Edition:
October 30, 2009
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Readers of The Friday Flyer have the rare privilege of learning the unadorned story of a U.S. Air Force pilot, Dudley Thompson, who received many of his early assignments during the Cold War, was among those who flew above Viet Nam with bombs and napalm and later, as a career officer, worked on a variety of assignments, included flight testing school, advanced planning for the Space Shuttle and the development of non-nuclear weapons.
Most of Dudley Thompson’s Canyon Lake acquaintances know him from the Golf Course, where they probably are more aware of his “handicap” than his history. But with the City of Canyon Lake planning a Veterans Day celebration on November 11, this is a good time to learn what it takes to become a member of one of the most elite forces in military history: the U.S. Air Force.
Dudley’s personal story is so detailed and interesting, The Friday Flyer is devoting three issues to its telling – but even that won’t be enough to tell the whole story. To summarize his early years, Dudley says he first became interested in flying as a child.
While still in high school, he applied for and was accepted by the Air Force and Navy for evaluation to enter pilot training. He underwent two days of physical, psychological and intelligence testing designed by Stanford University to identify people who were most likely to complete military flight training. Out of 50 people taking the tests with Dudley, only 20 passed the first hurdle. The process of being assigned to a flight training class took time, so, after graduating from high school in 1951, Dudley entered the Air Force in January 1955.
A typical daily schedule for primary flight training at Hondo Air Base in Texas consisted of four hours of academics, one hour of physical training and six hours on the flight line. Two squadrons alternated flying/academics in two-week cycles of flying in the morning and academics in the afternoon. The instructors were civilians, mostly former military pilots.
By the end of October 1955, he had received training and flown solo in a PA-18 (Piper Super Cub) and T-6G. Primary training ended in March 1956, with Dudley logging 140 hours of flight time. He was beginning to fulfill those childhood ambitions of just a few years earlier.
Then, it was on to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, for Basic Pilot Training. “Basic training was a rude awakening,” says Dudley. “It was all military and even more intense than Primary, although the two-squadron morning/afternoon alternation still applied.”
Dudley says his class arrived at Laughlin on April 2; his first flight in a T-33 jet aircraft was April 7 and he soloed just over two weeks later on April 24. Class 56-U graduated on August 29, 1956, after which members were commissioned 2nd Lt. in the Air Force reserve and assigned to active duty.
“Your assignment depended on your class standing, which depended on academic, military and flight testing scores accumulated during Primary and Basic training,” says Dudley. “I finished 4th in my class and opted for fighter gunnery school flying the F-84F at Luke AFB in Arizona.”
Fighter gunnery school, as it was called in those days, was actually fighter tactics for air-to-air and air-to-ground attack, according to Dudley, who completed gunnery school in December 1956. He reported to his new assignment flying F-84s and T-33s at Randolph AFB in Texas, where he remained through 1958 until his squadron was disbanded. He got married in August 1957.
After a short stint in South Dakota, Dudley says his new squadron was moved to Sheppard AFB in Texas in February 1960 as part of a major dispersal of all bomber units in the Strategic Air Command (SAC).
“This was done to make it more difficult for the Soviet Union to take out a large number of our bomber aircraft and crews with a single weapon,” says Dudley. “There were three bomber squadrons and one tanker squadron at Ellsworth AFB and only one bomber squadron remained after the dispersal. The rest were relocated around the country.”
Dudley speaks briefly of military life for the families of pilots by saying the Air Force generally tried to put people of the same rank in the same of area of base housing while he lived on base at Sheppard.
“This worked out well because people of the same age tended to have kids of the same age who could play together and didn’t get on the nerves of more senior officers,” he says. “Our quarters were adjacent to the school grounds and my oldest daughter could walk to school when she started the first grade. There were many base activities aimed at families and my kids enjoyed life there. However they really didn’t know any civilian kids because it was difficult to enter the base due to security and the base school only had military dependants as students.”
Dudley explains that squadron duty was regimented, with the concept in those days to form a B-52 crew (aircraft commander, pilot, radar bombardier, navigator, electronic counter measure officer and gunner) that did everything together. They flew, went on alert and took leave as an integral group.
“A regular training flight started with a full day of mission planning prior to flying,” he says. “A typical mission lasted about 10 hours in the air. Normally it consisted of a 500-mile navigation leg, practice high altitude radar bomb runs against a radar bomb scoring site, aerial refueling, entry into a low level corridor for low altitude navigation to a low altitude radar bombing site and then return to home base for instrument approaches and landing practice. After the mission was complete, the flight was recapped and bombing scores were received from the radar bomb scoring sites. Every crew flew about three missions per month.”
In addition, Dudley explains, each crew had to pull alert duty, which consisted of seven days within an alert facility. The alert bombers, fully loaded with fuel, ammunition and nuclear weapons also were located within this secure compound. The alert facility had a full kitchen to serve about 60 people for each meal, along with sleeping quarters, two men to a room. It was their home away from home.
Almost immediately after arrival at Sheppard the airmen received a new requirement to launch the B-52 ground alert force within 15 minutes of receipt of a launch message. This was dictated because of improved Russian nuclear missile capability. Also, the requirement to have seven bombers on ground alert at all times meant that each B-52 crew had to pull approximately 15 days alert duty each month. Certification for alert duty required days of study by a crew on every aspect of a strike on the assigned target in the then Soviet Union.
“You studied every facet of the mission from launch, to refueling point, to ingress into enemy territory, tactics to elude air defenses, route to be flown, timing, target identification, egress from target area, safe bail-out points along the route, escape and evasion tactics if shot down and recovery at a post strike base,” says Dudley.
This process was repeated if the crew was assigned a new target and this happened often. Targets were changed as new intelligence became available, he explains. Because most of the data used in preparation was classified Top Secret, the crew study area was housed in a highly protected vault that could accommodate three crews at once.
“The whole certification process was quite intense, but you would expect no less when dealing with the employment of nuclear weapons,” says Dudley of this time in his life.
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