Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| TG: | Because of my admiration and respect for Brad. Everybody that's on a crew, you live together when you're on alert. Now other than sleeping together, we ate together, we watched movies together, we went to the gym together, we went to the BX together, all in this truck, and we all had to know where everybody was, so that if there was an alert you could all get to your airplane in the specific amount of time to get it running. Yeah, but we knew each other very well. | |
| INT: | You don't recall being ordered to go back over and fly this thing? | |
| TG: | I remember the transcript said 1,200 feet was our altitude that we were flying under radar control. If we went visual, you can go down to a thousand feet, or maybe even more. I don't remember. I'm not a pilot and I wouldn't know what the rules of flight are for visual flying, but in order to over fly a certain point, the pilot would've been visual. VFR—visual flight rules, okay? | |
| INT: | Do you remember landing after that flight? | |
| TG: | Kinda. But events that happened from landing to getting home we did again and again and they're always the same. You'd taxi in, you'd park the airplane, you'd unload the airplane, you'd get on the bus, you'd go through the 781 and write up discrepancies, finish off paperwork—flight paperwork. We had to go to maintenance debriefing. | |
| INT: | Did you have to go to a certain command post—what was the actual procedure? | |
| TG: | Okay, as electronic warfare officer one of my crew responsibilities was taking care of all the classified material that we had. So I had to go into the wing headquarters—not necessarily the command post, but another area so that I could deposit the classified communications information and crew materials that we would normally carry. And normally the pilots would go to the command post and drop off the mission paperwork, and I would go and take care of the classified material. | |
| INT: | Classified—you mean like protocols and stuff like that? | |
| TG: | There were some classified documents that we would carry that were procedural type documents. There was a coding system to so that you would be able to validate with current codes information that was passed to you, so that somebody couldn't feed you erroneous information. You could ask them to validate by a certain coding system, and those codes were classified. |
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