19 Navy 1 – OCS, Flight Training

Navy 1 – OCS, Flight Training

I attended a few meetings at the Navy Reserve center in Chattanooga through the sponsorship of my older friend (a WW2 Veteran), where for entertainment they showed pornographic movies, which I thought disgusting and deemed a waste of the Navy’s time and money.  When they administered the ASVAB test to me, they said I scored the highest they had seen, and should go to Officers’ Candidate School (OCS) in RI, being a college graduate.  Pursuant to this, I enlisted on March 19, 1965, at Nashville (farthest I had been from home) and was flown to RI to begin the 16 week OCS program in April.

In those days I fancied myself a western star, and bought a brown 10-gallon hat, grey shirt, black “Kentucky colonel” string bow tie, (cool, remember?).  While the Navy was recruiting me for OCS, I drove my mother’s car back and forth to Nashville, took in the Grand Ole Opry at the old Ryman auditorium, and saturated the car (and my mom and an older ladyfriend) with smoke from my stinky cigars.

OCS covered a lot of ground on the Naval base, and was on a hill.  The student body was divided into rival groups named for the military letters (I was assigned to Lima Company), each with its own Navy officer and Chief Petty Officer responsible for training, discipline, and routine administration.  I was taken to relatively sumptuous Nimitz Hall, where was the revered “quarterdeck”, with its daily assigned OC “officer of the deck”; I remember the first night we had to deal with a new OC arrival who was throwing up due to having eaten “fried clams”.  Each OC was given a plastic tag to wear above the shirt pocket, engraved with his name, company, and the OCS logo; the tag had four stripes, covered with black electrical tape, which he was to uncover month by month, until he had all stripes uncovered in his last month – this showed seniority in the program.

That summer, we marched (or ran) most places, including the mess (chow) hall, where we typically ate hurried meals, always under the ever watchful eye of our company’s Chief Petty Officer, whom we called (behind his back) “Grunion”.  For intramural sports we did softball, and swam in the base pool (at which I excelled).  We also trained there for the “Dilbert Dunker” (simulated aircraft ditching), “PLFs” (parachute landing falls (jump from a tower with ‘chute attached).  There was a student band, which often played marches at formations.  Our courses taught, among other subjects, navigation, (we used charts and sextants), seamanship (I remember the “BZ”=Bravo-Zulu or “well done” in signal flags) trainer, which simulated several ships operating simultaneously, and leadership (eg prioritizing country, Navy, family, self).  Most notably there was Physical Education with its obstacle course and its two-mile run through the woods.

Occasionally we were allowed off base for week-end “liberty”, which I spent, like most of the other officer candidates, sleeping in a rented waterfront room, roaming the night clubs of Newport, chiefly on Thames Street.

There were scheduled medical examinations and shots.  We were issued various uniform items (I thought my “bridge” coat was very grand); this is when I ordered the beautiful stainless steel personalized Navy sword, with its “officer’s knot”, that I wore for special occasions.  It was very hot that summer, and I remember lying on my bunk in our wooden barracks-like room hearing  the loud music of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals from nearby Cardine’s Field (among others, Odetta sang “Work Song”).  Near the end of my period at OCS I asked for and was assigned to the flight program, by virtue of my good grades.   We were each given a “Sea Chest” book (like a high school or college annual) to commemorate our OCS experience.  On August 20, 1965, I was commissioned an Ensign in the Navy and sent to Pensacola FL for flight training; this would add about 18 months to my service time.

Because ground school couldn’t take me until the following spring, I was temporarily assigned to the helicopter training squadron HT-8 at Ellyson Field in FL near Pensacola where they flew the Bell H-13 “Sioux” helicopter.

My leader there, a senior lieutenant commander, told me that astronauts, elite fliers, found helicopters, especially hovering, most difficult; he did with me a dead-motor technique called autorotation, descending straight over the field and executing a “flare” just before landing.

