Strategic Air Command (SAC) was a unique command, to say the least, and to understand the atmosphere under which we trained and worked, one must understand a little of the command.

SAC was the was the child and charge of General Curtis E. LeMay.
Click for picture and biography

He was a truly historic figure whom I had a chance to meet many years later in his retirement years not long before his death in 1990, and of all places, in the waiting area of a base hospital pharmacy. Unfortunately, a young airman at the pickup window microphone had no sense of history and that shortcoming was augmented by the fact that she worked in the hospital, which is somewhat its own world.

There in the waiting area, I heard, “LeMay, LeMay,” and I thought that was an interesting name to be hearing, considering we were on a SAC base and General LeMay, the tough talking, cigar smoking leader who reportedly once quipped near a fueled aircraft that the aircraft wouldn’t dare blow up just because he was smoking near it…, well, it just struck me as being a little odd that I was hearing that name being so casually called over the public address system.

I looked around the waiting area and sure enough there was retired General Curtis E. LeMay sitting there waiting. He was an easy man to recognize and I think my reaction was twofold.

On the one hand, here was a moment in history for me, an icon of the development of not only SAC, but also of the Air Force itself, was sitting right there. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine someone like General LeMay sitting there waiting humbly for a prescription like everyone else. Having read his biography it was very clear that humility was the very least of his virtues.

He had created an arm of the Air Force specifically designated to carry out the unthinkable of nuclear bombardment and he did it in a way that necessarily made SAC a unique command.

That uniqueness affected not only the bomber flight crews, but also those of us who maintained the aircraft and the weapons themselves. Though the rest of the Air Force had a manual by which all maintenance activities were conducted, AFM 66-1, SAC had its own manual, AFM 66-12. As I entered my training program and overheard others who were experienced in other commands discussing how things should be done, comments of how different things were in the other commands were always a part of the dialogue.

The technical aspects of the job were a matter of whatever the particular system’s maintenance requirements were but maintenance philosophy, organization, functions (including training), and documentation were all guided by AFM 66-12.

Air Force Manuals are different from Air Force Regulations in that manuals are more general in nature, while regulations are specific and spell out exacting requirements. This was not the case with AFM 66-12. Despite being a manual, it was the guiding document for everything non-technical and was as specific as most regulations. In many cases, it was so specific that it bordered on being a technical directive.

66-12 was the maintenance bible and by God you had better follow it. It definitely worked well in forming standardization across the command – every SAC base was doing almost everything in almost exactly the same way, and you have to have that sort of thing if you are in the world of high-value aircraft whose sole purpose is to deliver nuclear weapons to a target. And bear in mind that if you are delivering nuclear weapons by aircraft, those weapons must be stored and maintained nearby also. A SAC base had no room for error in conducting its maintenance activities on either the weapons or their delivery systems.

Once I truly understood our mission, it was easy to marvel at what responsibility had been placed in the hands of a lot of very young people, including myself. It also made it much easier to accept the fact that despite being a maintainer of aircraft with some often very dirty places and parts, we were expected to arrive at work in clean, crisply starched fatigues. We might look like hell by the end of shift, but when we got there at the start we were inspection-ready.

Being a part of Strategic Air Command was a matter of pride.
Click for Weapons of the SAC Arsenal

………………..

My formal On-The-Job-Training began immediately. Job skill related documents were quickly pulled together, correspondence course volumes were ordered, and local classes were scheduled.

The OJT approach was two-track, consisting of knowledge gained through completion of correspondence courses, with testing under controlled conditions, and the systems maintenance skills learned by hands-on training provided by my trainer, Pike, and others.

Six months was the expected duration and finishing early apparently wasn’t an option. Finishing late was definitely advertised as an undesirable prospect.

Promotion to the next rank was dependent upon achieving the next skill level, and that was the result of satisfactory OJT program completion. In tech school I had been a 42210; as a graduate and now in OJT training on the aircraft and on the shop test benches I was a 42230; and upon completion of OJT I would become a 42250, finally allowed to work on my own.

Classes were held to cover local and aircraft-specific issues and one of the first courses I attended was “Seat Safety,” a course designed to inform maintenance people about the ejection system, of which the seats were certainly a major part. This was important because we would be sitting in those seats while performing maintenance. If accidental ejection forces didn’t kill you, contact with the heavy canopy hatch above certainly would. You’d be dead before the seat got completely out of the aircraft. All this was sufficient education and motivation to check the seat’s safety pins before sitting in one and to not carry tools in pockets, reducing the likelihood of snagging either of the ejection handles.

………………..

