Well, we made it to Sacramento! Think singing: "California, here we come -- Right back where I started from!" Yes -- Richard's birthplace! Regular visits to Aunt Blanche & Uncle Ken who lived there. Occasional visits from Babe, MY mother, who lived in Ventura, down south -- she was the baby of her family of origin causing her nickname and a feeling of entitlement to self-indulgence that never helped her in the adult world. (Too bad -- That self-centeredness also alienated me. Very different than how I was raised after age 8 by my father and stepmother who probably should have indulged me a little, at least.)
Reconnecting with my young-childhood "hometown" (a rare treat for a military "brat"), my new family of adulthood would go to Mass in the downtown Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament where I was baptized and confirmed. We toured through the Capitol building's detailed county window displays -- and seated Ivan on top of the lifesize California grizzlies that used to guard the western exterior steps to the Capitol. Whatever happened to those earthbound Ursa that inspired my later love-poem, "Zodiac Emigres"?
Part I of this instructor assignment was the first two years after returning from Vietnam. Part II was the last two years. The first two years, I was a Nav Instructor in one of the 3 Nav Training Squadrons for brand new students commissioned into the Air Force. The "Undergraduate Navigator Training" (UNT) consisted of classroom lessons (mostly lecture-style), simulators and part-task trainers, and actual flight missions. Air Training Command instructor navs personally instructed & checked the work of 2-3 students on each of 40 separate flight missions in the syllabus. Most were practice missions perfecting new skills using different navigation techniques and equipment; a few were "check rides," inflight practical examinations to show proficiency with that phase of navigation. We also monitored and gave one-to-one instruction in the simulators/trainers.
Flight mission days were longer days for the navs than for the pilots who were truly just airborn "bus drivers" for those missions. We all flew together on one plane with 2 pilots, 3 instructors, and up to 9 students tracing a giant, horizontal "L" in the sky known as "Overland South." The route went toward Los Angeles but turned east over the Tehachapi Mtns heading east over the desert to Kingman, Arizona; then, we turned the old T-29 twin-engine, prop-plane around to retrace the route back to Sacramento!
Nav students took turns being "Lead Student" giving the new heading directions to the pilots once they figured out where the aircraft was and which direction they needed to have the plane turned to get back on the course's centerline. The first missions in the program emphasized DR (dead reckoning) and map reading from the air. Then they learned to "fix" (identify their aircraft's precise known location on a map) using other sources of navigation: radarscope interpretation, day celestial with the sun and moon, night celestial with the stars, combined low-level map reading and radar fixing, and finally out over the Pacific far, far away from the apparent security of being able to land if there were engine trouble. Overwater navigation combined multiple navigation aids & techniques to get precise fix positions: LORAN, pressure-pattern, day & night celestial, and even radar.
Well, that was Part I for 2 years! I kept very, very busy with work trying to do an excellent job as one of the very few 1st-Lieutenant instructor navs on the UNT faculty! (Nav School officials seemed to want some of us assigned "hot from the war zone" so it turned out to be an involuntary assignment which set my life's attachment to teaching and academia!) I did notice after the first year that the squadron had started to schedule me to fly exclusively as a Night Celestial flight instructor -- like on the flying schedule 4 nights a week for 3 months in a row! (14 - 16 hour duty days.)
I finally asked the scheduler and flight commander how come I was flying at night so much? The answer was that most of the other instructors were taking night courses on-base to earn their Master's degrees in management from Golden Gate College. Since AF supported officers' wishes to continue into higher degree education, the squadron had chosen that way to help, and scheduled those instructor navs seeking off-duty Master's degrees for only the day schedule flights! (That left their evenings open to take graduate degree courses in base classrooms available for that purpose.)
I went to the Base Education Office the very next day I was not flying at night to see what was available. Turned out, Chapman College (now Chapman University) was just starting a Master's program in counseling psychology, and I had been a psych major at the University of Denver! There was no guarantee that their program would actually gain enough students at Mather AFB in Sacramento to ever graduate students, but there was a chance (and it would get me off the night-flying schedule able to develop myself in an area of academic studies I loved). Besides, Chapman was fully accredited, and I could always transfer any coursework elsewhere if the program didn't continue on-base. SIGN ME UP, PROFESSOR!
In fact, that did get me off the night-flying schedule to accommodate taking my classes. I began to fly more overwater daytime or day-night flights, and I became the Course Director for the academic Overwater Navigation course. I worked well over 40 hours a week for the AF, you can be sure (more like 60+). But I still got straight A's in my off-duty courses until a TDY (temporary duty) interrupted 2 required courses I had been commuting to Beale AFB in Marysville, CA to complete (2 hours driving each way).
A communication glitch led the civilian instructor to file B's for me instead of Incompletes as would have been proper. I finished the course requirements by mail from San Antonio during off-duty hours but was never able to make contact to get my B's turned back into the A's I had really earned. I'm still unhappy about that because I had really earned a 3.9 GPA instead of a 3.7 but was not given credit for it. Please pardon me for giving myself such credit here; having flunked 2 courses in one 25-semester-hour Spring term as a Cadet at the Air Force Academy led to my being academically dismissed & stills weighs heavy on me. My Chapman instructor was a civilian who was still finishing his doctoral degree somewhere else and I lost track of how to contact him because of the intense workload at Mather which was to increase in Part II of that tour of duty. (See the next post.)
posted by Richard A @ 6:48 AM
2 Comments:
si, mi nombre es
FABULOUS and UNIQUE
-- I'm a mexican't baby
and I am heading back to Cali soon - used to live near March AFB but am visiting family in the city of fallen angels.
buenos noches, y te quiero tambien ;)
and holy cow, my nickname is babe
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