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Yo, Bro! No such thing as a "Mk 1/Mod 0 squadron stick" in Tomcats! Takes summos cojones to fly them, shipmate, as you well know, and not become a smoking hole in the ground.

Glad you stuck with the program -- lots of guys quit if at first they don't succeed. I'll wager you are glad you stuck with the program, too.

I went in to fly Spads. I was a little behind the curve, as when I was in VT-3, having turned down Meridian for some "loud radial engine/right rudder flying," the Navy, in its infinite wisdom, sold all their Spads to the Air Force (who, BTW, bought every Spad the FRench had, as well), and shut down VT-30 in Corpus.

[Tne VNAF wound up with most of them, and they are, to this day, probably still mouldering away on the ramps at the former USAF/VNAF airfields scattered around South Vietnam.]

Well, hellzbellz, there was no way I was gonna quit the program (a lotta guys did), so I stuck with it, saw an E-2 one day, and said to myself, "Well, if you gotta go M/E tailhook (AND I WAS GOING TO BE A TAILHOOKER, NO DOUBT ABOUT IT!), might as well fly around the Tonkin Gulf in a modern pressurized and air conditioned airplane," the other choices being the S-2F or the E-1B.

So, I got orders to VAW-11 to fly E-2A's. And, naturally, while I was '65 GTOing out to NAS North Island, some poobah in the squadron (they were the E1-B/E2-A RAG and parent squadron then -- 350 or so officers and nearly 5,000 enlisted men, as I recall, with detachments on every West Coast Carrier) decided that I was the to be the "must pump" warm body they needed for the USS Kearsarge (CVS-33) "Willy Fudd" detachment. So I "saw the China Sea in my E-1B" for two cruises.

But then I went to the RVAW-110, the Fudd/Super Fudd RAG (the squadron had split by then), as the LSO, got cross qualled in the E-2A/B, and had a ball; like I needed an air conditioned airplane in San Diego!

While I was in RVW-110, I qualified as a "Fleet LSO" all varieties of carrier based Fighter/Attack aircraft, through the good graces of the AIRPAC LSOs. So when I reported aboard Kitty Hawk, the CAG LSO "impressed" me into his rotation -- we deployed to WESTPAC with three fully qualified LSOs, and I was one of them. Rather unusual, and it made for long, interesting days/nights!

I "got" to wave the Viggies (the RA-5C is, IMHO, the most beautiful airplane ever manufactured), the Hummers and the Whales, and teach the newbies about those badboys; the fighter/attack guys thought they were too big to be landing on a carrier, so, since I flew the Hummer, I was the "big aircraft" LSO! My first "solo HMFIC LSO" night recovery is memorable, to this day!

I tried to wrangle PCS to the AirWing so I could fly more, but was unable to do that, and by the end of the first Kitty Hawk cruise, I was pretty much out of the LSO business, as they had qualled enough newbies to man the platform "comfortably."

Later, I flew the Super Fudd in the Reserves at NAS Miramar, circa 1976-1981 in VAW-1285.

I'm proud to have been a Tailhooker, but I sure would have loved flying the Spad!