Flight training

If you're busy hit the delete button. If not you're not read on. This is a magazine article I wrote several years ago. Hand salute to all of you who served bravely and with distinction as ATC instructors, but not every instructor did.

Charlie.P

T H E G I M M I C K

It wouldn't seem to have required rocket scientist brains to conclude there would be a pilot surplus; what with the end of the Korean War and literally thousands of B-29s, B-36s, B-45s, B-47s and KC-97s being replaced with hundreds of B-52s and KC-135s. It finally dawned on the Air Force personnel weenies and they put out the message, in December of 1955, to cut back on the number of new pilots. Class 56-P was in transit from their Primary bases to their Basic bases when the word hit the street. This class, which started with more than 200 students, would now only graduate 47 pilots.

Rather than tell three out of every four students to go home, the mystics in the head shed said keep the best, and wash-out the rest. A young man in that class who wanted to be a pilot would have to be damn good, as well as damn lucky; or have a gimmick. I had a gimmick.

Mr. Dean, my civilian primary instructor, at Bartow AB, Florida was a prince, a priceless piece of work. When I met him, in July of 1955, he had over 6,000 hours in the back seat of a T-6. There weren't many tricks a student could pull that Mr. Dean hadn't seen before. He wanted to make sure that each of his four students knew exactly what and why the airplane was doing at all times. He would go over everything again and again until he was sure we understood; we were always the last ones to be excused after flying class. We were supposed to solo the PA-18 after between 8 and 12 hours of dual instruction and Mr. Dean´s students all soloed in their eleventh hour. I remember us begging him to demonstrate some unauthorized aerobatic maneuvers, and on our last dual rides in the T-6 he demonstrated one snap roll to each of his four students.

From Primary flying school, Mr. Dean's four students went to three different bases. I went to single engine Basic at Bryan Air Force Base, Texas. Bartow had been all student officers and the other two primary bases for 56-P had aviation cadets. Bartow was also the last base with PA-18s and T-6s; the other primary bases had T-34s and T-28s. My instruction had been 18 hours in the PA-18 (Piper J-3 Super Cub) and 128 hours in the T-6G. The other Primary students flew 28 hours in the T-34 and 120 hours in the T-28. This is very important, because it was the basis of my gimmick.

On our first day at Bryan we all marched to the flight line and filed into our flight ready room. The tables had our names on pieces of paper, each paper on top of a neat stack of manuals. We soon found our seats and were told to sit down. In typical military fashion, as soon as we were seated someone called the room to attention and we all stood up again. The instructors filed in and took their places at the head of each table. I was an ROTC graduate and a 2nd Lt., and the other three students at the table were Aviation Cadets. Our instructor, I´ll call him Green (to protect the guilty) was also a 2nd Lt. and this was his first class. Lt. Green had graduated from flying school as an aviation cadet three months earlier and then gone to Basic Instructor's School (BIS) before this assignment. I therefore out ranked him by more than four months. It didn't bother me; he was the instructor and I the student, so as far as I was concerned he still rated a 'yes sir´ or `no sir'. But it bothered him and I could tell he resented my college education and ROTC commission. He had also flown T-6s in primary and only had 28 hours in basic flying school, and 10 hours at BIS, in the T-28.

Lt. Green flew with the three cadets first, on that first day, and when they came in from flying he stayed at the airplane. I was busily reading the dash one and getting ready for my 'dollar ride'. I asked the returning cadets how their ride had gone, and each answered. "Okay, we made three landings and then Lt. Green said, 'You can fly the airplane as well as I can, go ahead and make three solo landings and bring the airplane back to the parking spot." (Well of course they could fly the airplane as well as he could---they had 120 hours in the T-28 and he only had 38.)

I went out to the airplane with great trepidation. Green was a shouter and I wasn't used to that. In fact it was really going to bother me for the next six months. Well, I got in the airplane, and 'we' got the engine started on the second try. It was a new airplane to me and I didn't know the priming technique or where any of the switches were, it was also my first tricycle landing gear airplane. With his shouting at me, the few T-28 facts I had jammed into my brain quickly turned to water. 'We' took-off and made three landings. I say 'we' because I don't think I had much to do with any of it because he was always heavy handed on the controls. After all, I thought I was getting a demonstration ride. On the taxiway he said, "Stop the airplane." I stopped the airplane, and then he said, "You can fly the airplane as well as I can, go ahead and make three solo landings and bring the airplane back to the parking spot."

