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Copyright © 2000 R. H.
Wood |
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How The O-2s Really Got There
by Richard H. Wood, Colonel, USAF
(Ret) It's 1967 or maybe early
1968, I forget, and the Air Force has bought a mess of Cessna Super
Skymasters and called them O-2s. The Cessna factory at Wichita, Kansas is
pumping them out at a pretty good clip and your problem is to figure out how
to get them to Vietnam where they are needed. Your choices are: 1. Fly them to
the West coast and turn them over to the Army for transport by cargo ship. 2. Take the
wings off them and stuff them three at a time into the belly of C-124s and
fly them over. 3. Fly them
over under their own power with no C-124 attached. Question: Which method was
used? Right! Every single one of those puppies was
hand-flown across the Big P to Vietnam. That sounds like it might have been a
Mickey Mouse operation. Believe me, it wasn't that good. Air Force Systems Command
(AFSC) was running that show and their knowledge stopped somewhat short of
knowing anything about ferrying airplanes. The Air Force had a perfectly
good organization called the 44th Aircraft Delivery Group which operated
world wide and managed the ferrying of all aircraft; except the O-2s. AFSC contracted with some
outfit in San Francisco to deliver the planes to Saigon. The contractor hired
a bunch of civilian pilots who couldn't find honest work elsewhere. Since the
O-2s were technically "public" aircraft (as opposed to civil
aircraft) no pilot's license was necessary to fly one and I'm not sure that
all of the pilots had licenses. Some of them were pretty good, but the rest
of them were the most god-awful collection of unqualified scruffy-looking
alcoholics you ever saw. The dregs of the flying profession. The deal worked like this.
The pilots were given a plane ticket to Wichita where they got a quickie
checkout in the O-2 if they needed one. Then they launched in bunches of four
and headed for Hamilton AFB on the west coast of California. Enroute, they
were instructed to carefully monitor and record their oil consumption, which,
of course, they did not do. That type of pilot does not monitor and record
oil consumption. At Hamilton, the Air Force
removed all the seats except the left front one. The seats were shipped to
Vietnam by air, which is what should have happened to the rest of the plane,
too. Extra fuel tanks were installed in the vacant floor space followed by
the pilot himself. He had to crawl over the co-pilot tank to get to the left
seat. Next, they installed an oil tank on top of the co-pilot tank followed
by a small emergency HF radio on top of that. Now, the pilot was truly locked
in. To get out, he could either wait for someone to remove the radio and oil
tank or crawl out the emergency escape window on the left side. Takeoff must have been
something to watch. With all that fuel, the planes were way over max gross
weight. They had no single engine capability at all for about the first five
hours of flight. If either engine hiccupped, the pilot went swimming. The route was Hawaii
(Hickam), Midway, Wake Island, Guam (Anderson), Philippines (Clark) and
Saigon (Tan Son Nhut.) The Hamilton-Hickam leg was by far the longest;
nominally about thirteen hours. The O-2s were carrying fuel for about
fourteen and a half hours of flight. Navigation was strictly
dead reckoning. The pilots took up a heading based on wind calculations and
flew out their ETA hoping to be lost within range of a Hawaiian radio
station. They had no long range navigation equipment. The fuel tanks were
disposable and were dropped off as they were no longer needed. The fuel pumps
were not disposable and the pilots were instructed to bring them back along
with their dirty underwear and the HF radio. The trip was supposed to take
about a week and each pilot carried an airline ticket from Saigon to Wichita
to go back and pick up another plane. For this, the pilots were paid $800 per
trip with the flight leader getting $1,000. They planned on averaging three
trips a month and getting rich doing it. How come I know so much
about this? Well, I was the Director of Safety at Hickam AFB and every single
one of over 300 O-2s passed through my domain and created almost constant
headaches. Before this all started, I had no idea what an O-2 even looked
like much less any knowledge of the overall ferrying scheme. The trouble started with
the very first flight and began with the extra oil tank. The reason for
determining oil consumption on the Wichita-Hamilton leg was to know how much
oil to add during the really long legs. There were no oil quantity gages.
