VP-26 Fun Flying Stories

TRAILING WIRE ANTENNA. The trailing wire antenna is the antenna the aircraft radio operator used to send and receive messages. The antenna position is on the bottom of the aircraft. The antenna wire is attached to a drum and can be trailed out behind the aircraft as much as 120 feet to increase the reception and sending of radio signals. There's a heavy weight at the end of the trailing wire that helps keep it steady instead of flapping around in the air.

When landing on one of the
runways at NAS Brunswick,
there at the beginning of the
landing strip, was a Texaco sign, Ya know, one of those with THE BIG RED STAR! The radio operators would occasionally "forget" to reel in the trailing wire antenna with its heavy weight on the end and attempt to dent that BIG RED STAR! It was a contest among the radio operators.

ROCKET RUNS. Underneath the wing just inside the number 104 you can see four rails. There's four under both wings. Those are wing rocket rails. Rocket runs are fun because you throw a smoke light out the after station window. The smoke lights float and smoke comes out the top of it so the pilots can see it. On the rocket run, the pilot puts the aircraft in a steep dive and fires a rocket off at the smoke light, pulls the aircraft out of the dive, climbs back to altitude, and makes another rocket run. Exciting stuff! Since we have three pilots, you make a lot of rocket runs to keep them proficient. It's one of my favorite things we do.

FLYING WITH THE HATCH OPEN. Just behind the ESM antennas is a 3 foot wide by 4 foot long crew entrance hatch. That's where the two men in the after station get in and out of the aircraft to install or remove the landing gear pins and the wheel chocks. On hot days we would open the hatch to let in the cool air. Then we'd have a big open hole in the bottom of the plane and we'd swing across the open hatch to get to our duties in the front of the after station instead of closing the hatch door. Nope, not us! The really funny part was when we would be carrying a couple of military passengers and the hatch was open. No place for them to sit except the floor. They'd sit there wall-eyed at the open hatch and watch us swing across it, It was a good way to keep them from bugging us. One time these two non aviation junior officers were flying with us and after a few hours they were looking for a bathroom. You could see their eyeballs floating. Finally one asks "Where do you take a leak?" Gatch gets up, opens the hatch, and points. "Right here." You could see the doubt in their eyes. We tried not to laugh but couldn't do it! Then we showed them where the piss tubes were and they didn't want to whip it out and pee in front of us. We were hysterical!

Formation Flying. We also practice flying in formation. The main job of the bow observer and the two guys in the after station was to help our pilots keep an eye on THE OTHER AIRCRAFT!

FLYING ON JUST THE JETS. We also practiced emergency procedures. Such as feathering the propellers and flying on just the jets. The jet engines are normally only used to assist the prop engines on takeoff and landing. However, it one of the prop engines goes bad, your can feather that propeller and shutdown that bad engine and use the jet instead. Usually you would just have the jet in idle while the aircraft was cruise flying because the jet makes much more power than the prop engine. You can see in the photo below that the propellers aren't turning and the aircraft is flying on just the jets! Normally the flatter part of the propeller faces into the wind. When you feather the propeller, you rotate the thinnest part of it into the wind. With the leading edge (the thin part of the prop) facing the wind, it won't spin when you shutdown the propeller engine. If you left it spinning it would likely destroy the engine.