Posted on 05/03/2019 8:44:56 AM PDT by C19fan
True...I am such an aviation junkie...I have been my whole life.
When I was a kid back in the late Sixties, I used to go to the officer’s beach at Cubi Point in Subic Bay and walk all around the planes on the tarmac right in back of and above the beach...looking into the wheel wells, tailpipes, and intakes.
Could never do that now, they would have security on you so fast it would make your head spin!
Whenever anything goes over, I have to look.
Yep...always loved planes!
A-6 techs across the hanger got bored one day. My buddy from A School called me over and we I watched a newbie in the cockpit blowing on something. The Tech on the deck yelled “still can’t hear you, blow again.” My buddy is dying, I asked what the F was going on. He said it was the “pilots relief tube.” I lost it. A-4s didn’t have one of those some pilots carried an old canteen for long flights.
I was a QAR and was leaving the flight line one night and I see two hydraulic mechs under a bird. One mech says to the other something to the effect “if it didn’t feel like hydraulic fluid what does it taste like”, “not hydraulic fluid” was the answer. Must be fuel “f’ it” lets move to the next bird. I about died, I saw a plane captain taking a piss by that A-4 nose gear. After I got back to my office and stopped laughing I put out a memo about not pissing on the flight line.
I loved NAS Cubi. I would sit on one of (not sure which one but it was near the runway facing out of Subic Bay) the beaches if I was off during the week and watch different planes do touch and go’s. It was even more fun when a carrier group came in and they did carrier quals for carrier landings with Marine pilots.
I have to get back there. I used to drill with the 4th ForRecon Company at Stead Field.
It was the two and three stripers that were most creative. We had the new troops looking for counter-torque bolt removers, 12 oz impact transfer tools and dzeus engage/disengage tools.
Most line troops relieved themselves where they could rather than wait for the bread trucks to take us back to civilization. Many of us were fooled by puddles under the gear wells. We almost all did the feel and smell test on the puddles.
Cool...changed a great deal in the last ten years.
When I was there (back in the Sixties) facing the shore where the runway stuck out, the beach on the right for enlisted was “Dungaree Beach”, and the one on the Left was the officer’s beach, I think “All Hands Beach”, but not sure about that.
They had a place where they would tie down planes up above the beach to do high power testing, and the only safety measure was a white sign with red letters saying “DANGER-JET EXHAUST” and we would go stand in it when planes were turning...:) (IIRC, it was high enough above us that the real danger was getting sand in your eyes from it)
That was the first place I ever held a girl’s hand. She was a pixie-ish daughter of a Navy Captain...years later, when I joined the navy, I found out he had retired and was living near Norfolk, VA, I contacted them to see if I could visit, hoping to see their daughter...:) They invited me to dinner and she was there, so I wore my uniform over, but it didn’t have the irresistable effect on her that I hoped it would!
I had two stories about that beach...one, was when I got busted walking across the runway to go from one beach to the one on the other side...I just looked left and right, saw no planes in the pattern, and...just walked across. About halfway across, a jeep with a black checked flag on it came out and two guys grabbed me by the arms and hauled me in for...interrogation! I gave them a false name, because my dad (who was the base XO at the time) would have been pretty angry with me! They ended up calling a fake number I gave them, and when they got no answer, they let me go.
I wasn’t too bright, to be sure.
Another time, when I was walking around the tarmac looking at the planes, a pilot came out in his flight gear to take one of the F-8 Crusaders up. I followed him around like a puppy dog, and he finally asked me if I wanted to sit in the cockpit, I couldn’t say yes fast enough! (Every kid’s dream, right?) Well, he got me up there, and even let me put his helmet on (I was about 12 at the time) and when I got down they told me I had to leave the area, and before the guy climbed up, he grinned at me and said “Just watch me take off!”
As the Crusader jumped off the end of the runway out at sea, the guy pulled the plane up into a screaming climb at full afterburner and did 4 quick aeileron rolls before leveling out and flying away!
Man. I can remember that like it was yesterday...I was so thrilled.
That was my aviation version of going down to the docks and asking sailors if they would take me on a tour of their ship...:)
ROFL!!!
I didn't write that program … but I have written software like that.
Ha...boy, that brings back memories...Grande Island!
Love the memory lane, Chief...:)
My brother worked for DEC way back in the day, and he told me how someone had buried some witticism in the code for a situation they never thought would happen.
It was a very big client so there were people in suits clustered around watching, and when they were troubleshooting the system, it took them down various paths trying to rebuild the stored data, and on the last attempt at using some obscure utility, the programmer had put in the response they saw when it failed and the terminal responded:
“System go bye-bye.”
He said they tracked down the person who had written that code and fired him.
Gulp.
LOL, that story reminds me of when I was about 7 years old, and I discovered that mint growing in the wild tastes pretty good, and we had a mailbox near our house that had mint growing under it. I plucked mint leaves off and popped them in my mouth...
Until I saw a dog walk up and take a piss on that mailbox!
I was a rather dim seven year old, and it never occurred to me that a dog might piss on a mailbox!
Boy, did I get grossed out!
Fired the guy? DEC is no longer with us. That kind of attitude may have had something to do with it.
DEC certainly had its issues.
Must have been a very big customer and a very high DEC bigwig clustered around that terminal...
The F4 was so maneuverable and could turn so tightly that the inside jet engine could “flame out” due to starvation during a turn. My uncle, a laminar air-flow specialist at McDonnel Douglass in St Louis, helped design the doors at the air inlets to solve that problem.
The F4 Phantom was one of the most versatile platforms ever to take to the air.
Mark
That’s a real feature.
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