight to Ft. Glenn had been hurriedly arranged and the briefing was short. We knew where the barge had departed from but had no idea of its drift rate. Weather would be our major challenge for the entire mission. We took off about noon for Ft. Glenn in order to use that base as the launch point for our actual search assignment. Pilot Hugh Burris made a difficult radio range approach to the landing field at Ft. Glenn. We had been advised to keep our barometric altimeter setting frequently updated and to cross check wherever feasible with our radio altimeter. An Army Air Corps Colonel, as local Ft. Glenn lore had it, made the exact same approach we needed to make at Ft. Glenn. The story was that he had rolled his wheels unexpectedly on a hilltop during the approach and made an emergency pullup. He then discovered that the altimeter setting was not 29 point something, but 28 point something. Plunging altimeters, even below 28 inches, occurred often in the Aleutian weather picture. After the Colonel's near miss, the weather broadcaster's procedure would prefix a 28 point something altimeter setting, with the words, "Red, Red."
Enroute to Ft. Glenn, westbound out of Kodiak, over the west end of Unimak Island, with early darkness already upon us, the outside air temperatures plunged at our assigned airways flight altitude of 8,000 feet. Cylinder head temperatures plunged in response, despite snugging down our cold-weather-modified cowl flaps. Number One Engine went below 100 degrees and began to lose power. Pilot Burris put down half flaps to slow the plane down and managed to keep cylinder head temperatures on all engines at 100 degrees or above, with the engines "putting out" thrust. Burris made an "at minimums" approach and landing at Ft. Glenn. Weary, we checked in, had a hot meal, and went to our assigned bunks for a short rest.
Up early, well before dawn, we finished our preflight, checked with the weather man, and received an "open" over water clearance with no fixed destination listed. A flight with no destination was a rarity and this is the only one I can recall. This is not a flight plan that would ever be accepted stateside by Air Traffic Control. We took off in the dark and headed southeast out over the North Pacific Ocean. Our flight crew was attuned to this challenging mission and all of our training at Whidbey Island and at Kodiak would be put into play this day.
Let me go over the geography once more. Our Privateer took off from Kodiak Island, jumped over the Alaska Peninsula to Naknek and flew north of the Chain on airways to Ft. Glenn on Umnak Island. Note Adak Island west and bit south of Umnak almost to the International Date Line.
NAS Adak had been busy on this search too. Lt. Walter Munk (He was Maximilian Walter Munk when I knew him in the class ahead of me at the U.S. Naval Academy. Most of his class of 1942 classmates at the Naval Academy called him "Max" but I always knew him as "Walt."), was flying for a Navy PBY-5A squadron based at Adak, Alaska, south and west of Ft. Glenn. He and his crew had been airborne on the search the night before while we were enroute to Umnak Island. I had known Walter Munk slightly at the Naval Academy, then a bit more at Whidbey Island where his PBY-5A squadron had been home-based. My Oak Harbor, Washington, "Victory Home" overlooked the Saratoga Passage on which the waterborne PBY-5s had originally been based. With the advent of wheels for the PBYs, the seaplane base had been abandoned and newly configured VP squadrons with PBY-5As were then stationed at Ault Field right next door to our PB4Y-2 hangars. In 1946, the Munks lived close to us on that Oak Harbor hill.
Pictured is a flight of Sitka based P2Y-1 aircraft. About four generations of Convair designs later came the PBY-5As
Munk and his crew made the first aircraft sighting contact with the barge, a BSP in shorthand, that had drifted rapidly south and east from Umnak. The visual contact was made in restricted visibility, under a very low overcast, with a driving wind and driven seas. Those seas can present a haze of water particles in the air. Even in the extremely poor nighttime visibility, Lt. Munk and his crew could see that the men were alive in the barge but that its freeboard was already dangerously low. It was taking water. The PBY-5A could do little for the barge but offer hope and headed back to Adak for fuel.
Walter Munk's crew knew that their Loran fix data on the barge was fundamentally in error because they had determined that their Loran equipment was out of calibration. Wisely, Munk did not attempt to change the calibration when he discovered it out of specified norms, but went back to his base, gassed up, and headed back to sea, now in the early hours of the 5th of November. He set out to find the barge again using the Loran data he had recorded earlier, with his Loran equipment still uncalibrated.
Our flight from Ft. Glenn got airborne about the time Munk's PBY-5A, allowing for rapid surface drift, regained contact with the barge. This time, Munk's crew had a raft and a Gibson Girl (emergency radio) to throw overboard as close as he could drop them to the barge. They came close, but there was no way the barge occupants, drifting helplessly, could bring aboard either emergency device. The barge would therefore remain out of touch radio-wise, while its freeboard would continue to shrink. Significantly though, for the men on that barge, Munk's second aircraft visual contact had been made with them and those Army men knew that the Navy was trying hard.
