[swg] During my time in SEA ( May 1968 - Sept. 1969 ) assigned to the 604th Special Operations Squadron, Bien Hoa AB, RVN, I beheld a U-2 —oops, I mean an OL-20 that resided in its very own hangar on Center Ramp, make numerous takeoffs and landings. It strangely preferred miserably overcast days of 500ft. ceilings. [:)] And upon it’s graceful returns, it was met by a chase vehicle that looked exactly like a 1968 Chevy SS-396 El Cameno sporting redline tires on stock steel wheels with dog dish hubcaps. [8D] I must have been mistaken though, because this vehicle was painted Air Force Blue with yellow markings and even had Security Police door decals and a roof mounted light bar. We were told that that A/C WAS NOT THERE. Silly me, I still insist on believing my own eyes and now that the North Vietnamese and the Chinese could probably care less—SOMEBODY BUILD THAT DIORAMA. Thank you and good night. [:o)]
Hey, I’d build it if I had a 1/144 scale El Cameno or even a 1/72, but I refuse to use my 1/25 scale and turn my whole house into a diorama.
Didn’t know Bono, the dge and the other two were involved in Vietnam. I kno they are very involved in world affairs, but not flying spy missions over vietnam. [:D]
Yep, Grandadjohn,to watch that recovery crew in action was pure poetry. The El Cameno driver always drove to the left side and would match speeds while the crewmen in the bed grounded the left wingtip to the top of the bed until stopped. Then jump out and plugin the outriggers. All of this was accomplished in the first half of the runway so that the A/C could take the center taxiway straight to its hangar where it would taxi into the building before stopping.
Does anybody know why the USAF seems to prefer hot Chevys to chase the Dragon Lady? They do to this day, or at least in the docs I’ve seen in the last few years they were chasing them with blue Cameros. I’m sure the El Camino, with its bed and that wonderful, pre-EPA 396 under the hood must have been the ideal vehicle for the chore. And while we’re on the subject of Chevrolet and spook planes, if I’m not mistaken, the huffers that got the SR-71’s engines turning were powered by not one but two big Chevy 454 cubic inch motors.
TOM
Sharkskin
It seems like I saw something like that on one of those Discovery-type TV programs. I DO know that when the SR-71’s engines were being designed and developed, the engine from an F-104 , with full afterburner, was mounted on frames 15 feet directly infront of the intake of the Blackbirds engine to simulate the supersonic airstream that would be hitting the new engine. There was a full story with color photos printed in either Machanix Illustrated or Popular Mechanics a bunch of years ago. Now THAT would make an interesting diorama!!!
I saw a lot of things in my 26 years in the Air Force that “never happened”. When working with the F-4 RAM Support out of Hill AFB, assigned to SEA, I went into a country to retrieve a crashed F-4C Wild Weasel. I took two teams in and disassembled, crated and shipped the aircraft out in a total of 79 hours. The reason, we were not in that country. The president made that statement only a week prior to us going in.
At George AFB, I was called out at four in the morning on a Saturday. An aircraft was coming in on a IFE. After it landed it was put in a hanger under guard and a civilian crew came in that day and worked on it. I was there on Sunday morning at 0200 when the aircraft took off. We were all told it never was there and it did not exist.
Hey, berny13:
I saw alot in my 22 years, too. Do you remember when Dean Martin’s son, died while flying an F-4C/D on a training mission in California with the Air National Guard? I never could understand why such a heavy security screen was thrown-up around the crash site. Even news helicopters were forced out of the area. One newsy DID get a short clip of the site----just a greasy looking smear on the ground with no visible wreckage.
The U-2C flew out of Bien Hoa AB, Viet Nam under the code name “Trojan Horse”. They initially flew over North Viet Nam including Route Pack 6, until the SA-2 was introduced. Then they were restricted to South Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, etc. The film was downloaded at Bien Hoa and flown by Army UH-1 to Tan Son Nhut Air Base and processed and analysed for the IPIR, (Initial Photo Interpretation Report) at the SAC S.A.R.P.F. (Strategic Air Relocateable Processing Facility). The SARPF was manned by TDY personnel from Beale AFB, 9 SRW. When the U2-C was replaced by the U-2R, the code name was changed to “Giant Dragon”. Shortly after that, the flying program was moved to U-Tapao RTAFB at Sattahip, Thailand. The SARPF was shut down in January 1968 and the processing and read out was taken over by the 12 RITS, Recon Intel Tech Squadron, a permant squadron at TSN…
The start carts for the SR-71 originally had two 454 Buick engines designed by Mickey Thompson. That is why the start cart was usually referred to as “the Buick”. When the Buick division of General Motors stopped making that engine for the Riviera, the Air Force started using the 454 Chevy engine. These start carts had a direct, spline drive connection to the underside of the J-58 engine. They did not just “huff” air into the front of it.
