In June 1969 I reported to UPT. Within the first week I realized I needed a car and the local Volkswagen dealership was only too happy to sell a 1969 VW bug to a new pilot trainee whose military pay could be garnished if he didn’t make his loan payments. I lived in the Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ) on base. My roommate was Duck Wilder. His dad sold real estate in Phoenix AZ and was named Donald Wilder; his son was Donald Wilder Jr. so everyone called him “Duck” to avoid confusion.
The first phase of training is the T-41 which is the military designation of the Cessna 172 that I was familiar with. Many of the trainees had never flown and the T-41 served the purpose of washing out those who didn’t have the coordination or the constitution to fly. A typical reason for washing out was MOA – Manifestations of Apprehension – which meant the trainee froze up in flight because they got so nervous. Since I’d just received my flight certificate, I did fine. The only bad part was the takeoff leg went over the nearby Cosden Oil Refinery and the summer afternoon fumes plus the choppy air currents caused a fair amount of air sickness for some trainees – not for me.
The second phase was the T-37 Tweety Bird trainer, also made by Cessna. The T-37 was a twin engine jet (look, ma, no propellers!) with side-by-side seating in the cockpit. This plane is described in my yearbook as “sounding like the air rushing out of a pinched balloon and the thrust is roughly equivalent. On a good day you could fly a loop.”
Trainees continued to wash out of the program as the flying got more intense. If you made it to Advanced UPT you got to fly the Northrop T-38 Talon, a twin-engine supersonic trainer, with the pilots flying in tandem – front/back. The first flight was called the “Gee-Whiz” flight because the student essentially sat there and experienced everything the plane had to offer, from hitting afterburners on takeoff to climbing practically straight up until 45,000 feet before nosing over to go supersonic. It was rumored that on the “Gee-whiz” initial flight, if the plane crashed the student pilot wouldn’t get hurt because they were so far behind the airplane. “Behind the airplane” means the airplane flies faster than you can think; the pilot really had to think ahead of this supersonic trainer. I loved it! Our class reported to T-38 training just before Christmas 1969 and there was a rush to fly that first “Gee-whiz” flight before Christmas leave. There was a rumor that flying supersonic caused temporary sterility and that seemed to be a desirable outcome just before going home for a while……
Another IP trick before the first ride was to carefully explain that during supersonic flight, the IP in the front seat could talk to the trainee in the back seat but he couldn’t hear the trainee talk back because in supersonic flight the sound would be left behind and never make it to the front cockpit. Think about that…..
The T-38 is awesome, and training was awesome. The T-38 is about 50 feet long and 25 feet wide and in the cockpit you feel like you’re on the end of a telephone pole with the wings far behind you. We got to fly in four-ship formations and do aerobatics like the USAF Thunderbirds. Think about a simple loop: four airplanes in close formation, 3 feet wingtip clearance, 500 knots and 5 G’s at the bottom, 200 knots and 1 G inverted at the top after an 8,000 foot climb…….too cool for words.
Just after I arrived in Big Spring I found the Wesley United Methodist Church and met Sylvia and Willie D. Lovelace. They “adopted” me into their extended family and provided a retreat when the stress of UPT got to me. I was standing in their front yard July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle and walked on the moon.
My year in UPT was amazing, wonderful, fun, memorable – just about any superlative you want to add. I graduated 5th in my class and chose to come back to the Air Training Command (ATC) as a T-38 Instructor Pilot. Next stop: Fairchild AFB, Spokane, WA for Survival Training.
i remember two things about Survival Training. First, the Wilderness Survival portion was like a camping trip. I caught a bunch of trout for my group of guys, found a hunter’s cache with left-behind canned goods, located a hillside of ripe huckleberries, and volunteered to eat a rabbit’s eyeball. Yes, that’s true; it was slightly salty once I cornered that slippery thing and chomped down on it.
On the other hand, the Obstacle Course and subsequent capture and internment in a mock POW camp was not fun. I spent time in a little black box just big enough to squat in, in a cargo truck box crammed with other pilots, in a cubicle not tall enough to stand up in and not wide or long enough to lay down in, with Vietnamese music playing 24/7. I went through interrogations with “safe” words in case the interrogation got too tough, too emotional, too heated — whatever. I successfully completed Survival Training and proceeded down to Tyndall AFB, Panama City, FL for Pilot Instructor Training (PIT).
