A P2V flight crew consisted of 10 people. Note the leather flight jackets. You had to be on a flight crew to be issued one of those jackets. They were sort a status symbol because not everyone who wants to be a crew member gets to be one. Patrolling for submarines was one of the aircraft crews primary jobs. When we found a suspected sub contact with the MAD electronic equipment, we would attempt to bring the sub to the surface using sonobuoys, and PDCs. The Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) gear is in the pointed tail section. It detects the submarine's presence under the sea by sensing the subs disturbance of the earth's magnetic lines of flux. Then the hunt is on! We drop sonobuoys to try and pinpoint the subs location. The sonobuoys send out an electronic signal that pings off the sub. Drop several sonobuoys and the sub's location can be exactly determined. Then we drop PDCs to warn the sub we found them. PDCs are Practice Depth Charges. They won't harm the sub but they will certainly hear the noise they make when they explode! The submarine Captain will surface the submarine if he can't evade the PDCs. We found some subs!
They sonobuoy is the photo with the parachute. The PDC is small bomb on the left.
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Sonobuoy
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| PDC |
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