In the dark ages, before Frequent Flier clubs, I flew a lot more than I do today. As a matter of fact, I flew just about every other day for about ten months. By my rough estimate, it added up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 miles. About 80% of those miles came as a crew member of an EA-3B Douglas Skywarrior (pictured at left).
This was actually some of the most fun I've ever had in an airplane. I sat in the cockpit with the pilot and navigator. Some of the best views I've ever seen from a plane were from that plane. In fact the picture above is a plane that I crewed on several times. PR-15 wasn't my favorite, but it was almost the last plane I ever flew on.
In 1972, while on a mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, the pilot decided to do a touch-and-go maneuver on the USS Midway. My job during this relatively routine activity was to watch for any traffic coming from the rear. I, of course, thought that my time would better used snapping pictures as we hit the deck and took off again.
It seems that I may have missed the approach of a Navy A-5 (a bomber, I think). Since he was at the same altitude (or lack of altitude since we were just above the deck of the carrier) as we were, and banking into us, I assumed, correctly it seemed, that doom was imminently upon us. I was remarkably calm - if screaming hysterically at the pilot can be considered calm. The pilot very subtly nosed the plane down, allowing the errant A-5 to pass over us, missing by about an inch...o.k. is was probably 10 feet, but it was definitely too close for any of us.
The pilots that we flew with were an interesting lot. Each had a unique personality, but each was incredibly professional. Those of us who flew with them have tons of stories - many of them true. Spend six hours a night with a small group of men locked inside a very small plane, and you learn a lot about them.
I was a linguist. My flying partner, whose nickname was Hurricane, was a great guy, but a little paranoid. He was certain that he'd be killed during his tour. It didn't happen, of course, but his antics made our lives more bearable.
Hurricane (a.k.a. Hal Gamble) was one of the people that made life bearable. In a world that was pretty much by the book, Hal wasn't. Everybody in the unit had a "Hurricane" story, and of course many of them have gotten better with age. I believe that my favorite was the night that we had an 11:00 o'clock p.m. biefing before a flight. Few of us paid much attention to the briefing officer, so Hal struck up a conversation with the pilot Lt (jg) Jerry Pate. It seems that a friend of Hal's and mine, Jack Crider, had just returned from R & R in Australia.
Mr. Pate opined that he had served three tours in Vietnam without ever getting to Australia.
Hurricane got this look on his face and we all knew whatever came next was going to be fun. He asked the pilot if he had, in fact, spent three years, "just going back and forth"? (Our usual mission was flying up and down a line that ran through the center of a country that the U.S. Navy suggested was Thailand. We were actually a little east of Thailand flying up and down the Mekong River in Laos).
Pate said that, in fact, before he started flying A-3's he'd done two tours flying A-1 Skyraiders. It was obvious that Hall didn't know what an A-1 or a Skyraider was, so he just said "Oh". I asked him if he knew what one was and he admitted that he didn't. The pilot, trying to clear up the confusion, said that it was a Spad. Again Hal siad, "Oh", and another crewmember asked if he knew what a Spad was. Again Hal said that no, he didn't know what it was.
Pate went on to explain that an A-1 was a single engine low-winged prop plane that carried heavy ordinance at very slow speeds. Hall got really excited and said, " yeah, yeah, one enine right in front of the pilot!!". At this point the pilot said totally straight-faced, "no it's the right wing!" Hal dutifully replied, "Oh".
To this day I believe he thinks that there is a prop plane that has a single engine on the right wing!
