Rupert Red Two: A Fighter Pilot's Life From Thunderbolts to Thunderchiefs by Jack Broughton & Richard P. Hallion

Author:Jack Broughton & Richard P. Hallion [Broughton, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Motorbooks International
Published: 2008-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

It seemed like whatever Ike and I did was guaranteed to cause a confrontation with Colonel Mosley. We had a brand-new second lieutenant student pilot get lost one afternoon when he was on a solo F-80 acrobatic training mission. As he was running out of fuel, he spotted an abandoned dirt strip about a thousand feet long and over a hundred miles out in the desert. He bellied in his aircraft and slid off the end of the strip, but he was OK. One of our instructors homed in on the student’s radio transmissions, pinpointed his position, and relayed it to Ike and me in group ops. It was getting late in the afternoon, and since we didn’t want to leave him out there overnight with big thunder bumpers on the western horizon, it was time for action. Standby helicopters were not standard features in those days, but we did have a B-25 assigned to base operations that Colonel Mosely rode in when he had to go some place. Ike and I both had B-25 time, and Ike asked if I wanted to fly as his copilot. I was already grabbing a map as we headed for the flight line. Those two big R-2800 engines on a B-25 had a very distinctive roar, and Colonel Mosley called base ops demanding to know who was flying his aircraft without his permission. When they told him what was going on, he flew into a blistering rage, but we were long gone and had switched our radio off of tower frequency by then.

We easily found the forlorn-looking, gear-up F-80, and we made one practice approach to the tiny strip before going around and making the world’s greatest short-field landing. We got the lieutenant on board, and since he was in some degree of shock, he babbled incessant apologies until we finally had to give him a direct order to shut up and hang on. Then came the fun part, since we knew getting out of there was going to be iffy. As we taxied back to the other end of the little dirt strip, Ike and I joked that if we creamed Mosley’s B-25 and lived through it, we would at least be on our way out of Del Rio for sure.

We got so close to the end of that strip that our main gear was on the dirt strip and our tail was hanging out over the desert. Both of us stood on the top of the rudder pedals to lock the brakes against the power of the two big engines. We pushed the control yoke full forward to pin the nose wheel down as Ike palmed the throttle quadrant that sat between us with his right hand. With my left hand backing up his hand, he moved all six levers to the forward stop, so we had full throttle, max rpm, and full-rich mixture on both engines. The nose wheel tried to bounce, the main gear wanted to skip, and the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.