Shortly after that incident, I was fortunate enough to fly as copilot in the B-45 through the kindness of the assistant culprit Capt. Mac Greenamyre, a good friend and one of the best pilots in the light bomb squadron. I found it easy to fly and much more responsive to the controls than other bombers I had flown. Also, it felt more like flying a fighter because the seats were in tandem rather than side-by-side. One hundred and nine B-45s were built, and they saw service in the United States and Europe. A photoreconnaissance version, the RB-45C, saw action in Korea. They remained in the inventory until 1958.
The light bomb squadron had a Consolidated OA-10 Catalina amphibian flying boat (famous in the Navy as the PBY) that they were using for air-sea rescue tests. One afternoon, the test officer met me on the ramp and asked if I would like to fly it. I jumped at the chance, and about an hour later, after a cockpit checkout and some words of wisdom on water flying, I found myself in the left seat of a flying boat taxiing out for takeoff. After a long run we lifted off and climbed toward the east end of Choctawhatchee Bay, away from the Eglin runways. The water conditions in the bay were perfect, with some gentle waves driven by a 10-mph wind. With my instructor's guidance I made two good touch and go landings (on water they are called, appropriately, splash and dash). After the second one the instructor suggested that we come to a full stop on the next landing and take a brief swim in the bay (yet another advantage of an Air Force career). After the next touchdown I cut the power, and we stopped in a short distance, without the gentle deceleration I was used to on runways. Once off the step, it stopped almost immediately and went so low in the water that for a moment I thought my next command should be ''Up periscope." I had never been in a PBY at rest in the water, and I didn't realize how close to the pilot's window the water level rose.
A few months later the OA-10 was transferred to the heavy bomber squadron, and shortly thereafter it crashed into the Gulf with tragic results. The pilots had been practicing landings in the bay to gain familiarity with the aircraft, since none of them had any previous flying-boat experience. Besides the regular crew of two pilots and a flight engineer, there were several other pilots and a group of bombardiers and navigators aboard getting in some of their required flying time. After the pilots had made a few landings in the bay, they decided to try some rough-water landings in the Gulf, which was about as rough that day as the Gulf gets except during a hurricane. The first landing was successful, but during the attempted takeoff, before the plane reached flying speed, it bounced high off a large wave, and the pilot instinctively pushed the nose down to keep from stalling and dived into an oncoming wave. The fuselage ripped open, and the plane sank like a stone. Most of those on board managed to escape, but the pilot and several of those up front were not able to get out and went down with the plane.
One of the most spectacular weapons that we tested was the 11.75-inch rocket known as the Tiny Tim. It was developed and used by the Navy during World War II to attack and penetrate the concrete Japanese bunkers on the Pacific islands. The exhaust plume from the rocket motor was so large that the Tiny Tim could not be launched directly from a standard wing rack. When the firing button was pressed, the rocket dropped from the rack still attached to the airplane by a lanyard, then fired when it was about six feet below the wing. The Tiny Tim was a proven weapon, but we were testing the capability of the F-84 to launch it with accuracy. Lt. Jack Fallon, who had recently joined the squadron from the 1st Fighter Group, was the test officer and did most of the firings; I launched only one pair of the rockets, but I flew as chase pilot on several missions to check the underside of the F-84 for possible damage. There was no damage on the first missions, so there was no further need for a chase plane.
Evidently the editors of Life magazine thought that a Tiny Tim launch was spectacular, because they sent one of their photographers, Jay Eyerman, to Eglin to photograph a few launches. This was accomplished on regular test missions because Tiny Tims were too expensive to fire just for the magazine. On the Life missions, Jack Fallon flew the F-84, and Cyclone Davis flew an A-26 with the photographer and me riding in the glass nose. My job was to pass information back and forth between Mr. Eyerman, Jack, and Cyclone by radio and intercom. I was also to advise him what to expect during the firings.
I was amazed at the equipment the photographer loaded in the nose: about four cameras of various kinds, a wet-cell automobile battery to run one of the large cameras, and a bag full of lenses, filters, extra film, and many items I did not recognize. There was barely room for us in the nose, so I rode in the jump seat next to Cyclone, except when I had to be in the nose. We flew two missions in the A-26, and Jack flew four in the F-84, firing a total of eight Tiny Tims. He landed to be rearmed while we remained in the air. When the photographer was satisfied with the position of the F-84 relative to our plane, I gave Jack the signal to fire. Eyerman used two cameras at once, the motor-driven large camera and a 35mm camera, taking a series of shots with each. Not being familiar with professional photography, I thought he was wasting a lot of film, but he said that film was the cheapest part of the equation. A few months later the photos appeared in Life, and they were terrific.
In 1950 Jack Fallon was transferred to Korea; he returned to Eglin the next year after completing his tour. We were stationed in Washington then, and we were greatly saddened to hear that while Jack was flying under the hood in the backseat of a T-33, making a practice ground-controlled approach, an F-84 collided with the T-33 about fifty feet above the ground, killing all three pilots. The tower had cleared the F-84 for a simulated flame-out approach (a steep overhead approach) on the same runway but had not been notified by the GCA operator of the T-33's approach.
One of the major problems in aerial gunnery training is the lack of suitable targets, especially since the advent of jet fighters with their higher speeds and high-altitude operation. The standard six-by-thirty flag targets flutter so violently at high speed that they tear apart. In addition, the extreme low temperatures encountered at high altitude make the wire mesh of the targets brittle, increasing their tendency to rip. For years we had been hearing rumors that the armament laboratory at Wright Field was developing a much-improved target that would eliminate these problems and make for much more accurate scoring. So far no such device had materialized. One day, however, Rode called and asked me to attend a briefing at the armament branch on the new target device, which was finally ready for firing tests. The briefer from the armament lab described the device, which was called the firing error indicator (FEI). It was an acoustic receiver that was to be towed behind an airplane where it could record the sound of bullets passing through a 25-foot radius in a vertical plane centered on the unit. It used a rho-theta method of recording the location of the bullets, rho being the range or distance from the center and theta the angle (zero degrees, in a 360-degree circle, representing a point directly above the center). For example, a bullet that passed 15 feet in front of the target at the target level would be recorded as rho 15, theta 90, while one that passed 15 feet behind, at the target level, would be recorded as 15-270. The ground testing had been successfully completed, and the device was now ready for the aerial firing tests, which would be run at Eglin starting in about two weeks. I was selected to be the test officer.