The “chase car” for the U-2 was originally the El Camino. Somewhere along the line they switched to the Camaro, then the Mustang and recently switched back to the Camaro. The chase car was driven by a U-2 pilot usually with another pilot as passenger/spotter. Their function was to drive fairly close to the U-2 and call out his height above the ground to aid the pilot in the last part of the landing/touch down. At that low altitude, the altimeter is not accurate enough and visibility to the ground from the cockpit is non-existant. There was no need to “catch” the wing tip because it has skid plates on the tips and the pilot just balances it with ailerons and fuel transfer wing to wing until it is almost stopped. One wing or the other touches down on the skid plate, the plane stops, the ground crew inserts the “pogos” and the plane taxiis to the hangar. The high performance vehicle is necessary because the driver must wait until the U-2 flies past at 100+ miles per hour, then pull out onto the runway behind the U-2, accelerate up to the plane’s speed and catch up before the planes touches down. You aren’t going to do that with a little 6 banger engine.
I’m sure it has occurred to everyone that since this thread started, we have lost one of the precious few Dragon Ladies left, and much more tragically, a talented and brave aviator.
I noticed most of the news reports were using old data, or had other, mostly minor errors. For example, many mentioned that NASA operates two U-2’s. NASA’s ER-1’s have been permanently grounded for some time now. The NASA WB-57F’s are flying those high-altitude science missions now.
Such mistakes of fact in news stories, though trivial, bug me, like No Name’s irritation at the misspellings. (BTW, on my “Camero” gaffe, I plead haste, not ignorance. I once owned a '77 “Camero” and loved it.) In my daily newspaper years, any story involving aircraft and written by reporters who weren’t “airplane people” more often than not contained a wealth of errors from small to quite large. At most of my jobs, one of my duties was as the official Aviation Writer (I was, until a few years ago, a member of the Aviation/Space Writers Association, which is about as hard to get into as the National Geographic Society. In other words, you become a member when you pay your subscription fee.). Anyway, I finally printed a long article in our in-house publication at the Houston Chronicle to school those reporters who might have to write about airplanes. It started out with what those letters mean in a/c designations, like B is for Bomber. F is for Fighter, etc.
It was only when I had to explain all the things you and I take for granted that I realized that we shouldn’t get angry when we see minor errors like that. We are crazy about flying machines, and as a result have each accrued a vast wealth of tiny, difficult and often quite technical facts that, let’s face it, bore the devil out of 99 percent of the population.
Oh, and just once, just ONE time, I’d like to see a journalist do an article about the U-2 without mentioning Francis Gary Powers. This has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with politics. It has to do with the fact that constant mention of the FGP incident leads the public to believe that the most notable thing this absolutely remarkable and useful aircraft did for the taxpayers is get shot down once 45 years ago. What is remarkable, and is never reported, is all the thousands of mission the U-2 flew and continues to fly, so many of them into harm’s way, and did not get shot down.
As a journalist, I admit we are mostly to blame, but the USAF has to share some responsibility here for not getting the word out when it’s not classified. Unfortunately, special, elite programs like the U-2 and the SR-71 generate a lot of jealousy and resentment within their own branches of the service (just as the SEALS and Special Forces traditionally have been treated by the Navy and Army drones in the Pentagon). I don’t know how many people remember this, but when the SR-71 was first cancelled in 1990, some journalists did point out that the Air Force Chief of Staff at that time who was responsible for the decision had in fact been rejected for the SR-71 program earlier in his career.
Sorry, I don’t know how I got off on this rant when the subject was chase cars.
TOM
If you ever heard an SR-71 engine start, you’d never forget it. First the two Buick engines would be started and warmed up, rumbling and stumbling a bit. Once they were ready, they’d be wound up to the J-58 light off rpm, which took about 20 seconds and seemed to be well above the normal Buick engine redline. The Buick engines would be literally screaming when the J-58 lit off with a “whump”. Then, just perceptible as the J-58 began to accelerate to idle rpm, you would hear the two Buick engines winding down, sounding like whipped and exhausted puppies.
I don’t know how many starts they got out of the engines in the cart before their overhaul, but I’d be surprised if it were very many. I’m surprised that I never heard one blow up…
I just remembered, someone I knew who actually flew the things out of NASA Dryen at Edwards AFB once told me that the 454 engines in the starters had simple stub exhausts, and he swore that the starter carts were louder than any noise the SR itself could make.
And can some car person with a long memory fill me in: As I recall, GM’s big cars and muscle cars, if memory serves, didn’t start using the 454 CID engine until the 1970 model year, because I remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the 396’s and 427’s were put to rest for good. So if that’s the case, what did they use to power the carts from 1962-1969, starting with the YF and A-12 programs?
TOM
TailspinTurtle - Do You know what is louder than an SR-71 start cart running up? How about being at the end of the runway when an SR-71 takes off? Once I was checking out some work being done on a KC-135Q that was parked at one of the ramps near the end of the runway at Beale AFB, when the klaxon horn went off signaling the take off of an SR-71. I was inside the cockpit of the 135 and I shut the windows and held my ears when the black rocket ship went zipping by. Talk about loud!!! The pressure wave went through the aircraft and rattled my bones. I just wished I had a camera. After take off the SR would shoot almost straight up to get to altitude. The sound from the engines sounded just like a ballistic missle taking off with the crumpling sound from the rocket engines. If one took off and I was outside in the housing area on base (8 miles from the flight line), I would hear the crumpling sound and look up to see the two white dots of the engine exhaust as it was climbing to altitude. The SR-71 was one cool aircraft!!! I’m only glad that I didn’t have to work on it. It was a bear on maintenance.