Shortly after takeoff from Hamilton, boredom set in and the pilots would give
the oil tank wobble pump a jab or two and squirt some more oil into the
engines. The O-2 didn't need that
much oil. All this did was overservice the engines which resulted in
fluctuating oil pressure. The pilots didn't like that at all, so they added
more oil which led to more pressure fluctuation. Meanwhile, they were totally
lost and not getting much closer to Hawaii. Time for the old MAYDAY call on
the HF radio. When that call came in,
the Coast Guard in Hawaii was running a very interesting seminar on sea
rescue in downtown Honolulu. I was attending which is how I found out that we
had an O-2 problem. The Coast Guard shut down the seminar and launched their
C-130 and a pair of cutters to find the O-2s; which they did. They herded them to the
nearest runway which happened to be the Marine Corps Air Station at Kanehoe
on the Northeast side of Oahu. I drove over the mountains to Kanehoe to find
out what the hell this was all about. That's when I saw my first O-2;
actually my first four O-2s. Aside from being ugly, they were all soaked with
oil overflowing from both engines and they didn't have ten gallons of gas
among them. One had flamed out taxiing in from landing. They had been
airborne for 14 hours and 45 minutes. The Coast Guard was really pissed when
they learned the full story and was making noises about sending someone a
bill for the rescue effort. I must say, I agreed with them. That silliness continued
for three or four weeks with every single flight of O-2s getting into some
sort of trouble. At Hickam, the O-2 pilots were fairly easy to find. Most of
the time they were draped over the bar at the O-Club; a situation which was
attracting the attention of the Officers Wives Club; always a dangerous thing
to do. I went to PACAF
Headquarters and told them what was going on and they were absolutely
appalled. Civilian misfits ferrying Air Force airplanes across the Pacific to
a combat zone? No way! Between us, we began
firing off messages to get this idiocy stopped. AFSC couldn't understand what
the problem was and probably still doesn't. Hamilton AFB was taking a lot of
heat for participating and allowing them to launch at all. I was agitating
about the stupidity of this through all the safety channels. I think I may
have mentioned that when the inevitable accident occurred, they better hope
it was out of my area. If I had to investigate it, they were definitely not
going to like the report. I was prepared to write most of the report right
then before the accident even happened. AFSC backed down and
agreed to let the 44th Aircraft Delivery Group run the operation. The 44th
wasn't too happy about that because the civilian pilots didn't seem to take
instructions very well. Nevertheless, that brought some organization to the
festivities which included things like mission planning, briefings, weather
analysis, flight following and escort. The O-2s weren't allowed to fly
unless accompanied by a C-47 or C-7 Caribou who could fly at their speed and
handle the navigation. That wasn't much of a problem as there were two or
three of those planes being ferried each week to Vietnam. That procedure eliminated
most of my problems and things settled down to a routine. The delivery rate
to Vietnam was slowed somewhat, but I think more total planes actually got
there because of it. During the entire process, only two planes were lost.
One ditched due to engine failure on the Wake-Guam leg. The pilot managed to
get out of the plane and bobbed around in his life jacket until picked up by
a Japanese cargo ship. The other crashed in the Philippines killing the
pilot. I never knew the circumstances. We had, of course, the
occasional problem at Hickam. I remember one pilot who landed nose gear first
and managed to snap the gear off completely and ding the front propeller. I
went out to see what had happened and got a load of bullshit and a strong
whiff of gin from the pilot. The plane (he claimed) was nose heavy on landing
and the elevator trim was inoperative. He couldn't get the nose up.
Furthermore, his transmitter was out and he couldn't tell anyone about his
problems. I checked the plane and found the elevator trimmed full nose down,
but the trim switch and trim tab worked just fine. Just to the left of the
trim switch, I noticed that the microphone toggle switch was actually bent
backwards. After several hours of martinis, the pilot was trying to trim
using the mic switch. He trimmed the plane full nose down while trying to
talk to the control tower on the trim switch. Case closed. None of these accidents
consumed any of my time. I had learned another quirk in the AFSC way of doing
business. Appearances aside, the aircraft were not Air Force aircraft and
wouldn't be until they arrived in Saigon and were formally delivered and
accepted. Since they weren't, technically, Air Force aircraft; they couldn't
have an Air Force accident. The planes weren't registered as civil aircraft,
so they couldn't have a civil accident either. They were in regulatory limbo
and any accidents were non-events. Nobody cared. That suited me just fine.
I had other things to do and I couldn't see how an investigation of stupidity
would contribute anything to the Air Force safety program. Incidentally, how do you
suppose they got the O-2s out of Vietnam and back to the United States? They
took the wings off, stuffed them three at a time into the belly of C-124s and
flew them back. AFSC was not involved which, I later learned, tended to
improve almost any operation. Author contact Info: Richard H. Wood 4563 El Dorado Way, #124 Bellingham, WA 98226 360-752-0199 |
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