It sounded like a pretty sporty course to me, since this was the first time I´d ever been in a T-28, but it seemed to be the way they did things around here, so I thought I´d better give it a go. Lt. Green climbed out of the back seat and I didn´t dare say anything to him.

I´ll never know whether the North American engineers did it by accident or on purpose, but the airspeed numbers for the T-6 and T-28 are almost identical, albeit MPH for the T-6 and knots for the T-28. In any event it was lucky for me. The landing gear handle on the T-6 has a button on the end, to release it from the down position; the T-28 has notch in the instrument panel and you have to push the gear handle to the side, out of the notch, before it will go up. I didn't know this at the time and I couldn't get the gear handle up; so I just made three traffic patterns and landings with the gear down and locked. Maybe it was all for the best, because I had a million other things on my mind at the time.

It was a good thing Lt. Green was standing at the airplane's parking spot, or I would never have found it. And, I was having a hell of a time steering the airplane because I hadn't yet learned about the little lever in front of the stick grip that releases the nose wheel from the straight ahead and locked position, I was steering the airplane with differential braking and skidding the nose around.

"Why didn't you retract the gear?" Was the first thing he said to me.

I didn't know what to say, but I surely wasn't going to tell him the truth, that I didn't know how to retract it. "When I retracted it the first time, the hydraulic pressure dropped to zero, so I put the handle back down and left it there." I boldly replied.

"Good thinking." Was his response.

Two weeks went by and none of us were doing very well. We hated flying with the shouter, Lt. Green, and getting our ass chewed on all the time for apparently no reason, but that seemed to be all that happened from takeoff to landing on each flight. One afternoon, after a solo flight, I was putting away my parachute in the back of the parachute room when Lt. Green approached me with a ferocious look on his face. "You S.O.B. why didn't you tell me you had never flown the T-28 before. You were supposed to have a minimum of eight hours dual instruction before soloing?"

I had thought it was a dead issue, but I guess he had heard some other instructors talking about soloing their student officers in the T-28. Green probably asked himself, "Why am I not worried about soloing my student officer? Because I soloed him on the first day." Then he must have broken the code and realized the huge mistake he´d made. It was too late now, in the past two weeks I had flown solo several times. Being a new 2nd Lt. as well as a new instructor, I'm sure he knew he was on probation but he wanted to go outside and fight me then and there. He was small but probably pretty scrappy; I was big and had played football and wrestled in high school so I wasn´t afraid of him. I said, "That is the dumbest thing we could do, I sure wont prove anything and it would likely get both of us thrown out of the Air Force." He replied that `if I blow on him´, he would kill me. That was the first time I´d ever heard that expression but I knew what he meant without any definition and I believe he was serious. His only hope was that I wouldn't say anything. And, although I didn't realize it at the moment, I too had to keep my mouth shut, or I would have been thrown back into the briar patch with another instructor or washed out, as was happening to so many students.

The conversation seemed over and I simply replied. "Remember, you're the instructor. You're supposed to know those things without me telling you. You told me I could fly the airplane as well as you could, so I figured there was nothing more you could teach me and I was ready to go solo, so I did. That´s all that happened."

Lt. Green washed out the three cadets, got two more and washed them out as well. He then got another student officer and almost washed him out, but at the last minute the student requested a change of instructors and made it through the program. I never got so much as a pink slip, although I certainly felt I deserved one on several occasions. I'll never know for sure, but I think it was `our secret´, my gimmick, that got me through the program. If Lt. Green ever let me get as far as an elimination board, and I told the board he had soloed me with only fifteen minutes dual time in the T-28, he would have been finished; maybe even met a Flying Evaluation Board.

