Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 25 February 2001
‹‹ Interview Index
1 /
2 /
3 /
4 /
5 /
6 /
7 /
8 /
9 /
10 /
11 /
12 /
13 /
14 /
15 /
16 /
17 /
18 /
19 /
20 /
21 /
22 /
23 /
24 /
25 /
26 /
27 /
28 /
29 /
30 /
31 /
32 /
33 /
34 /
35 /
36 /
37 /
38 /
39 /
40 /
41 /
42 /
43 /
44 /
45 /
46 /
47 /
48 /
49 /
50 /
51
| placed under the air—very close to the aircraft. Maybe 5 miles, and that's what you'd be in when you were doing air refueling. | ||
| INT: | Right. What was that process? Could you just walk through that—what the process was in locating the KC-135 and lining the aircraft up? | |
| PM: | Initially, if I remember correctly the conversation—you'd know where you had to meet them in the sky over a geographic point, and you'd have a time for the rendezvous. You'd go there—contact would be established with...between the pilots, so you'd have radio contact, and we'd establish positions relative to one another that way. We'd start to search on the radar, try to acquire them on radar. | |
| INT: | So—getting back to your previous point of talking about each side of the return knowing distance—that's sort of of interest to us here. Could you explain why you can make that statement? | |
| PM: | Well because at a point, and I don't remember exactly where, we would be in station keep mode so that we could accurately—the idea was to bring— the KC-135 would come toward us, we would come slightly offset toward the KC-135, and he would be slightly higher than we were. And it was the nav's job to watch this aircraft coming toward us—acquire it and watch it coming toward us, and then at some point we'd go to station keep to get even more energy on the aircraft. When it got to—and there was a certain art to this, that when it got a certain off to our left—if he was making a left turn—we would call and ask him to start his turn, and he would turn—he would begin a turn in front of us that would bring him out, hopefully, right in front of us and slightly ahead of us. And so the most accurate way to do that was in station keep mode, and having done that a number of times I knew what size of return a 135 or a B-52—when you'd be in a formation with B-52's, you could tell what size they were, and roughly the same on a radar return. | |
| INT: | Right. Okay. So, but at 1,000 yards, you knew—you could tell how far— | |
| PM: | No. The size of the blip would be pretty much the same, but you could tell from the ranging rings on the radar how far it was. | |
| INT: | OK. | |
| PM: | There were rings printed on the scope. | |
| INT: | In what increments? |
14