Posted on 05/08/2010 10:56:22 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
When my old man was flying in B-24's (bombardier), the ground-echelon sergeants who'd had training on MG's would occasionally be called up to fill gaps in the aircrew lists. One of the sergeants in the squadron's ground-echelon roster from October, 1942, was with the old man's much-shuffled aircrew, in a new a/c, when they disappeared during the first Ploesti raid on August 1, 1943. Dad didn't make the trip: they did a big personnel reshuffle just before moving the air group from England to Libya, the flying officers grounded for medical or on sick call got moved to base ops so the squadron skippers could get fresh duty-ready officers (only way they could wangle that), and off they went in a big cloud of dust on temporary transfer to Ninth Air Force and the pleasures of Bizerte. My old man thought his navigator had gone down, too, but then he ran into him in the Lowry AFB O-club in Denver in 1951: the guy had been in the shuffle, too, and got shipped out to a sister squadron for two draft choices to be named later. (He went on the raid, though.) Each thought the other had gone down with their crew.
As a jet jockey on active duty, I walked the walk and talked the talk, but later in my career as a test pilot I came to realize that helo and tiltrotor aircrews served the grunts far more directly and regularly than we fast-movers do. And flying their machines takes every bit as much skill as flying a jet. I have the utmost respect for rotorheads regardless of which service.
TC
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