OCS Adventures – 1
US Navy Officer Candidate School was located in Newport, Rhode Island. Flying there in 1962 was a new experience. The Newport airport didn’t have a long enough runway to handle the jet aircraft that were in use the. I flew to NYC and changed to an older, propeller driven, aircraft. Almost all the passengers were bound for OCS. Our propeller plane taxied to the end of the runway and the pilot revved up the engines. He then throttled them back and we taxied off the access strip to a maintenance area. Something wasn’t quite right with one of the engines. A mechanic wheeled an access platform over to the wing and climbed up. He removed an access panel to one of the engines and spent several minutes tinkering with the engine. The passengers all remained on board. When the mechanic was satisfied he picked up the access panel and tried to put it back in place. First he tightened the top two screws, then he tried to close the bottom two. But they wouldn’t go in. He loosened the top screws, and tightened the bottom two screws. When he tried to close the top two screws they wouldn’t catch. One of the passengers a few rows behind me knocked on the window to get the mechanics attention. He pantomimed holding the panel, and turning it upside down. The mechanic nodded, inverted the access panel, and, miraculously, all 4 screws easily went in. As we taxied back out to take off somebody exclaimed rather loudly,
“If he didn’t know which way to place the panel, how do we know he knew what he was doing when he was fiddling with the engine?”
Well, he apparently did know, because our remaining flight was uneventful.
The 1200 or so Officer Candidates went through the standard reception. There were haircuts, standing in queues to receive our new uniforms, and over a dozen textbooks, walking (we really couldn’t call it marching) to our barracks that would be home for the next few months. Each of us had a bunk bed assignment and a locker for stowing our uniforms. We were shown how and where to place each item. Each wooden barracks held a company of men. It was split into 4 sections of about 40 men each. I was in section 3 of Mike Company. Each company had a letter designation and Mike was the phonetic equivalent of the letter “M”. The section would do everything together. We all went to the same classes together, and we all ate together in the same mess hall. We also all marched together from one place to another. That was a minor skill that we all had to learn very quickly.
Wetherhorn 
You remind me of a flight from Chișinău, Moldova to Amsterdam back in about 1999 or 2000. We boarded the TU-154 and apart from the shock of seeing overhead luggage bins just being a open railway style shelf and the rear door to the exit steps looking like it was wood with a round window in it (I think it was wood), and the lavatory looking like one from an older railway carriage, we settled into a pleasant enough flight.
When we landed however, all the empty seats slammed forward (they only had resistance when someone was leaning back in them) and then when the taxiing was over, a guy in a red flannelette shirt got up, moved to the rear of the cabin, opened the rear door and lowered the stairway. He then grabbed a large red toolbox from behind the back row of seats and exited. When we got to the bottom of the steps the toolbox was on its end and he was standing on the other end of it tightening bolts up on the tail-plane.
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Good to hear that someone else has had a similar experience.
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