It was hard to become completely certified on the Base Fight aircraft because there were so few of them and they didn’t have as many scheduled flights as the mission aircraft, the B-52s and KC-135s. But when a job came in for one of them you were going to get a thorough education. Those aircraft were definitely not built for easy maintenance.
Click for T-29
Click for C-123
Click for T-33

However, on some of their systems, it was very easy for a trainee such as I to become certified fairly quickly. That was because when a work order for one of those systems came in, everyone who knew better suddenly became very busy. It was interesting to watch the reaction of some of the old heads as jobs came in on those old aircraft.

Cylinder Head Temperature (CHT) was a prime avoid-it job. When a CHT job came in everybody ran, so it was generally left to a trainer and his poor trainee, if available.

The T-29s and C-123s had such a system for each of their engines and the system was a simple one consisting of a sensor mounted in an impossible spot on the engine cylinder head and an indicator on the instrument panel, the two connected by wiring. The wiring was a special wiring of known electrical resistance and because of that the connection at the engine had to be silver soldered.

It was virtually impossible to work on that system and not ruin a uniform, or at least either the shirt or trousers, because those engines were old and filthy. Working on that system, and a few others, definitely made one feel like a mechanic and not a technician, and those jobs were trained by the “I’ll tell you how to and you do it — I’ll be right here behind you” method.

Working on Base Flight was pretty much like that all around – old aircraft, old systems, old and deteriorating wiring, all adding up to a dirty job in many cases and few quick fixes due to faulty wiring that took a lot of time to troubleshoot and repair.

Base Flight, specifically the T-29s, did provide occasional welcome relief, however.

The T29s had previously been used to train navigators and originally had individual stations for students, each having a drift meter and various other instruments installed. Our aircraft had had all but one of these stations removed and airline style passenger seats with basic cloth seat covers installed.

The drift meter was a wholly unlikely looking device in that it was like an inverted periscope that went from the student navigator station above the floor all the way down to the bottom of the fuselage. The head contained an optical grid that was used to measure the amount of sideways drift, allowing computation of a drift-corrected plot of actual aircraft track and course. Absolutely low tech, but state of the art of its day.

On certain weekends, a single T-29 would fly a training mission from our base at Fort Worth, southward to Matagorda Island, off the coast of Texas. The destination was an old bombing range on the island, where long unused as a range for dropping inert practice bombs, facilities were fast approaching the condemned stage. The mission left on Saturday morning and returned Sunday evening.

There was some unknown, at least to me, system of selecting from a list of those whose names were on the list, who would be allowed to board as passengers for the purpose of spending the weekend at Matagorda Island. To be so selected would mean a weekend of swimming, snorkeling, fishing, and general unwinding and relaxation in and around the waters of the gulf.

I made the trip twice, and on the first occasion I had no idea how I had been selected for the treat, and I still don’t know. I was told about the opportunity, asked if I wanted to go, and a day or so later told to report to Base Operations on Saturday morning, told what to take with me, and wished a good time. The second time I went was as the result of winning Airman of The Quarter competition.

By the time I made my first trip, I had been around a while and felt comfortable with my “airman” status in just about any company. I think I had a decent reputation by then, too. In any case, I looked forward to the trip and the possible opportunity to use the drift meter in the air.

After we took off, a bone rattling, noisy experience with those reciprocating engines and props wound up, I went back to the drift meter, turned it on, and watched the ground pass below. Of course, I had no navigation skills, so I couldn’t actually use it for any computations, but it was interesting to see how at least something worked while actually airborne.

While I was at the drift meter, one of the others who was making the trip and apparently knew the two crew members up in the cockpit came over and asked if he might have a look. After we discussed the instrument for a moment or two, he said, come with me, I want to show you how these guys navigate to Matagorda.

I followed him up to the curtain that hung across the aisle at the rear of the cockpit and he parted the curtain just enough for me to see an oil company map, the kind you could get at any gas station, and in those days, such maps were free. We were literally following the highway southward toward the coast!

Then he told me to walk softly, but to stay close to him and move quickly to the rear of the aircraft. We did so.

A few minutes later, we did the same thing again, but to the front of the aircraft, where we had started, just behind the curtain.

A few minutes later, we did the same thing again, repeating this circuit a few times at maybe 3 or 4 minute intervals.

Just as I was beginning to get the idea of what we were doing, the curtain parted behind us and the pilot in mock seriousness said, OK, you guys have had your fun, now go sit down and I’ll trim this thing out again.

The T-29 had no autopilot, but it did have a way of having the aircraft controls set for equilibrium so the pilot wouldn’t have to continually push and pull on the control yoke to maintain altitude. Each time we moved our combined weight from front to rear and back again, we threw the aircraft out of trim and the pilot would have to adjust it again. After a few cycles of that it was easy for him to figure out what was happening.

Such was the atmosphere of those trips from start to finish and everyone else had a good laugh, too.