We overheard much of the voice radio traffic that Munk was broadcasting back to his base as he returned there so we had an updated picture of the situation soon after our takeoff from Ft. Glenn. NAS Adak also sent us the best barge position coordinates they could calculate based on the PBY-5A crew's successive visual acquisitions of the BSP. The PBY-5A cruised just under the low overcast on its search. Not as well equipped as our Privateer, it would have wasted hours to get above the overcast.
The overcast extended from a few feet above sea level to just above10,000 feet. Our first APS-15 radar "contact" with anything on the surface came when we were above the overcast using sun shots for navigation, still short of where we felt the barge had to be. We descended anyway, just to make sure we checked every contact. We broke out about 500 feet over mountainous waves with streaks running northwest to southeast. There we discovered an all-white Liberty ship headed for Siberia. The Russians were still taking supplies to Siberia in what had once been a U.S. Lend/Lease "bottom." Ironic that our basic Alaskan ECM mission was to be looking at them with suspicion. Back to 10,000-feet we went because we needed maximum range to the horizon to help detect radar targets and find that barge. Celestial navi
A descent through several thousand feet of solid overcast to find some visibility "underneath the overcast" is not a trivial exercise. Approaching an instrument-equipped, manned, airfield with full tower facilities, pilots are given a succession of barometric altimeter settings for the landing field. When settings are received, both pilot and copilot reset their altimeters. The worldwide convention is that a standard setting of 29.92 inches of Mercury is assigned as the "standard" sea level reading. When it varies from that, and it almost always does, all air stations, knowing the height of their field above sea level, issue new altimeter settings. Presuming the setting is correct, when the plane touches down, its pressure altimeters should read the height of the field above sea level. Our Privateer was also equipped with a radio altimeter. These too needed to be kept in calibration and this was done by making sure that their reading matches that of the pressure altimeter when the latter is corrected as was just noted.
Now, the plane goes to sea and there is no tower, and no surface weather station to provide pressure altimeter corrections. So, for these letdowns at sea one looks to the radio altimeter and is more confident if that instrument has been recently calibrated. If the radio altimeter reads 500 feet and the plane is still in the soup and needs to go down further to examine a radar "contact," the pilot shallows his rate of descent and goes down 50 feet at a time and looks hard for a cloud opening. How far down to go before calling it off? It is up to the pilot and the extent of the need. For all these over-water missions we streamed our trailing wire antenna to get extra range on our radio communications equipment. This wire had a "pig"(a cast metal weight) on the end to make sure the wire streamed fully and did not just flap around outside the plane. The pig, and its connecting wire, stream behind the aircraft, and down. If the radioman under these circumstances discovers that he has lost his pig, one conclusion is that it hit the water and was jerked off. The plane is then below safe minimums and should certainly ascend at once. No one would recommend a descent on instruments to such a level but it has happened and the plane involved has pulled itself up from this dangerous altitude.
Almost too much time seemed to have passed before our second radar contact. We descended again and discovered a surprise, not the barge, but a United States submarine, the USS Bugara, SS-331. She had been diverted from a Seattle destination, as we soon learned, to join the search for the barge. Bugara, a modern fleet sub of that time, tossed uncomfortably on the roiled surface.
Aided by our radioman, our Patrol Plane Commander(PPC), Hugh Burris, quickly established direct voice contact with the Bugara. Navigator Orville Hollenbeck came forward to the pilot's compartment. He asked me to estimate the true heading of the Bugara for him. I did. Now, Orville, while on top of the overcast at 10,000 feet, had put into service his bubble octant, the sun and moon navigation tables, and the single weak Loran station available. He had kept an accurate position of our aircraft moving forward. He had also used the best estimate from the Adak PBY-5A squadron's information of the BSP position at their last sighting and had advanced that position according to his estimates of BSP drift. Munk's calculations, first sighting to second sighting, were Orville's primary input on the drift rate of the BSP.
Orville Hollenbeck quickly informed PPC Burris that the Bugara would be unlikely on her present course to come anywhere near the barge. Orville suggested to Burris that he recommend a course change to the Bugara.
In the annals of ships and aircraft (and I served both), I can tell the reader confidently that ships always felt they had the better of the navigation skill and often they did. A Navy pilot's air navigation training was diluted by pilot training. A shipboard navigator would hold his billet for up to three years doing little else. In addition, Navy ship navigators usually have skilled Quartermasters, rated petty officers, on their team. Ships almost always gave heading vectors to aircraft, not the other way around. Still, Burris did not flinch. He immediately contacted the Bugara on voice, and recommended that she change course 19 degrees to port!
