by Phil Rowe
During the early days of the B-58 program, before either the 43rd or 305th Bomb Wings got their aircraft and started serious crew training to transition us from B-47 and/or B-52 to B-58 operations, I was part of the backlog crowd of aircrewmen awaiting checkout in that new supersonic delta-winged Hustler.
Some of us who had not yet been able to start ground school, much less get into the airplane, were farmed-out to various organizations at Carswell AFB, Texas. My temporary assignment was as adjutant for the 43rd Field Maintenance Squadron. And during that period of several months my duties had nothing to do with my flying skills.
Still it was necessary to obtain "by hook or by crook" the minimum four-hours-per-month flying time to maintain some semblance of proficiency in my rated specialty AND (of more immediate concern) that flight pay which had become so much a part of my monthly budget. As a dual-rated navigator and electronic countermeasures specialist I was fortunate to have more options in logging flight time than some others.
One day from out of the blue came a request for the 43rd Bomb Wing to furnish a navigator to support a deployment of a flight of three C-123 transports from a base in Kansas to Goose Bay AB in Labrador. I was designated to be lead navigator and told to be ready to depart from Texas to Kansas in twenty-four hours. It was late March of 1961.
I had never flown in a C-123 but it didn't concern me because navigating was simply navigating. The type of aircraft didn't really matter. All I had to do was familiarize myself with the particular equipment on the C-123, learn the emergency procedures unique to the airplane and do my normal job.
The C-123 Fairchild-built twin-engine transport is a far cry from the B-52's which I had recently flown before re-assignment to the new B-58's. And the particular C-123's in which I was to fly were extremely spartan in terms of navigation equipment. Where I had been used to a complex and highly capable B-52 navigation and bombing system capable of all-weather worldwide operations, I found myself facing considerably less.
The navigator's station on-board the C-123B was really the jump seat between the two pilots. My equipment consisted of a clipboard as a workdesk, the bubble sextant that I brought with me from Carswell AFB, and the pilot's instruments on the front console such as the airspeed indicator, pressure altimeter, compass and outside air temperature gauge. Down on the lower cargo deck there was a B-3 driftmeter which I could use to determine air wind drift and grounspeed. There was also the pilot's visual-omnirange (VOR) radio receiver. This was like stepping back twenty years in navigation technology.
Our flight of three C-123's was sent from Kansas to Labrador to ferry aircraft parts, maintenance personnel and some pierced steel planking ( portable matting ) in support of some KC-97 tanker aircraft on strip alert at Goose Bay. Those KC-97's were deployed to Labrador to be available should B-47's or B-52's in SAC's war readiness force need aerial refuelling. They were also on standby in case aircraft flying to and from Europe needed refuelling or emergency support.
We stopped at Selfridge AFB in Michigan to refuel before going up into Canada. The flight up across Quebec province and then over to Labrador was pretty smooth and quite easy. I didn't really need much more than pilotage ( map reading ) and basic dead reckoning techniques. But I did take a few celestial shots on the sun for a heading check and to confirm DR estimates. We droned along at about 6000 feet at a blazing 130 knots groundspeed. Boy, was that a shock after several years of flying at about 500 miles per hour. Now we were making two miles a minute instead of the six or eight in B-52's.
Eventually we approached Goose Bay, flying low over the snow-covered frozen lakes and evergreen forests typical of that part of Canada. We landed on a pretty well plowed airstrip with huge snowbanks on both sides and turned off the runway towards the U.S. Air Force side of that dual use air base. Across the flight line was the Canadian civil and air force operations.
We were scheduled to remain overnight (RON) at Goose Bay and start back to Kansas the next morning. There wasn't much to do but grab supper and check into the Visiting Officers Quarters (VOQ) for a night's rest.
On the 31st of March we took off for the return to the States, headed first for Plattsburg AFB, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain, for a mandatory U.S. Customs inspection stop. We were to refuel there and continue on towards Kansas.
Unfortunately our far-less-than-high-altitude and very subsonic aircraft had to plow along at barely ten thousand feet and in the clouds. Most everybody else was able to climb above the clouds into clear air and avoid turbulence and icing conditions. We got barely an hour out of Plattsburg when we had to turn back because we were picking up ice on the wings. A strong weather system was moving in from the Great Lakes and winds were pretty fierce.
The next day we were able to launch again for points South and West. We were able to stay beneath those clouds which threatened icing and didn't help much in navigation. But we were fighting pretty stiff headwinds and the accompanying turbulence. It was pretty bumpy ... and it was darned slow. I remember vividly the surprise of looking through the driftmeter and seeing cars on the New York roadways beneath us going faster than we were. Our groundspeed was under fifty knots. Those headwinds were something. I jokingly asked the pilot if it wasn't time to get this crate out of second gear.
In fact we were making such slow progress against the winds that we were forced to land at Wright-Patterson AFB in central Ohio to refuel. We were not able to continue on to Kansas without taking on more gas.
The next day we were able to continue our return leg to Whiteman AFB in Kansas, thus ending the mission and enabling me to return to Carswell AFB, Texas the day after. By the time I finally got back to my home base I had been able to accumulate more than the needed monthly minimum of four hours flying time. That Goose Bay trip had yielded just under twenty-nine hours.
It would be hard to forget that experience (especially in the so-called jet age) of having to FOLLOW THAT CAR in an Air Force airplane.