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Hotel Crown, Okinawa City, Friday, 1998-05-15 19:00 local (Z+9)
Hello, Everybody,
If all goes as planned, I'll get a wake up call at 06:15 tomorrow morning and be on my way out of here. It will not hurt my feelings if I do not come this way again. However, given the choice, I would much rather be stuck here than in Jeddah.
Tomorrow will be a brutal day. The previous two trips have run to about twenty-three hours of duty time. There's no reason to expect tomorrow to be different.
The big difference between this upcoming trip and the previous two is that, after returning to Okinawa, instead of coming back to this hotel, we will go to the back of the airplane and hopefully sleep all the way to Anchorage. Arrival in Anchorage is scheduled for late Saturday evening Anchorage time. If I'm not sick to exhaustion, I'll try to jumpseat on down to Seattle. Jumpseats out of Anchorage are hard to get; the middle of the night should be easier than during the day.
A quick recounting of the previous two trips: the first was to U-Tapao and then on to Takhli, both in Thailand, then back to Okinawa. U-Tapao is a beach town on the Gulf of Thailand. C.J., remember Pataya Beach? U-Tapao is about thirty miles southeast from Pataya.
The airport is now a joint use civilian-military field. The military portion is used by Royal Thai Navy air operations flying U.S. made F-8s. During the Vietnam War, the field was a U.S.A.F. B-52 base. Both the captain and flight engineer I am with are retired military, and both spent time at U-Tapao during that war. The base has acres and acres of unused concrete revetments. During the war, according to my two fellow crewmembers, those revetments were jam-packed with B-52s.
We approached the airport for a landing on runway 18. Put a zero after runway numbers and you have the magnetic runway heading. Thus runway 18's heading is 180 degree magnetic, in other words, south. About ten miles from the airport they told us visibility for runway 18 had dropped to less than 1000 feet in a torrential rain but that runway 36, same strip of concrete but landing in the opposite direction, was clear. We touched down in the sun on dry concrete, then rolled into the downpour on the north end. Only in the tropics....
The temperature was 37 Celsius, same as our body temperature, 98.6 FAhrenheit, and the humidity was in the high 90% range, not pleasant when you're in a uniform.
At U-Tapao, we were treated to an example of military decision making. The original plan called for all the troops to disembark at U-Tapao and then others to get on to be taken to Takhli. However, the others had already taken an earlier flight to Takhli. However, there were fifteen bags that had somehow been left behind. There was nothing and no one at Takhli needing to go to Okinawa, and helicopters regularly run between U-Tapao and Takhli. It took the military four hours to consider, and then reject, the cost-effective solution of sending us directly back to Okinawa. So, a 747 was used to haul fifteen bags to Takhli. Incredible!
So, we went to Takhli, where the temperature was 42 Celsius. That's 107 Fahrenheit, but the humidity was probably only in the 80% range. That made it more comfortable than U-Tapao.
Takhli is a Thai air force fighter base, U.S. made F-16s. During the Vietnam war it was a U.S.A.F. F-105 base. The Republic F-105's official name was the Thunderchief. During the Vietnam war more than three hundred of them were lost to ground fire. Consequently the popular nickname of the F-105 became the “Thud”. A mountain ridge near Hanoi was nicknamed Thud Ridge in recognition of the number of 105s that had thudded into it. An ex-105 pilot, court-martialed when he dared to speak the truth, wrote a book entitled, “Thud Ridge”.
http://www.burrusspta.org/395_Combat.pdf lists 395 F-105 combat losses.
The problem with the 105 was its control system. Like the 747, it was all hydraulic. But 747s don't get shot at...well, at least not often. All the North Vietnamese had to do was puncture a hydraulic line and it was all over. The pilot had no control and no choice but to eject.
Takhli's biggest problem for a 747, other than its relatively short runway, is its lack of high rate, high volume fueling facilities. F-16s are small even for a fighter; they don't take much fuel, 747s do. One tiny, to us, fuel truck had to make multiple trips between their fuel storage and aircraft. Another four hours.
One interesting occurrence while we were there, a U.S. military Beech King Air came in, requesting a thousand pounds of fuel. We were listening to him on the radio and heard the base tell him that it would be awhile. He countered by informing them that he had the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam on board. He got his fuel immediately. RHIP—rank has its privileges.
It was dark when we finally got out of Takhli, my leg. The aircraft was one of Tower's older planes, and its radar is old and not very reliable. Climbing out it painted nothing but light moisture dead ahead. Avoiding it would have required a sixty degree right turn—couldn't go left, that was Vietnam—and at least a seventy-five mile diversion. I elected to continue straight ahead; the captain concurred. Fun and games, we flew right into a full-blown thunderstorm. Those old radars aren't worth shit.
Actually, the turbulence wasn't all that bad, but the lightning was awesome. I think it freaked out the captain a bit. He's a good guy and a good pilot, but he's the one that took the 747 off the runway at JFK. That accident, I believe, traumatized him. He's very nervous and seemingly expects the worst from any situation. In this instance he started screaming into the radio to ATC that we were in an emergency and needed a higher altitude and vectors. What with all the lightning static and language differences, he wasn't communicating. I had the airplane pulled back to its turbulence penetration speed, and I had the engineer turn all cockpit lights up high to avoid having the lightning blind us. Thunderstorms aren't very wide. If you blunder into them, you're usually out in a few minutes, and we were through it before ATC could understand and comply with our request.
When we finally got back to Okinawa, most of us spent twenty hours in bed. Our exhaustion was total.
Enough for now. It's 19:30 and dark, and I have yet to pack. Tropical evenings don't last long even in the summer. I'm looking forward to getting home but not to what it will take to get there.
Everybody take care...Terry
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