Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| back is I was trying to stay awake and maybe not, but I had a check list that I personally had to run with my equipment prior to penetration. I had to do certain things, and I would use my checklist and I would end up powered down. | ||
| INT: | By the time you landed? | |
| TG: | No, by the time we were on a penetration. Penetration means leaving flight level 200—20,000 feet, and starting down to the runway. | |
| INT: | So at that point your equipment's shut down—you're ready for a nap? | |
| TG: | You bet. I probably napped prior to having to do the checklist, but now one of my crew position responsibilities was monitoring the HF radio—high frequency radio, single-side band and no matter where we were in the United States, our command post could always raise us on HF radio, and I could communicate back to the command post. That was my job on the airplane. And then when we got into the local area, we had 2 UHF radios, okay? Now we had HF, we had 2 UHF radios and one VHF, which was... | |
| INT: | So you had 3 communications devices? | |
| TG: | That's right. HF, and 2 UHF. | |
| INT: | Okay. | |
| TG: | And I want to explain the UHF antennas—there was radio 1 and radio 2 UHF. The antennas for those were located on different parts of the airplane. One was low and forward, the other was up in the back and the reason for that was a lot of times with the UHF radio the reception and the transmission quality was good using one, depending on where you were relative to one site or the other. Or maybe you had one weak radio, or maybe one radio wasn't up during the flight. He wouldn't take off with it that way, but, you know, things break. | |
| INT: | Question—did that happen anytime that your radios went out? | |
| TG: | Sure. Yeah, you'd lose a radio. | |
| INT: | So it was not uncommon? | |
| TG: | Yeah well, it wasn't uncommon but it wasn't a normality. You could get in a position where you'd be down to one UHF radio, which was kind of a problem, because then you had to do a lot of frequency changes depending on whom you had to speak to. But normally, you had two operative UHF radios. When we got back in the local area, we would put one of 'em on |
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