NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: B-52 navigators in Vietnam
From: Greg R_
Date: 2010 Oct 6, 12:05 -0700
From: Greg R_
Date: 2010 Oct 6, 12:05 -0700
Just took a look at the amazon.com listing for this book (http://tinyurl.com/29os8mk) - with 25 5-star reader ratings (and nothing lower), I think a lot of people concur with your "hard to put it down" assessment. :-) -- GregR On 10/5/2010 4:03:32 PM, Paul Hirose (cfuhb-acdgw@earthlink.net) wrote: > "U.S. Air Force navigators and bombardiers have long labored under the > shadow of pilots, their contributions misunderstood or simply unknown to > the public. This was especially the case with the B-52 non-pilot officer > aircrews in the Vietnam War. Yet without them it would have been > impossible to execute nuclear war strike plans or fly conventional > bombing sorties. Here, one of their own reveals who these men were and > what they did down in the 'Black Hole.'" > > So says the dust jacket of "Flying from the Black Hole," a 2009 > book by Robert O. Harder, who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1966 > through 1970. Harder had wanted to be a pilot, but slight myopia > meant he became a navigator instead. > ("The eye test was an absolute deal > killer; if one did not have 'perfect' vision, one was simply not > admitted to Undergraduate Pilot School.") > > In the mid-1960s, the USAF conducted UNT (undergraduate navigator > training) at Mather AFB near Sacramento, California. > "The young men were > streamed into their new work on a dead run, and that intensity did not > let up in the slightest over the next thirty-eight weeks." > After a few > weeks of ground training with charts, plotters, dividers, and the MB-4A