As a post-script, two base standardization-board pilots were giving four of us our night formation check rides in the T-33. They were the last checks for the last students before graduation. We were the only ones flying that night. Lt. Green had drawn mobile-control duty. The tower operators and all the firemen, except for one fire truck, had gone home for the night. I was in a solo airplane, as was another student; the other two students were dual with the check pilots. The rule was, no four-ship formation flying on check-rides, or at night. After the check-ride the two check pilots decided to join up for 'a little four-ship work'. So we flew around for a while with me in number four position. Getting ready for landing, the other solo student was leading then the two dual ships and I was tail-end-charlie in the four-ship echelon. The base had parallel runways and the normal procedure was for #1 to land on the outside runway, #2 on the inside runway, #3 on the outside runway and #4 on the inside runway again. On touch down, number one ship blew a tire and started skidding about 45 degrees across the runway. The tip tank on the outside of his skid scraped the runway and burst into flame. The airplane went across the grass between the runways, across the other runway and came to rest in the grass beyond that. Number two ship started a go-around and pulled up into the belly of the number three airplane. The two airplanes crashed together, short of the runways. I was just turning base to final and watched the whole thing as I went around.

I didn't know what to do, and Lt. Green had left the mobile-control unit to go to the accident scene. There was a lot of activity on the ground and I was afraid to try to land on either runway, but I didn't have enough gas to screw around very long. There was a bright full moon. (Isn´t there always on night flying nights?) I could see well enough to fly to our auxiliary field. It was an unmanned and unlighted field but I could see well enough to make an uncontrolled, black-out landing. I called the base from a farmhouse and waited until someone from the motor pool came to pick me up.

The student flying in number one airplane in the formation was fine and his airplane was flying again in a couple of days. One student and one check pilot were killed. The other student soon received a disability discharge and the other instructor was terribly burned, barely surviving.

The base Chief of Standardization signed off my night formation check ride. I never saw Lt. Green again, but a week later, on graduation day, I learned that he was in bad shape and undergoing psychological treatment at Ft. Sam Houston. Surely the accident pushed him over the brink, but worrying about `our little secret´ probably set him up. I've often thought that I learned to fly in spite of Lt. Green, not because of him; and I know I was a major contributor to him losing a lot of sleep.

Oh yes, what kind of assignments did the 47 graduates get? The class leader got a F-86H slot, the number two man in the class got a B-47 co-pilot job, and the rest of us went on to career broadening experiences as supply officers, air police officers or ammunition officers. Only two pilot jobs for 200 candidates, it turned out to be a real pilot surplus.

From: charlie.p@adelphia.net

From: Zot Barazzotto <zot250@ameritech.net>
Subject: I Learned About Flying From Him

I Learned About Flying From Him

Jim Rock was the guy that taught me how to fly.  He was 5'6" tall and 
thought anyone over 5'6" was malformed.  He was a natural stick but he 
had a lot of time in a lot of planes including P-40s, B-24s and C-124s.  
He also had a lot of planes shot out from under him or otherwise return 
him earlier then planned.  When his P-40 was shot down in North Africa 
he walked 50 miles to the coast with a broken back.  After he was 
patched up he went back to instruct in B-24s but it was too tame so he 
went the the South Pacific to fly combat.  He lost two B-24s but none of 
his crew although they got 5 days in a life raft and a 37 day scenic 
tour walking out of the Borneo jungle.  He had numerous forced landings 
from mechanical trouble and one in which another plane ran into he and 
his wife in the New Carlisle traffic pattern.  All told I think he 
walked away for about 18, not all of which left the A/C reusable.

He taught me to fly in a 1946 Commonwealth Skyranger tail dragger at 
Springfield, Ohio, which had a part time tower for a Guard unit flying 
F-84s.  He taught me how to think about what was happening so that I 
could stay far enough ahead of the situation to make it back to the bar 
- his goal in life.  He never took any money for the education he gave 
me. All I had to do was stop on the way home at the Old Trail Tavern in 
Yellow Springs, Ohio, buy him cigarettes and beer and listen to his war 
stories.  What I learned from Jim was a solid foundation that got me 
through UPT high enough to get an OV-10 and probably kept me alive in 
SEA, spilling gas inside the RC-135 and doing other dumb stuff in 
C-123s.  He died an old mans death in a nursing home.  Hand Salute to a 
fallen warrior and good stick.

PS - Jim had a lot of sayings that are pretty precious.  Here are a 
couple of classics - "There is no accounting for taste" (usually when it 
was something that he wouldn't like.)  "Never live West of work" - (so 
the sun doesn't shine in your eyes twice a day.)