Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| would go PCS [Permanent Change of Station], get out of the service but they tried to keep crews together. | ||
| INT: | Where did you start out in the hierarchy? | |
| TG: | When I got there I had to do my B-52 H difference training, because at Castle I flew D and F-models, so when you get there you have to learn a new airplane. So when you completed that you were assigned to a crew. My very first crew I took the place of a guy that was going PCS, so that was crew [E]-12. Warren Hingle was the pilot of that crew. We did all of our alert time and all of our flying together, although that doesn't mean that you wouldn't be called upon to substitute into somebody else's crew if the individual was sick or on emergency leave or something like that. So there was a shifting around of crewmembers, but they always tried to keep crews together the best they could. They called it an integral crew. | |
| INT: | So that was your training and then you moved up? | |
| TG: | Became an instructor, and then I got a position in Stanboard. Crews S-01, S-05 and S-06 were the Stanboard crews, and I think my first assignment there was crew S-06. | |
| INT: | Okay. So then you worked your way up to the Stanboard crew? Explain that a little bit. Talk about the Stanboard crews, 'cause they really were sort of the top— | |
| TG: | They were the most proficient and the proficiency was personal capability and experience, you know? Once you became an instructor you actually learned your job more than you ever did when you were just a student. | |
| INT: | What was your normal routine? | |
| TG: | A lot of flying because we had to fly our own sorties and then we had to fly evaluations with other crews on missions. And usually to complete somebody you had to have a whole bunch of given activity on a sortie, and let's say you couldn't go low level, you couldn't get a refueling, you couldn't do this or that, then you had to fly with that individual again for the activity that you missed in order to evaluate that phase of flight. And because of that, completing somebody on a Standboard ride in one flight was not that often of an occurrence. I was flying probably 8 or 9 times a month, but then we had to sit a full compliment of alert which even got more strenuous because there were crews rotating TDY to Arc Light, or flying out of Guam and Thailand for the Viet Nam effort. So we were actually sitting alert one week—7 days, then we would have crew rest and recuperation for half the time you were on. If we said 7 days, then we had 3 and ½ days that we were gold and we could not be touched, but after that |
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