After completing OCS I was sent to CIC (Combat Information Center) and AIC (Air intercept control ) schools in Glynco, Georgi, One of the things I thought strange was that I had to have a yellow Fever inoculation. It was not for going overseas. It was for being stationed in Georgia. The courses lasted over 5 months. I decided on an exercise routine that involved walking (fast) from the bachelor officer’s quarters to the class room building at least once a week. This was a serious walk. The 2 locations were on opposite sides of the air base and the walk took about an hour. The distance was over 3 miles.
At AIC school we had simulators for practice, but simulator intercepts didn’t count towards the 100 actual live control intercepts required for completing the course. The daily routine involved an instructor and 2 students. The instructor showed us how to make an intercept run by directing a real pilot to fly to a final location just 1 mile behind the target plane and just below in altitude. The training runs did not let us really do the altitude part because of safety considerations, but the rest was very real. Two target planes took off and went to opposite sides of racetrack pattern separated by 1000 feet in altitude. They followed the racetrack while student controlled fighter planes flew interception patterns. $ interceptors were above the racetracks with 1000 foot altitude separations between them. Another four were placed similarly below the racetrack.
The aircraft we directed were Navy FJ Furys. They did not have radar. The fury, by the way, was the navy equivalent of the air force F-86 that had been the best fighter in the Korean War.
One day one of the aircraft suffered simultaneous electrical and hydraulic failures. The pilot managed to use a manual backup system to lower his landing gear and then tried to touch down on the base runway. The problem was that he came in the wrong way. The runway had arresting wires to catch the aircraft, but only from one direction. The base people tried to use a signal blinker to wave him off, but he came don anyway. The plane rolled down the runway and the pilot cut his engine. But the aircraft kept rolling. As it neared the end of the concrete runway the pilot decided to eject. But the Fury was not equipped with a zero altitude ejection seat. It threw him into the air and he came down before the parachute had time to deploy. He made a very hard landing on the concrete which killed him. The plane kept rolling off the runway into swampland and finally came to stop, still upright.
On another occasion, while I was observing and not controlling, one of the junior pilots missed lunch before scheduled take off time. He took a couple of sandwiches with him to the aircraft. He was assigned the highest altitude interceptor at about 32,000 feet above the earth. After the first run he was feeling hungry so he took off his oxygen mast in order to eat one of those sandwiches. Anoxia (lack of oxygen) is a condition that doesn’t let you know your abilities are deteriorating. My instructor figured it out when the pilots response to commands became sloppy and his speech was slurred. An emergency was declared and two other pilots closed in on either side of him to escort him down to a safe landing. This mishap had a better ending. The pilot got down safely. The base commander grounded him for his carelessness. But what does one do with a pilot who is unable to fly? Our hero, the young Ensign pilot, was assigned temporarily to be responsible for the classified publications vault. He issued classified books to students in the CIC course and recorded when those books were returned at the end of the day. In between, it was a very boring assignment. there was almost no one passing the vault during the day. One day, Ensign X was feeling hungry (again!) and left the vault to go buy a candy bar. It just happened that that was the time the base commander was passing by after an inspection tour. The vault was open, but there was no clerk or custodian to be found. Well, in the 1960s a new officer was automatically promoted from ensign to lieutenant junior grade after 18 months service as an ensign. Not this pilot. He was still an ensign when ( left the base. I don’t know if the base commander ever relented and allowed him to be promoted.
o
Wetherhorn 