Page Seventeen

The radar personnel at Goose Bay had no success in repairing our radar. This was not of great concern since we would be part of the formation, but not leading it, or so we thought.  

After the normal briefing, my pilot and the Wing Commander came into the Navigators planning room to inform me that we would be flying lead. It seems the lead plane's fuel leaks had not been fixed. When I reminded them we had no radar, things started to change in a hurry. A command decision was made that we would not continue on the mission but would return directly back to Lake Charles. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Not so.  

Since we were no longer a component of the mission, we were scheduled to leave early for our flight back to Lake Charles. While we were on our takeoff roll, the tower operator told us to abort. It was too late to stop, so after takeoff we orbited the field while trying to determine what was going on. By the time it was determined that the abort direction was a mistake, we were too low on fuel to make it back to Lake Charles. It turned out that the main mission had been scrubbed because of weather and the tower operator erred in thinking we were still part of the mission.  

Anyway, we elected to make some touch and go landings since we still had fuel. When we called in for a full stop landing, we were asked to go around again. We were then informed that a KC-97 tanker, returning from the refueling area could not dump his JP4 fuel. Since the tanker could not consume the JP4, it would have to spend a lot of time using up most of it's 100 octane prior to landing.

We were asked to go up to 17,000 feet and take about 20.000 pounds of the JP4. We did this and returned to low level where a six-engine jet consumes JP4 in a hurry. The tanker crew treated us to a steak dinner at the Officer's Club after we landed.

After all this, the next day's trip back to Lake Charles was fairly routine, even with no radar.

Picture of Owen, Madeleine, Joyce, and Billy while at Lake Charles, 1954.

England Tour

The trip to England was made in a new plane we had obtained, since our assigned plane had been severely damaged. This happened when another crew lost control on landing after a post maintenance test flight, while we were on survival training in Nevada.

This is mentioned because we did not get a chance to give the new plane a good shakedown. Some of the problems we encountered can probably be attributed to this lack of flight test time, others might be attributed to the plane itself, as noted in one of the next segments (final months).

Just after in-flight refueling over the northern tip of Newfoundland, our radar started acting up. I decided it was good enough to get good absolute altitude readings for pressure pattern navigation over the Atlantic. The picture would be good enough to find England. The decision was to continue on. It turned out OK.

There was a little concern by tower personnel when we deployed our drogue chute on the downwind leg during landing. However, at that time, all the B47's had a drag chute, which is deployed on touchdown. This, being a new plane, was their first sight of a drogue chute and they thought we had really goofed.  

The weather was pretty much normal for England, which means few clear days. This meant we had trouble getting in visual RBS runs and never did get a chance to visually drop our practice spotting bombs on the range in England. To meet our practice bomb requirement, it was determined that we would go to Marrakech. Morocco, North Africa. We were scheduled to takeoff at about 4 p.m., stay overnight, and drop our bombs the next day. And return to England.

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