USAF Pilot Training

1970  -  US Air Force Pilot Training

Pilot training was 52 weeks long... that means... 52 weeks in Big Spring, Texas.  I had other ideas... a young lady in Waco, Texas... So every single weekend I was stationed in Big Springs I drove to Waco, where my Fiance, Martha was finishing up her degree at Baylor.

At Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) we started out flying a T-41 which was basically a Cessna 172, a four seat propeller airplane. 

I had flown different airplanes with my dad but I had quit when I was 17... I discovered girls were more fun...  Since my Dad had taught me how to fly when I was about 12 years old, pilot training was very easy for me.  

After about a month of T-41 training we started on jet training.  We flew the T-37 twin engine jet.  

The T-37 was a very noisy airplane, a real screamer.  It had lots of nicknames... 6600 pound dog whistle... Tweety Bird... Tweet was the name that stuck most of the time.  This airplane was fully acrobatic and a lot of fun to fly.  We even practiced spins and spin recovery in them. The Tweet had ejection seats and this is where we were trained in parachuting. It was like a dream to most of us to fly a jet airplane. 



Next came the T-38... the White Rocket.  













It was a truly amazing airplane.  It was supersonic... it would fly Mach 1.3, 30 % faster than the speed of sound.  It would climb at 33,000 feet per minute and held the climb speed record for years.  

We called our first flight in a new airplane a "Dollar Ride"... you might be flying it but you were basically along for the ride.  My Dollar Ride was with the Wing Commander (the highest ranking guy on the base)... Col. Atkinson.  We did a full afterburner climb to 45,000 feet and that airplane still wanted to climb... I remember trying hard to level off at 45,000 feet and not succeeding, and the Colonel laughing at me... (nobody was quite ready for the power and abilities of this airplane).  When we leveled off we then went supersonic... no difference in flight characteristics or sound inside the airplane... kind of a non-event except you were moving at more than 13 miles a minute over the ground.


The main reason for this post is because of one person that became a close friend in pilot training and would greatly affect my life.  Jimmy Huard... we  became friends because of the alphabet. That's the way it is in the military... everyone is grouped by alphabetical order. Jimmy and I were close in both OTS (Officer Training School) and UPT.  Jimmy and his wife Cindy had twin boys while we were in OTS.  We sat at the same table for briefings and shared instructors all through pilot training.

Martha and I were married when I was in my last 6 weeks of pilot training.  I was all finished with pilot training and was mostly flying as a solo aircraft in formation flights with other guys in our class that were still learning.  Every once and a while they would just let me go fly by myself and I would just play with the clouds and point that airplane straight up and do aileron rolls until I couldn't stand it any more.  It was a fun time.  Jimmy and Cindy and the boys were neighbors in our apartment complex.  We remember so many funny stories of those twin baby boys... we laughed a lot.  When Pilot Training was all said an done I was #7 in my class and Jimmy was #6.

At the end of pilot training 61 new pilots had 61 aircraft to choose from and we did so by class standing. I realize now that I had been recruited by my Wing and Squadron Commanders to be a T-38 Instructor but Big Spring just didn't appeal to us.  Of course DaNang didn't appeal to us either.  

Six of the 61 aircraft were fighters. Just about everyone signed up for fighters first, including me. Jimmy got the last fighter, an F-4.  So... I got my second choice... but I also got the girl of my dreams...

Martha and I ended up in Tokyo, with me flying as a  hurricane hunter in a WC-135B (basically a Boeing 707). But we never hunted hurricanes, we flew 12 hour reconnaissance missions up and down the Russian and Chinese no-fly zones... including up over the North Pole... We worked for "The Company".  Very early one morning (like 3 AM) the phone rang in our house in Tokyo (actually based at Yokota Air Base) and it was Jimmy. Martha and I went to the base to visit with him on the ramp.  Anyhow we got caught up on family history.  When Jimmy was finishing F-4 training they had another boy... so when we last saw Jimmy he had twins about 2 and a 6 month old. Jimmy was on R and R which typically happened at the half way point of a Vietnam Tour.   I shook Jimmy's hand and he walked off into the night...

At this point in life our Squadron in Tokyo was being shutdown (4 year assignment cut short to 9 months) and anyone that hadn't been to Nam was going there.  I knew I was headed for Nam but I didn't know what I was going to be flying.  Martha had just found out she had a baby in the hangar.