Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 11 November 2000
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| PM | Right. It was basically our normal crew—the STANEVAL crew, and we had this other person along—I think there was only one who was being evaluated to be a qualified B-52 pilot. | |
| JK | That was the 23rd Bomb Squadron? | |
| PM | Right. | |
| JK | If you would, I'd like you to just tell me what you recall. | |
| PM | OK, we had flown a mission and we were back at Minot, close to landing, and the pilots required some more training. We had to do several types of approaches and they did one coming in from the east toward Minot and then we did a low approach, didn't touch down as I remember it, but did a low approach, and while we were doing the low approach the tower called and said—asked us to keep our eyes open for anything strange. | |
| JK | Could you hear the radio traffic? | |
| PM | I didn't hear the call. | |
| JK | OK, Brad said he was in the right seat and he handled the radios. | |
| PM | Yeah stands to reason, that's what the pilots do. But I was downstairs as a Navigator, and I didn't hear the call as I remember it, I didn't hear any call— | |
| JK | So you just had intercom, basically? | |
| PM | Ah, yeah. But I did hear the pilot say something like "the missile guys are seeing things again." Because it was kind of a standard thing that the missile guys reported stuff apparently on a fairly routine basis that looked strange. And, apparently the tower acknowledged that, yes, the missile guys had said that they'd seen something, and hence the call for us to keep our eyes open and see if we saw anything strange. | |
| JK | That agrees with the documents. | |
| PM | Ok, so we then proceeded west toward, I think it was either a VOR or VORTAC out west, a nav aid, and we climbed to some altitude, I wanna say 20-some thousand feet to do another approach coming in from the west using this particular nav aid. As we climbed out, I asked my radar Navigator to put the radar in station-keeping mode. It puts most of the radar energy within a short distance of the air. I want to say within 5 miles of the airplane, and it's the mode where we would use that for air refueling, to pick up the airplane, the other airplane coming in, the KC-135 that we would refuel from. | |
| JK | In that mode it'll skin paint? |
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