Nightingales

Back in 1974 Scott AFB in Illinois was (still is) primarily a "military airlift" base, and was home to a fleet of C-9A Nightingales (passenger jets modified for medevac use), hence the title of this post.

I arrived there at the beginning of February as part of a maintenance team sent from McClellan AFB (in Sacramento) to do some major repair work on their weather radar (WSR-57?) which had recently gone non-operational. For me and Airman Snyder, this was our first "real" job since graduating from tech school at Keesler AFB, and (not surprisingly) we were being used primarily as "gofers" for the rest of the team (all civil servants).

The team chief was a "WG-12" named Richard Balderson, and that first morning he let me tag along as he "made the rounds" - contacting the various parties we would be interacting with while on the base. Of course, me being me, I had lots of questions about what was going on and why, and Balderson (who wasn't much for explaining things) would look exasperated and say "Just pick your nose and look pretty"...

Aside: I can't count the number of times he said that to me during the years that followed... Balderson (who passed away in 2014) was a genuinely nice (but quirky) guy. As I recall, aviation was his life's passion - he was a licensed pilot and (at the time) was building a BD-5 in his garage. And shortly before I got out of the Air Force in 1979 he bought my '69 Road Runner (for his son). A few years later the car was hit broadside (the other driver's fault) and, luckily, nobody was injured. But I digress...

The team was split between two locations - the weather center (where the radar screen was) and the antenna, which was on top of a 110 ft tower. Snyder and I were split up between the locations and, luckily, I spent most of my time on the ground. However, I did have to go up the tower a few times (mostly to relay messages), which was a pain because there were no stairs - just a ladder straight up the side. (There was a circular metal cage around the ladder, but that just meant that if you lost your grip you would bounce between metal bars all the way to the ground instead of falling straight to your death. I'm not sure that's much of an improvement...)

Here's a picture I took early one morning from the platform level below the antenna... As I recall, it was bitterly cold, and the ladder rungs were icy... And those are a couple of the "Nightingales" in the middle of the picture:

At the very top of the tower was a pressurized inflatable radome (bubble) that protected the rotating antenna and related equipment. You entered it by climbing up a ladder through a trapdoor, and the only way to get tools and stuff up the tower was with a rope and pulley.

I only have one distinct memory of being in the radome:
There were 4 of us up there when a civilian named Gil let a really loud fart... We were all like "WTF?" and he said "Don't worry. My farts never stink". He was being totally serious, and he could not have been more wrong... We were stuck there, in an air tight bubble, with one of the worst smells that has ever assaulted my nostrils. The rest of us were gagging and choking - and Gil though we were kidding - I honestly don't think he could smell it... Even at lunch later that day he kept insisting that his farts were "odorless", and if they did smell he needed to go see a doctor because there was something seriously wrong with him. And we were like "Yes, please go see a doctor."

If there is a point here, it's that I was about to spend the next five years of my life working with one of the weirdest groups of people I have ever encountered. And (at the time) I didn't know the half of it.