Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| the command post frequency and the other on ATC, whether that is Center, Minot Approach Control, or Minot Tower or Minot Ground. The UHF that was on command post became my responsibility, because the pilots would be busy doing pilot work and they would just be interested in air traffic control communications, and not interested in the command post, where I would listen to the command post and communicate with them and let the crew members know what the command post wanted, or the pilots say, 'Call up the command post and tell them this.' See he wouldn't do it himself. He'd ask me to do it. | ||
| INT: | So they were just concerned with control tower? | |
| TG: | Under whatever control we were under, whether that's Center or Approach or tower. See, the tower is a very limited thing. The Departure Control and Approach Control is about a 50-mile radius control. Once the Center gives you up, or once you leave Center's control and go to Approach Control, you change the frequency of your radio and you talk to different people and they're looking at you on different radars. | |
| INT: | Does that mean there's radar 50 miles around the air base? | |
| TG: | No, but one in the middle that sees out 50 miles, see? Or maybe a couple. Maybe there was some kind of redundancy so that if they lost— | |
| INT: | How was ADC associated with Minot? They had a radar station about 20-30 miles from the base? | |
| TG: | Yeah. Okay, that was a long, long, range radar warning system. | |
| INT: | Let's walk through this event. I mean what do you recall? | |
| TG: | We were getting into the local area and I was probably sleepy. Got my equipment shut down and then sleepy changed to alert. 'What in the heck is that thing?' or somebody said, 'If you see any [inaudible]?' and that was probably on the command post radio. | |
| INT: | Okay. So you're hearing this over your headphones? | |
| TG: | Yeah. I'm hearing air traffic control, one of the UHF, I'm hearing the command post, and since we're back on the local area I don't have to listen to the HF anymore, so I probably had the HF shut down, okay? And somebody said, 'Are you seeing anything?' or Brad—the way I recall was that we were at altitude and Brad saw something. That's the way I remember it. Since after talking to Jim and maybe even yourself a little bit maybe that isn't the case right then, but that's the way I remember it—that we saw something at that time at altitude. Now whether I'm confusing that |
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