air force times

I entered the Air Force in 1978, the year a Soviet fighter aircraft attacked a Korean Airlines 707 that had inadvertently wandered into Soviet airspace. The Korean Air pilots managed to crash land on a frozen lakebed, though one passenger was killed. Five years into my career another Soviet fighter intercepted a Korean Airlines aircraft, this one a 747, after it strayed into Soviet airspace in the Far East. Convinced that it was a US Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, the Soviets shot the passenger plane down. This time all 269 people on board were killed.

As it happens, I was an airborne Russian translator in the Air Force and flew as a crew member on RC-135s. The incident over the Sea of Japan, therefore, was very personal. One of my assignments was at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, where the Soviets thought their supposed “RC-135” had originated.

The primary aircraft I flew on were the RC-135V/W (Project Rivet Joint), RC-135S (Project Cobra Ball), and EC-130 (Projects Comfy Levi and Senior Scout). When I retired from the Air Force I was flying as a Mission Crew Supervisor on a different type of EC-130 (Project Compass Call). Unlike the reconnaissance aircraft, the Compass Call’s mission was to find enemy communications and destroy them through noise jamming.

RC-135 V/W (Project Rivet Joint)

The RC-135V/W was the Air Force’s intelligence collection workhorse when I was in the Air Force. In my day, Rivet Joint’s crew of thirty flew traditional Signals Intelligence missions. My first operational mission was on an RC-135 V, tail number 39792. Coincidentally, my last RC-135 mission was on the same aircraft during Operation Desert Shield, flown from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The typical Rivet Joint mission scenario was to take off in tandem with at least one KC-135 tanker aircraft, rendezvous en route with the tanker(s) to top off with fuel, then fly into the “sensitive area,” a defined region that required Joint Chiefs of Staff approval prior to entry. Soviet fighter aircraft routinely intercepted and escorted us during our missions; when one ran low on fuel, another usually took its place.

A great many of the Rivet Joint missions I flew were conducted over the northern Pacific Ocean (Kamchatka Peninsula) and the Barents Sea (Kola Peninsula). Kamchatka missions lasted 15+ hours and required one aerial tanker; Barents missions were about 19 hours and required two.

There’s not a lot I can share about these missions other than the fact that we were awfully good at what we did. By the time I started flying, RC-135s had been operational for over 15 years; other aircraft, such as RB-29s, RB-50s, RC-130s (Project “Sun Valley”), had flown these kinds of missions going back to the late 1940s.

The missions were exciting enough that I rarely slept well the night before. The regulation on crew rest required eight hours of sleep in the twelve hour period before we showed up at operations; not many managed to do that. Each mission was unique unto itself; we never knew if the day would be dull or, as one of my friends once said, we’d “fly into a fur ball.”

RC-135S (Project Cobra Ball)

I also flew on a very unique RC-135: the S-model. Known as Cobra Ball, the mission was to collect data related to Soviet ICBM missile tests. Unlike Rivet Joint missions, my role on Cobra Ball was singular: listen for Soviet fighter aircraft and tell our pilots what their intentions were.

Though based near Fairbanks, Alaska, Cobra Ball aircraft operated exclusively from Shemya, a small island at the end of the Aleutian chain. The reason was pragmatic: Soviet ICBM tests terminated near the center of the Kamchatka Peninsula, a mere 30-minute flight from Shemya.

We rotated to Shemya two weeks at a time every few months and lived in rooms that opened onto the hangar, where the aircraft was parked. When certain agencies had indications the Soviets were about to test a missile, a nasty horn, called a klaxon, blared throughout the alert facility. We’d run to the jet, don our prepositioned flight gear, and strap in for immediate takeoff. It was quite the adrenaline rush: the first time I experienced it we’d been airborne for a half hour before I realized I was barefoot in my boots; during the melee I’d forgotten to put socks on.

On lucky days we collected data on incoming warheads and were back at Shemya within a few hours. On bad days we flew our racetrack pattern “boring holes in the sky.” We called the latter missions “tunas,” a reference to trolling (and not catching a damn thing).

