Arlie E. Judd Interview, 27 February 2001
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| AJ: | Oh, after spending a nice time at Castle—it was such a beautiful spot. You know, I mean it was warm and lots of things to do and plenty of places to take the family and so forth. It was almost a year out there and then we went to Minot, and the family was young, I had 3 children. But it worked out pretty good because we were in a housing unit on base and all the people cooperated. If your driveway was snowed in, why somebody would help you shovel it out and so it was a lot of families cooperating to survive the snow. | |
| INT: | That must've been an adjustment just the winters up there. | |
| AJ: | But you just learned how to live with it and that was all you could do because you were gonna be there for awhile. It was a good B-52 base. The facilities were good. It was tough on the people that had to maintain the aircraft, you know, the winter was so severe— | |
| INT: | How long were you there at Minot? | |
| AJ: | I was there 5 years. And I got selected as a flight instructor out in the school at Castle. Stayed out there for 4 years, and the next award was to go to Kinchlow Air Force Base in Michigan, and stayed up there for 4 years, and then they closed. I was still a gunner at Kinchlow on H models. The H models had one where the gunner's up front and he had remote control from the station up front. You sat side by side with the EW. That's the kind of airplane we flew out of Minot. All the crew were stationed up front and that was a much better environment. | |
| INT: | Now much better than what? | |
| AJ: | Much better than flying in the tail. The flights in the tail were in the D model. Well, you can see a picture on the wall up there and you can see how far back the tail is it's 186 feet or something like that. | |
| INT: | Were you alone back there or something? | |
| AJ: | And if something happened, like if you lost pressure, lost electric, you had a little crawl space and you could crawl forward, but that meant that they'd have to take the aircraft down to 10,000 feet. Mostly it was a very efficient system back there, but once in awhile you'd have a little trouble. But there wasn't anybody that could help you if something really bad went wrong, so— | |
| INT: | Yeah. So Kinchlow, and then what? |
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