The sub had been in the soup for days without any celestial readings. Hollenbeck had been "on top and in the clear" for long enough to get good data. The sub skipper, and I give him great credit, did not hesitate and immediately made the recommended course change. Burris, along with Hollenbeck, then established our present position as a new hub for the search and climbed back to altitude on a course different from the one Orville Hollenbeck had recommended for Bugara. No need to duplicate search sectors. It was clear to me that this one aircraft and this one submarine were the only hope, the slimmest hope, for three men on a sinking barge in a raging sea.
An hour or two more passed and we were now moving eastward to a point due south of Kodiak. The weather suddenly cleared and at 10,000 feet, daylight receding to dusk, we could see in all directions. We were about 1 1/2 hours south of NAS Kodiak.
We then received an electrifying message from the USS Bugara, "We have spotted the barge. (A pause) The water is almost to the top of her gunnels. (Pause) We are closing. The seas are moderating. (Pause) We are taking three exhausted men aboard."
Our PB4Y-2, for that mission #59643, with its own tired crew, approached Kodiak from a rarely flown sector due south of the island, on a northerly heading, and made a routine night landing with local lights visible for miles. Our Ensign pilot/navigator, had kept three navigation tracks going, and had given perfect advice under less than perfect circumstances. Our aircraft equipment, notably the APS-15 radar with its skilled operator, and our radio altimeter, worked flawlessly. One weak Loran station had confirmed the other navigation sources. The radioman provided essential communication. Two men, the pilot of an aircraft, and the skipper of a submarine, believed the advice given by an Ensign aviator and a radar operator working under challenging conditions. Pilot Walter Munk and his PBY-5A crew out of Adak made two precision flights without which the whole effort might have failed. The Navy at its best!
There were two other events in which the APS-15 radar on VBP-107 aircraft proved to be a primary source of life preserving information during our Alaskan deployments. Interestingly, all of those events in which the APS-15 provided life-critical information were events on which we were not directly pursuing our primary ECM mission.
The PB4Y-2 aircraft was a Patrol Bomber in the Consolidated Aircraft Company's line of U.S. Navy aircraft. For the Navy, the twin-engine PBY Catalina proved to be a workhorse in World War II performing seven different missions simply because it was the only plane available to the Navy for those missions. As we have noted, the early version of the PBY was strictly a seaplane and later it became an amphibian after it was outfitted with landing wheels. The 4-engine PB2Y Coronado came next in the Patrol Bomber line but never fulfilled the mission capability that its designers hoped for it. Ed Hogan, my second Commanding Officer in VPB-107 (it had become VP-HL/7 by the time he took over) had flown the PB2Y. He told me of one mission effort that I am sure its designers never anticipated. The Doolittle mission, with its B-25 Mitchell bombers taking off from the U.S. carrier Hornet to bomb Japan early in the war, was a long stretch for Navy missions and certainly not anticipated by aircraft or carrier designers. That mission emphasized the intense U.S. desire to "strike back" after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. There were other plans like the Doolittle mission and Ed Hogan told me about one of them.
The use of Adak or Amchitka as a base to reach and bomb Paramashiro was a logical extension of the U.S. step by step effort to challenge the Home Islands of Japan. But, before we occupied Adak, when we were still restricted to Dutch Harbor as our closest base to Japan, another bizarre mission was contemplated. The PBY, that could not reach Paramashiro on a full gas load out of Dutch Harbor and have enough fuel to return, would take off from Dutch Harbor and fly westward. (The mission training for this exercise was in progress before June 1942 when the Japanese occupied Attu and Kiska.) A PB2Y would also be launched and its duty would be to meet the PBY in the air and then to refuel the PBY in flight so that the PBY could then get to Paramashiro, drop bombs, and return to Dutch Harbor. .Farfetched? Well according to Lieutenant Commander Ed Hogan, several training exercises to perfect this inflight refueling were actually conducted. Crude (by later standards) hoses and valves were fabricated and tested as part of the training exercise to see if it could be done. He, Hogan, had been one of the PB2Y pilots attempting to make such a fuel transfer in flight to a PBY. I do not know whether the idea was abandoned because that early Navy version of in-flight refueling had just not been perfected or because the Japanese occupied Attu and Kiska, making a PBY and its fuel provider in that vicinity a couple of sitting ducks.
