Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| TG: | No, not necessarily. Hastings was Hasting, Nebraska. La Junta was La Junta, Colorado. There was different RBS radar bomb scoring sites, and they all had an electronic warfare scoring capability where the EW would throw up simulated threat signals, and then the EW would counter those so that we wouldn't get shot down, but it would be able to track us and get tracking and targeting information on us so that we would be able to deliver our weapons. The major objective of every mission was delivering the weapons to the target in any way, shape or form that you could. So that's what we were all training for and it took a whole crew to do that. | |
| INT: | Were the navigators involved in the re-fueling? | |
| TG: | We would do what we call a rendezvous and when you did a rendezvous, the goal was to come up behind the tanker. Up underneath. And then when you got to the ARCP—Air Re-fueling Control Point, then we could begin re-fueling. So then we would move into what they called the pre-contact position and in the contact position. And once the rendezvous was complete, the radar didn't have any job. | |
| INT: | So primarily the pilots were doing this visually? | |
| TG: | After the rendezvous was complete and you did have the tanker visually, because a lot of times you're in clouds and whatever, you had to have the tanker visual and then you would do the rest of the procedures for re-fueling. | |
| INT: | The only reason I mentioned that is because, you know, Pat McCaslin mentioned that by the return they had on the unidentified object, they knew it was much larger than a KC-135 because they knew what the size of a KC-135 on the navigation scope, you see. | |
| TG: | In order to do a rendezvous with a tanker, there was a mode of the radar that would be able to paint another airborne object, instead of painting the ground. | |
| INT: | Are we talking station keeping, or? | |
| TG: | I think that there was a term that the radar would go into station keeping mode, but station keeping means that one aircraft will keep its station relative to another aircraft. That's station keeping. And then if the radar is responsible for the station keeping other than the pilot's eyes or whatever, well, then they were in that radar mode in order to accomplish that. It probably was a very narrow beam of radar pulse that would go out and then return to the aircraft. |
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