Tonight’s Buzz’s Bedtime Story is an interesting tale of military commitment with a touch of frivolity. You might need an adult beverage for this one. Come in close.
When I was a young aircraft commander in Air Force C-141s, my crew and I were scheduled to fly from Charleston AFB, South Carolina, to Frankfurt, Germany, crew rest, and then continue down range to a highly classified American military base in the Middle East. The Cold War was raging, and the U.S. was reaching out to all points on the globe to fight the spread of communism. This particular installation, in fact, had been a Soviet military base previously. It was mostly underground and hidden from satellites. The runway even blended into the desert seamlessly, making it very difficult to see from above. We took it over when the Soviets abandoned this part of the world. On this day, passengers and cargo to remain confidential.
We started our initial descent into our destination on a very hot day. As we started down, we had an engine failure. No biggie, we have three more. We ran our checklists, shut down the failed engine, and safely, successfully landed.
After deplaning our “passengers,” I got on the horn via HF radios (super long range) to chat with Military Airlift Command Headquarters back at Scott AFB, Illinois. Our global command post and daddy rabbit. I said, “Hey, we’re here. We lost an engine on arrival, but no other issues. We’re currently deplaning.” I went on with an appeal. “Since it’s potentially an international incident thing, I think we can get out of here fine on three. We’re totally empty.” I knew we could safely take off and fly back to Germany, where we had a base of operations and C-141 maintenance. Made sense in my captain mind.
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The controller on the other end asked me, “Do you have a copilot?” I looked at my copilots quizzically and smirked, and said, “Yeah, in fact, I have two.” “I’m an instructor pilot; I also have a very experienced first pilot and copilot.” And laughed.
They didn’t think it was funny. The senior controller got on the call, a colonel, as I recall, and said, “No. You’re spending the night until we can fly a maintenance team in and replace your engine.”
So, we’re stuck, in a place that doesn’t host visitors, in a place we weren’t supposed to be, in tents, in the desert. We moved our stuff into our community tent, picked out our bunks, and swept out piles of sand while, all the time, scanning for scorpions. We were going to make the most of this, damnit!
The other military folks stationed there were fantastic! They welcomed us with open arms. Apparently, we were their entertainment in a place where there wasn’t any. They fed us and invited us to their underground bar. We drank beers in the middle of a desert, told stories, and got to know our hosts. Most were junior enlisted Air Force on unaccompanied deployments. They asked us to sign the walls of the bar. Apparently, we were the first aircrew in forever that was forced to layover there. We were rock stars!
As we walked back to our tents, I stopped and looked at the skies. Just taking it all in. The stars were brilliant! There was no other light in the desert across the horizon. The sky was huge and sparkling like a Christmas tree. It was stunning. This career took me all over the world, and this was another remarkable experience.
The next morning, in what can only be a testimony to the amazing maintenance I received as an Air Force pilot, our jet was fixed. A team had flown down from Rhein-Main, Germany, and changed an engine, overnight, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. So, we hopped to and headed to the jet. We planned to fly back to Europe to return our maintenance guys, turn, and fly back to the states.
As we were running preflight checklists, the base commander came to the cockpit and asked me if we could do a “fly by” on our way “out of town.” He said there’d be two fire trucks spraying water across the runway and said to me, “Get as close as you can to the water.” I said, “Hell, I’ll hit it.” I asked the crew if they were ok with it, and they were, to a man.
We took off, and I did a sweeping left turn to pick up speed and come back around. I lined up on the runway about a mile out at about 350 knots and 50 feet above the ground. I aimed for the apex of the water arc from the trucks. We hit the water. Promises made, promises kept! The above picture made its way back to my base and my wing commander. He admonished me and laughed. I happened to be his executive officer. He told me “to never do that again.” I didn’t.
Flying the line!