The Privateer, at least from this pilot's point of view, had many desirable features. I have already mentioned the "hot wing" to combat Aleutian icing conditions. High altitude flying for the PB4Y-2 was a problem. In the design conversion from the Liberator, the Privateer designers were faced with the objective of long over water flights. As noted earlier, the Liberator's superchargers had been removed and two-stage blowers had been configured in the Privateer. These could help keep you moving along more fuel-economically at 10,000 feet or below but above 10,000 feet you were going to begin to stagger a bit particularly with that low drag, low lift Davis wing. The wing tanks held 2344 gallons and the four bomb bay tanks, when these were installed, held a total of 1564 gallons. Some mathematicians worked this out to be 19 hours of flight time. I'm glad I was not along in any attempt to stay aloft that long but the aircraft could fly to and stay on station a long time.
High on my list of good Privateer features was the Davis wing, a long thin, slender, tapered wing. The wing was a low drag and a low lift wing. The latter feature meant that when you came over the end of the runway, and cut the power, that even in gusty wind you would not float half way down the runway. An "honest" wing. When the power went off, the plane went down.
Privateers were also configured with Fowler flaps, a system for creating trailing edge wing flaps that was already well known in several Lockheed aircraft. The flaps went down on a track and wheel system as contrasted with hinges. The hinge method put so much force on the hinge itself that failure in the metal alloys of those days was a possibility. Another feature that a pilot liked was a side blister in his plexiglas enclosure. If wipers failed or the windshield iced up, the control pilot could move his head to the side and retain some visibility ahead to a runway during a landing attempt.
My last flight as Lieutenant Hugh Burris' copilot occurred on December 5, 1946. PB4Y-2 #59645 and its crew were ordered to return to our U.S. base at NAS Whidbey Island. It was the concluding flight in our first deployment tour in VPB-107. Again, we were last plane out because I was the Materiel Officer assigned to make sure our spaces at NAS Kodiak had been vacated and cleaned.
It had been a good tour. Only one of our aircraft had become a "hangar queen," to be pirated for parts. Two of that aircraft's engine carburetors kept misbehaving in the float test chambers where carburetors were adjusted on the ground. These finally had to be replaced altogether.
We had had only one damage incident at our NAS Kodiak base. Our two huge hangar doors were sliding doors that met in the center. These were opened and closed by employing a little tractor (a"mule") on each door. These mules had a small, high torque, internal combustion engines. The mule operators for moving the two hangar doors got carried away one day with their own expertise. A third mule operator on the nose wheel of one of our planes was pulling the plane into the hangar, starting with the two doors wide open. The guys on the two mules standing ready to pull the doors closed after the plane was safely in, figured they were by this time exceedingly skillful at timing the entry of the big plane. As the nose wheel of the big aircraft crossed the door threshold, these two, one on one side with one half door, the other on the other side with his half door, were already in motion pulling their respective door sides to the center to close the hangar. They certainly were coordinated, but just a little off on their timing. Each half door nipped a wing tip of the PB4Y-2 and we lost a green starboard wingtip lamp on one side, and a red port wing tip lamp on the other side, and the wingtip panel-ends to boot. Once those doors were in motion, all the reversing of the mule's engine, no matter how high their torque, was to no avail. It was a slow, silent, graceful, relative motion event. Even the bystanders were kept in thrall. Some plane in desert storage near Phoenix, Arizona, lost its wingtip panels shortly thereafter, and our plane finally came home.
I will not forget our last flight back to Whidbey from this deployment. Takeoff was scheduled for 4 a.m. on an early December morning, Kodiak time. The ready room and the operations room were darkened to keep our eyes night adapted. One of the heaviest snows I had encountered in Alaska was falling. The wind was from the north and we would have to use the short north runway, about 5,000 feet long, with jagged rocks rising steeply at its end. We had a full fuel load and Burris was worried about traction, and the drag of the snow on our wheels during takeoff. There was literally no visibility in the snow. We could just see from one Bartow light to the next Bartow light. In the ready room, there was coffee. I poured a cup for myself and added a liberal amount of sugar. There was no cream or milk. I took a big swallow and almost threw up. Someone had filled the glass sugar bottle with salt. That taste stayed with me for the 8.8 hours it took to get back to Whidbey Island. Burris made a beautiful, blind takeoff. The foot of snow did not appreciably hold back our airspeed buildup. Since we had no vision ahead and mountains rose abruptly just after the end of the runway, as soon as Burris got airborne, and the last Bartow light disappeared, he commenced a rapid climbing bank to the right out across the friendly sea. The landing gear came up on command, and no engine faltered, thank God. We had excellent performance with the Pratt & Whitney R-1830 engines. The flight itself, in the "remarks" column labeled "4 hours night on Inst," was otherwise quiet.
Here are two precious slides that my wife Peggy took on the squadron's return from its third deployment to Kodiak. These scenes are on the tarmac at NAS Whidbey Island in June of 1948. Order Book
Illustration 14-Coming Home; Two Views