The weather at Shemya made for treacherous flying. Surrounded by the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea, snowstorms, howling winds, and rain squalls were constant. Even on good flying days, Cobra Ball pilots had to deal with landing in crosswinds that were outside the aircraft’s safety limits. This is how one former Cobra Ball pilot described landing at Shemya:

Flying final approach you could be in dense fog, normally associated with still conditions, while simultaneously having to deal with a 30-knot crosswind gusting to 70 knots. You had to be very hands-on. [T]he airplane could be weather-vaned 30 degrees to the runway, [meaning] the aircraft commander could be in the left seat looking out of the right-side window just to see down the runway. Flaring the aircraft for final touchdown required slamming it down and dumping lift as quickly as possible. Landings were very heavy at times.

I sat in the cockpit for landing just once. It was unnerving: the runway we were “aimed” at was only visible from the far, right-hand window. As the pilot above described it, our nose was purposefully pointed into the wind, meaning we were flying sideways even as we were heading directly toward the runway. At the very last moment the pilot applied full rudder; the aircraft swiveled, and with the nose finally pointed down the runway the aircraft slammed hard against the concrete–another successful cross-wind landing. “Take that, runway,” someone announced over the intercom system.

The only RC-135s lost in the history of the entire program were either operating from Shemya or attempting to land there. The first was in 1968, when an RC-135 hydroplaned on ice as it landed and slid into a forty-foot ravine. Though the aircraft was destroyed, the entire 18-man crew survived.

The second incident occurred six months later, in 1969, when another type of RC-135 (Project “Rivet Amber”), which contained a 35,000-pound phased-array radar, departed Shemya for Fairbanks. Forty-five minutes into the flight the aircraft disappeared over the Bering Sea. The final radio transmission from the pilots indicated they were suffering severe vibrations and going on oxygen. No trace of aircraft or crew was ever found.

The third RC-135 fatality at Shemya occurred on March 15, 1981, when Cobra Ball tail number 12664 slammed into the approach lights while attempting to land in poor weather. The aircraft tumbled down the runway, killing six of the 24 men on board; two of those killed were from my squadron.

EC-130 (Project Comfy Levi)

I left Alaska in 1987 for Fort Meade, Maryland, home to the National Security Agency. Although I worked a few special projects at the agency, my primary function was flying on propellor-driven EC-130s that carried the Comfy Levi intelligence collection package. Comfy Levi consisted of two huts that could be installed on any C-130 in the military. Each hut housed six operators.

Because we were stationed in the US, we traveled all over the world to fly Comfy Levi missions. My first deployment was to Misawa Airbase, Japan, in 1987. For forty-five days we flew missions over the Sea of Japan, near the Soviet Far Eastern coast. The missions gained a lot of attention from the Soviets, probably because they weren’t used to seeing C-130s. Sixteen fighter aircraft–from MiG-23s to SU-15s to MiG-25s–intercepted our aircraft during the course of the day.

Comfy Levi was replaced by a newer, more modern system called Senior Scout. This system also rolled into any C-130 in the inventory, but it was a single box that housed up to eighteen crew members. In several instances we flew on C-130s whose pilots and navigators weren’t cleared to know what we were doing in the backend. It wasn’t rocket science, of course, but it did cause miscommunication at times.

The most important mission of my career occurred while flying a combat sortie on Senior Scout during Operation Desert Storm. Late one night we picked up the emergency beacons from two Army aviators who’d had to eject from their RV-1D “Mohawk” aircraft. A-10 “Sandy” search-and-rescue aircraft initially dropped flares for the pilots, but visibility was so bad that the downed men couldn’t see them. Smoke was thick across the entire region from oil-well fires deliberately set by Iraqi forces.

We descended to 5,000 feet, established an orbit nearby, and used one of our onboard systems to pinpoint their locations. We then contacted the rescue vehicles moving through the desert trying to find them and used the same onboard system to pinpoint their positions. After that, we provided simple compass heading to the rescue vehicles. We told them to hit their horns; the pilots radioed they’d heard them. Though one of the pilots was badly wounded, both men survived.

Looking back, it seems odd that the Cold War informed so much of my life. Over forty American reconnaissance aircraft were shot down during those years, most of them prior to 1961. To this day, over 130 men remain missing. There’s strong evidence to indicate that some of them may have been “rescued” by the Soviets and held in closely guarded camps.

But this: when I retired in 2000, an entire generation of young Americans–one with absolutely no memory of the Cold War at all–were about 10 years old, in school, and moving on. That same group is now in their thirties.

Thanks for letting me brag a little; I hope it was humble . . . enough. Here are a few pictures taken during my career.