Flight training included also young men who would be pilots for the Marines and the Coast Guard; it began with ground school at the Naval Air Station Pensacola “Mainside” (home of the famed “Blue Angels”), where we learned principles of flight and metrology (most of which we promptly forgot) and memorized the cockpit of the Beechcraft T-34 “Mentor”, our first airplane.  Physically it was as demanding as OCS had been, minus the obstacle course; for housing we lived in two-man dormitory-style rooms.  We had periodic medical examinations by flight surgeons, and ground simulator training.

After ground school we moved to Saufley Field, about five miles from Mainside.  There each student pilot was assigned to his own instructor pilot.  At Saufley (whose call sign was “Shoo Fly”) we began a series of 16 1-hour “hops” culminating with a solo flight, where we landed on dirt at a “farmer’s field”; our instructor left the plane, and we took off and landed, picking him back up, and flew back to our home base.  Following each student pilot’s solo, there was a congratulatory sort of ceremony at the officer’s club where the instructor cut off his pupil’s black tie.  After my tie-cutting I went to my roommate’s church and was saved there!

Next we went to another training airfield, called Whiting Field in Milton FL, about 20 miles north of Pensacola, where we learned to fly the North American T-28 “Trojan”, with its much more powerful Wright radial engine.  Like the T-34, this aircraft had dual controls, and the senior pilot sat in front.  At this field we learned, by succession, basic flight of the T-28; “unusual attitudes” in which the instructor put the airplane into a turn or upside-down, usually off-speed, and then handed over control to his student, who had an attached instrument hood or “bag” pulled down over his head; the student pilot’s task was to recover the airplane to straight and level flight at its normal speed of 180 knots (a “knot” is a nautical mile per hour; since a nautical mile is 2000 yards, not the 1760 yards of land measurement, a knot is roughly 1.35 times as fast as a mile per hour; eg 180 knots is about 205 mph), and return controls to the instructor; this was the most difficult stage, and it was here that I learned the value of a “barf bag”.  From this point all our flights were solo.  Next we learned acrobatics (inverted flight, loops and rolls).  During my time at Whiting, while waiting for clear weather so we could fly, I made friends with another student pilot, who was always honing his survival knife razor-sharp and admired hand-made knives by WD Randall of Orlando FL; I ordered one in stainless steel with my name etched, but it broke at a serration (must have had a flaw from hardening).  While there we also learned “instrument flight rules” (IFR) and formation flying, in which we typically flew four airplanes together (extremely dangerous), in a line or echelon.  After formation we celebrated by a day flight and overnight (RON) at Brownsville TX; it was so hot, I just lay in my assigned room with an oscillating fan pointed at me; the next day we flew back to Whiting.

Then we were transferred to Mainside in Pensacola, where we learned to fly the T-28C (equipped with a tail-hook for carrier landing).  We first learned the “meatball” optical landing system and aircraft carrier procedures, followed by practice at an outlying airstrip.  I seemed to be having trouble at this point, so a “Student Pilot Disposition” (Speedy) Board was called to consider my fitness to complete the programs safely (a recent convert, I was probably over-zealous in my demeanor toward them).  The board’s conclusion was that I could complete, which I did.  When the big day came, we flew out to the training carrier USS Lexington (CVS-16) in the ocean and did an arrested landing, which was thrilling as the arresting hook engaged the wire (cable), pulling the plane to a sudden but smooth stop.  We waited aboard the underway carrier in the officers’ “mess” (dining room).  When it was time to take the planes off again, the ship turned back into the wind, and we simply flew off the deck (the ship’s steam catapults were used only for jets); after a brief dip towards the water the plane gained flying speed, and we returned to our home field at Mainside.

After this exhilarating conclusion, we were awarded the coveted wings of a Naval Aviator; mine were pinned above the left breast pocket of my uniform by my fiancée (we broke up later) as my mother, down from Chattanooga for the occasion, proudly looked on.