Arlie E. Judd Interview, 27 February 2001
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| report signed by a General, and if you didn't have a two-star or a three-star endorsement on there, why you were not competitive, really. And so you really had to stay sharp and you just always had to walk on thin ice. You couldn't screw up. If you did, why, you'd just go to the back of the pack someplace. I mean that's my own personal opinion. I was proud to be associated with that group. | ||
| INT: | When you arrived at Minot, where did you start out? | |
| AJ: | I started on an R crew. When you graduated from school out there, all you had to do was take an exam, a ground test and then you had to take a flight test, and within 3 or 4 flights, where you're considered ready we got put on a ready crew, that was where you started. Now there were non-ready crews too. | |
| INT: | But you had plenty of experience coming there? | |
| AJ: | Well, when I got there they needed crews so bad that they didn't have the luxury [of placing] people on what they call a 'non-ready' crew. They needed to fill all their crew slots, so we— | |
| INT: | What year did you come there? | |
| AJ: | '65. So anyway, we were on a ready crew, and most of the folks are new, and the pilot was a captain. And I had lieutenants and a co-pilot lieutenant EW and a lieutenant navigator, and then I think we had a captain in radar. | |
| INT: | In the first crew? | |
| AJ: | On a first crew, yes. It was a young crew—young experience-wise and young people-wise. But it was a great start because everything from there, why you knew you were moving up the chain, 'cause we just kept getting better. | |
| INT: | You started out with a good crew [inaudible]. | |
| AJ: | Yeah, I started out with a good crew, but, you know, B-52 crews—I don't know why, but they were special. In order to fly a B-52—in a B-52 environment, you just had to be because you had to pull alert. You had to go the 7 days of alert, they'd bring you off alert and you'd go fly a couple, three times, and then they'd put you back on alert for 7 more days and— | |
| INT: | And define alert—what would that require? | |
| AJ: | You would pull—stay at the—they call it an alert facility, for 7 days at a time, and you were confined to some degree. You had to stay right there. |
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