The 611th Air Force Base Unit (Proof Test Group) was made up of four squadrons: my squadron, fighter test; medium and light bomber test, flying B-25s, B-26s, and B-45s; heavy bomber test, B-17s; and very heavy bomber test, B-29s and B-36s. The group was not large, and most of the officers were friends. In fact many of us had been checked out in planes from the other squadrons.
Although we had practiced for several days to perfect our timing, this briefing was as detailed as the first. The firepower demonstrations were the Air Proving Ground's chance to demonstrate not only the latest Air Force weaponry but also the skill of its pilots and bombardiers, and not just by hitting their targets but by hitting them exactly on schedule. The thirty or so individual attacks would be completed in less than forty-five minutes total time. The spacing varied, depending on the weapon being demonstrated. Some of the fighter passes were only thirty seconds apart; precise timing was vital.
Col. Bull Curry, the group commander, entered, and we all sprang to attention. After we were seated he said a few words, stressing that the only thing more important than timing and accuracy was safety. Some fighter pilots need to be reminded of that regularly. He would rather have us be late than be the late. After telling us just to make it as good as the last practice, he turned the briefing over to the operations officer, Lt. Col. Joe Davis, Jr., who would be in the tower at the range, controlling the show.
Colonel Davis proceeded through the briefing, mission by mission, covering start-engine times, taxi, takeoff, initial point, targets, abort procedures, and radio discipline. He, like Colonel Curry, stressed safety above all. The demonstration was to lead off with a flight of six B-29s dropping ten 500-pound bombs each, followed by the heavy and then the medium bombers. Finally the fighters would strafe, dive-bomb, skip-bomb, rocket, and napalm a myriad of targets. The targets included small buildings, trucks, airplanes, and pyramids for dive bombing. No explosion was faked; all of the ordnance was live.
For this demonstration I took part in two events. I was leading a flight of three P-80 Shooting Stars that were to drop napalm on a wooden shack target, and then my flight would join up with Maj. Si Johnson, flying a P-84B, in a simulated attack on a flight of B-29s as they passed in front of the stands at an altitude of about 500 feet. That was to be the last event of the demonstration. At the conclusion of the briefing, we left the room in high spirits, eager to get the show on the road, and went back to our respective squadron operations rooms.
Once back, I changed into my flying suit and reviewed the operations schedule to see which P-80 I was to fly. I copied the order and times of events from the master schedule onto my knee board, underlining the event immediately preceding mine in black and mine in red. I checked with Si to be sure that I was clear on the altitude and location where I was to join up with him for our pass on the bombers.
Since our three P-80s were each carrying napalm in the two 165-gallon tip tanks, we would be flying on internal fuel only, which at low altitude gave us only about forty-five minutes' endurance. Therefore, we would not take off until fifteen minutes after the start of the demonstration, which, coincidentally, was fifteen minutes before our event.
About forty-five minutes before our scheduled takeoff time, Capt. Leonard Koehler and Lt. Fred Belue, the pilots of the other two P-80s in the flight, and I went to the personal equipment shop to pick up our parachutes and Mae Wests, then hopped into a jeep and were driven across the field to the ordnance ramp, where our airplanes were parked. For safety, this ramp was some two miles from any building area, and aircraft carrying live ordnance of any type were armed and disarmed there.
Len, Fred, and I went over the details for the mission, including hand signals to be used in the event of radio failure and other emergency procedures. We then went to the planes, donned Mae Wests and parachutes (we wore backpack parachutes with separate seat cushions to fit into the bucket seats), and climbed up the ladders to the cockpits. In those days, at least at Eglin, we did not do a walk-around inspection of the planes before getting into the cockpit. The maintenance was so good and our ground crews so experienced that they would have taken it as a sign of mistrust and an insult had we done a preflight walk-around. Later, the USAF wisely made the pilot's preflight mandatory as part of the checklist.
Once in the cockpit, with the help of the crew chiefs we buckled our shoulder harnesses and seat belts, plugged in the radio leads and oxygen mask hose, and adjusted the seat height and rudder pedals to our liking. The P-80 had a small cockpit, and the gunsight was right in the pilot's face. A joke among the pilots was that you could always recognize someone who had crashed a P-80: "No hand hold" was imprinted in reverse on his forehead.
To make matters worse, most of our planes had 16mm cameras mounted on the sights, which further reduced forward visibility and obstructed the pilot's view of the instrument panel. When the seat was in the high position, as I liked it, my helmet rattled against the canopy in rough air.
At ten minutes after ten I circled my hand over my head as the signal to start engines. With the engine running in idle, the crew chief unplugged and towed away the starting unit. Len and Fred checked in on the radio, and I asked the tower for permission to taxi. We were cleared to runway one-nine, and I jerked my thumbs outward to signal the crew chief to remove the chocks from in front of the wheels.
We taxied into position on the runway in a three-ship right-echelon formation, lowered the flaps to 80 percent, and closed the canopies. I ran my engine up to 98 percent to give the two wingmen some rpm to play with on the formation takeoff, and nodded my head as a signal to release the brakes and start the takeoff roll. After we lifted off I retracted the gear and slowly milked up the flaps. When the airspeed reached 250 mph I started a gentle turn to the left, told the flight to switch to the mission control channel, and then reported in, "Mission control, Lopez airborne with three." Mission control acknowledged the call, and I continued my climb to the north toward Range 52. I leveled out at 5,000 feet and throttled back to about 80 percent to conserve fuel. By listening to control I learned that we had ten minutes to go before our run on the target. Once we were in the air, there was no casual chatter on the radio, as each pilot listened attentively to range control.
I made a few wide circles to the left, timing them so I would be over the initial point to start the run at T minus sixty seconds. At this point I turned due east to line up with the target, reporting to mission control that I was starting the run, and dipped my left wing as a signal for Len to slip over to the left side into vic formation and for the flight to arm the napalm tanks and the jettison switches. We approached the target, a wooden shack, in a 20-degree dive with my gunsight pipper on a point about 25 yards short of the target. On my signal, we released the tanks at about 100 feet altitude by pressing the button on top of the stick and immediately pulled up into a climbing turn to the left. Looking back I could see the flames obliterating the target and sliding far beyond it, a good hit.
Going back into echelon we climbed to the rendezvous point with Si. I saw his P-84 circling ahead and slowly brought up my flight to join him. Len slipped below me into formation with Si, and Fred and I joined them as the second element. Si waved and pointed to himself as a signal that he had control of the flight.
We circled for about ten minutes, listening to the subsequent missions report in; then the B-29s that were to be our target reported that they were two minutes out on their run. They were to cross the range at about 400 feet from west to east. We were about 4,000 feet above them and slightly to the south. We started our dive, timed to make the simulated firing pass at the bombers from right to left, just in front of the stands. Si timed it perfectly, and we curved toward the bombers at about 450 mph, then broke away in a steep climbing turn. That was the scheduled finish of the demonstration, and we loosened up the formation and headed back to Eglin to land, satisfied that we had completed another successful show.