My first car
By the time we get to Pensacola I could fly an aircraft solo but couldn’t drive a car. Keith had never owned a car and I was always too young to drive any of the band’s fleet so I had never bothered to learn. No problem.
The Mainside BOQ has a car hire facility where, for some trivial amount, we can rent a gigantic ‘65 Chevrolet Impala automatic and because we are officers no licence needs to be shown. This solves the problem of learning how to start, brake and steer but leaves a gap in one’s knowledge around gears and the mysteries of the clutch.
I rented a BOQ car and bought a six-pack of beer for a blind date to the drive-in. Unfortunately, I needed to top up with petrol before the movie and failed to impress my date with my driving skills by taking out the stacked display of oil next to the bowser. Either that or her not being a beer drinker led to a quiet night at the movies.
It’s the last day before Christmas in Florida in 1966 and we are all going on a two-week vacation. It’s a ground school day and Macca and I are next to each other in the Morse Code class. It’s a requirement to be able to receive Morse code at twelve words per minute in order to identify radio navigation beacons from a three-letter identifier. I guess the Navy hasn’t yet realised that all the air navigation charts had the identifiers printed in dot/dash format right alongside the letters so all one needs to do is be able to tell a dot from a dash and all is well, but that’s beside the point. We are all in individual cubicles with headphones for this critical exercise, so naturally Macca and I are having a chat:
Me: Thank Christ we’re off on vacation tomorrow. Did you get your holiday pay?
Him: Yeah. $700 will come in handy over Christmas.
Me: What should we do for the vacation?
Him: I thought we were going to drive down to Mexico.
Me: Maybe if we had a car…
And before the dots and dashes have a chance to overwhelm our concentration, a head pops up from an adjacent cubicle.
Random head: (Actually a USN Ensign student) Guys I’ve got a ‘58 Corvette I’m selling. It’s yours for only $700.
Wow. A Corvette. It fits my budget and looks great too. Cream with a blue hardtop and side highlight stripe. Three-speed manual, 327 V8. After a mercifully short test drive curtailed by much kangarooing from the clutch, a transfer form is signed, my total holiday pay is given over, and I’m the proud owner of my first car.
Wacka kindly volunteers to teach me to drive and while I never scared myself, the Corvette passenger’s industrial strength grab handle got a good workout.
My pride and joy. 60s car fans will recognise a Triumph TR4 and a Pontiac GTO convertible alongside.
We’re finally flying
Having completed the initial entry phase we are shipped off to Saufley Field, about a 30 minute drive west of Mainside, near the Alabama border. For the first time I’ve got an American roommate. He’s a great guy, just out of college in Chicago, so he can show me how to survive in a two-story wooden barracks with a testosterone-fuelled college fraternity culture.
My downfall is the communal TV room just outside our door. The biggest hit is Monday nights when The Monkees is on. The whole floor gathers for the breakthrough in zaniness that brightens the start of the week, fuelled by numerous Budweisers. If the communists could see us gathered around the screen singing Hey Hey We’re The Monkees, they’d be trembling in their boots.
The T-34, derogatorily called the ‘Teenie Weenie” by qualified pilots, turns out to be a great aircraft to fly. Solid, easy to handle, no tail wheel so no ground loops. It’s even aerobatic and I’m discovering how to get back from an aero flight without having thrown up. My activities the night before flying seems to hold a key to the mystery.
There was an appalling accident rate in the US Navy following the Korean War with the introduction of advanced jet aircraft coinciding with the need for more night and all-weather strike capabilities. The solution was the fleet-wide introduction of the NATOPS (Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization) program. This program introduced a NATOPS manual for each aircraft that was the pilot’s bible. Not just facts and figures on how the aircraft worked but standardised procedures for emergencies, different flight phases from pre-flight to shut down, and formation flying among others.
All lessons are structured around the procedures in the NATOPS manual, and a solo check and future solos are scheduled so there is no competitiveness around the shortest time to solo. Because of the sheer volume of flights launched daily from Saufley Field, there was a dedicated take-off runway and departure patterns, and a dedicated re-entry, circuit and landing pattern that required no clearances or radio calls. The key was understanding what was going on outside your cockpit and how the pattern was to be flown. If we could all do that it was amazing how smoothly the system worked.
Touch and go landing practice was conducted at multiple outlying fields, once again with no radios and using a complicated arrival procedure. As far as labour was concerned, all it took was a sailor or two at the end of the runway with a flare pistol to shoot at any pilots who hadn’t lowered their wheels prior to trying to land.
As the name implies, the Flight Grading phase is where the USN pilots are chosen to proceed through the jet or piston training path. The guys chosen for jets will head off to Mississippi to fly the T-2 Buckeye trainer and the rest of them, along with all the Aussies, will go to T-28 basic training.
A T-34 over Florida.