I nearly didn’t make it through PIT. I could fly all the maneuvers, I knew all the procedures, and I could teach them to student pilots; but landing the T-38 from the back seat was very challenging because the back seat pilot can’t see the runway. The T-38 touches down in a very nose-high attitude so all the back seat pilot has for reference is sideways glances at the runway through the corners of the canopy. One day it just “clicked” and I successfully passed the course. It was October 1970 and I was a T-38 IP before I turned 23. Maybe not the youngest IP ever, but probably pretty close.
I had three aircraft emergencies and one moment of excitement with a student pilot. Two of the emergencies were not in the flight manual.
1. The by-the-book emergency was a hydraulic gearbox failure on one of the engines, so we had to shut the engine down per the procedure and fly a straight-in approach to landing instead of the normal 360 overhead. The T-38 flies just fine on one engine which is one of the reasons it’s such a great trainer.
2. We took off from Vance AFB on a routine “bag ride” which has the student pilot in the back seat with a shroud pulled around the canopy so he has to fly instrument-only. We headed to Oklahoma City to fly a series of instrument approaches to Tinker AFB when we got a call from Vance that we probably blew a tire on take-off. The recommendation was we not cycle the gear up and down (as you’d normally do on a training flight) to avoid the risk of the blown tire getting stuck up in the gear well and not be able to get back down. So we completed one approach and then flew back to Vance with the gear down. Normal straight-in approach and landing and when we rolled out at the end of the runway our left tire looked like a giant ball of thread.
3. On a routine two-ship training flight to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, my wingman suggested I try my toe brakes, which are used only while taxiing and on landing rollout. My toe brakes went to the floor, which is not normal, and my wingman confirmed I had red hydraulic fluid draining down the outside of the airplane. Since this was a landing problem and not a flight problem, AND in any case we would want to burn off fuel to lighten the aircraft, we elected to proceed to Wright-Pat. I let the wingman land first in case my problem caused a runway shutdown, and then I flew a straight-in approach and landing. The student pilot bottomed his seat all the way to give me a better view of the runway and I landed gently, maximum aero-braking (pulled the nose up to increase drag) and pumped the brakes like crazy. There was sufficient fluid in the lines to brake the aircraft so I was able to stop in the runway. The emergency crews inserted the gear strut pins and towed us to parking. It turned out that during routine maintenance the tech had cross-threaded the hydraulic reservoir cap and the fluid started siphoning out during flight.
4. One of the more difficult tasks of a new Instructor Pilot (IP) is to determine how far to let the student pilot go when they’re screwing up, hoping they’ll discover their error themselves and correct accordingly. On one flight we were practicing no-flap overhead patterns and landings. The plane flies differently with no flaps and we have to practice approaches and landings to make sure we can safely get the plane down if the flaps fail. I can explain the aerodynamics if you like, but the bottom line is the student didn’t recognize that we had a crosswind blowing us into the runway so when he saw we were overshooting the final turn he “banked and yanked” and got us into a stall, which can be deadly in the final turn because we’re so close to the ground. When an aircraft stalls, the wing is no longer creating lift and the plane falls out of the sky. In a T-38, a stall is recognized by “a definite increase in buffet” (i.e. stick shaking) and the student was so intent on getting to the runway he ignored the stall warning. We’d practiced stalls, of course, and I kept expecting him to realize the error of his ways, but when the Runway Supervisory Unit (RSU) started screaming “GO AROUND” I took control of the aircraft, rolled wings level, went to afterburner, and cut across three active runways and over downtown Enid OK to get control of the aircraft. We got back in the pattern and the student tried a couple more no-flap patterns and landings before we landed, and then he “pinked” (failed) the lesson and he had to fly it over again the next day. Later I was told the aircraft had dipped below the tree line before screaming out across town.
Just a couple more comments regarding my USAF flight career. The T-38 is a twin-engine supersonic jet with the engine performance gages centered in the front console. While each gage has appropriate numbers and associated red/green zones, it is common practice to glance at the gages and take particular notice if two adjacent gages are not in sync, which would indicate a problem worth taking a closer look at. This concept works pretty well with a lot of things. No matter what I’m doing, if something looks out of the ordinary I’m likely to slow down and take a closer look at the situation.
General Emergency Procedure:
1. Maintain aircraft control.
2. Analyze the situation
3. Take appropriate action
In a similar fashion, I have used the General Emergency Procedure in a number of situations. I suppose some would call me slow to react, but what I’m actually doing is maintaining control until I figure out what’s going on.