Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| INT: | So were you flying up to Alaska? | |
| TG: | No, because of Canada. We did fly some missions but normally we stayed in the Conus United States, and after you'd take off you'd go refuel, and you refuel on a refueling track, and there was lots of different refueling tracks. You didn't necessarily refuel with a tanker out of Minot. You could refuel a tanker out of Grissom Air Force Base, or wherever.
You knew who your tanker was gonna be, where he was from, what his call sign was and then you would meet at a rendezvous time and point, and then you refuel. And after refueling, then you normally went into a nav leg, because on a war mission you gotta get there, and high and low-level navigation. Well, a high level navigation you had to do a nav leg. Normally that was an hour and a half, and we normally did celestial. It was daytime, you did day celestial with the sun and then at night you did stars. My job on the airplane was doing all the celestial observations for the navigator who's doing the nav leg downstairs. And on that portion, it was the navs training portion. Pilots were eating their flight lunch. In the refueling pilots portion of their training, and the navs eating his flight lunch. And then before you got your target area you'd fly low-level for an hour. | |
| INT: | Low-level meaning what kind of altitude? | |
| TG: | As low as 400 feet, normally around 800-1000 feet. You could fly—let's see, I lose track between the B-1 and the B-52. One was terrain following in the B-1, but this was terrain avoidance—T.A. So we had equipment on the airplane that would show you if something was higher so you could fly an altitude generally lower and you just watch for things ahead of you and then you would get over them— | |
| INT: | So you had front radar? | |
| TG: | Front radar, yep. And so you do the low-level navigation, then you'd get into the target area, then you'd do bomb delivery and electronic warfare. There would be a radar bomb scoring site would take the airplane under radar, well, precise radar control and it would determine where you released your weapon. There would be a release tone in the airplane. | |
| INT: | So this is a pre-set place? | |
| TG: | Yes. You would go to a bomb plot, Hastings bomb plot, La Junta bomb plot— | |
| INT: | And these were out in the desert? |
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