Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 25 February 2001
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| went to—you'd pick up that grating and then you'd pick that up and just walk down the ladder and into your position. | ||
| INT: | Okay. But you were within shouting distance of everybody on board? Was it open? | |
| PM: | There were banks of electronic gear behind us, and I think there was a urinal. Yeah, there was a urinal on the back wall, but we're talking about a distance of maybe 5-6 feet, as I remember. Not far. | |
| INT: | Oh, you guys were really crammed in. | |
| PM: | Yeah, for a big airplane, but not much room. Now when you say shouting distance—it was noisy in there, so you were within shouting distance. I don't think any 2 crew members were separated by much more in straight line distance than you and I are right now. | |
| INT: | Oh. They were 5 feet? | |
| PM: | Yeah. When I say straight line distance, maybe the pilot was more than that from me, but it wasn't very far. But it was noisy and if I took off my mask and screamed as loud as I could, I'm not sure anybody would've heard that. | |
| INT: | From the engines? | |
| PM: | Yeah. And the equipment running in there and everything. | |
| INT: | Right. I'm just trying to sort of set it up and get some stuff beforehand. I guess we can talk about that flight on October 24th. I mean, do you remember that flight specifically? You were flying constantly, so I would think it would be really hard to remember one flight. | |
| PM: | I remember what happened during the flight—a lot of what happened during the flight, but my memory of the flight itself is that it was a—I mentioned that there were 3 kinds of flights. I shouldn't say what it was. It could have been an evaluation for the pilot. It could have been that our pilots, the StanEval pilots, were evaluating and that sometimes happens, where a crew was being formed you had a new crewmember show up at Minot and he needed to be evaluated to be combat ready. That may have been what was happening. I'm not for positive, but I know you couldn't fly a B-52 with just pilots onboard. So you had to have at least 1 navigator downstairs. | |
| INT: | Well, let me ask you this about the guy you were evaluating, which obviously was the pilot. Up until that time he had 13 years experience as a |
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