by Mark Berent
CHAPTER SEVEN
1130 Hours Local, 19 December 1965
O-1E en route from Tan Son Nhut to
Bien Hoa Air Base, Republic of Vietnam
Phil Travers, Captain, USAF, AKA Phil the FAC, callsign Copperhead Zero Three, flew a small gray Cessna observation airplane, an 01-E by USAF nomenclature, at an altitude of three hundred feet on a heading of 354 degrees halfway between Tan Son Nhut and Bien Hoa with a passenger in the back seat. The 01-E had a big white-fanged red mouth painted on the engine cowling by Captain Travers and his crew chief, Sgt. Mike Germaine. The red tongue extending from the mouth resembled that of an Irish Setter's whose head was protruding from the window of a fast moving station wagon.
Travers had stayed low not only to avoid all the jet traffic and Army helicopters, but also the cloud layer at 1000 feet that had gone from scattered to broken since their takeoff from Tan Son Nhut. Once in the clear, he decided it was time for some fun. Humming to himself, he pushed the stick forward rapidly obtaining the aircraft's maximum speed of 115 miles per hour, then added five more mph for luck. He proceeded to smoothly perform two perfectly coordinated barrel rolls; one left and one right. At the finish of the second, he pulled sharply back on the stick and brought the little airplane through a loop so perfect he flew through his starting position prop wash. He hummed along with some snappy music piped into his headset from his ADF navigational radio tuned to the AFVN station in Saigon. At any time Phil "the FAC" Travers expected his back seat passenger, a non-rated first john courier FNG he had never seen before, to complain bitterly over the rolling and turning airsick-inducing maneuvers. Travers was quite positive in his belief that all Air Force personnel, even those non-rated types, should know and experience the joys of flight. The idea that perhaps rapid rolling maneuvers, sudden g-forces, and being inverted did not appeal to all such personnel never entered his mind. This is flying and flying is fun.
It was known that Travers flew his Cessna O-1E Forward Air Control (FAC) observation plane as if it were an F-100 jet fighter with hydraulic controls and forty thousand pounds of engine thrust instead of the one ton (fully loaded with gas and two people plus parachutes), 213-horsepower propeller-driven aircraft with fixed landing gear it really was. The only hydraulics in the tiny aircraft ran from the rudder pedals to the six-inch wheel brakes as in an automobile braking system. Patterned after the Army L-5 of WWII and Korean War fame, but with a much bigger engine, the high-winged O1-E had a tail wheel instead of a nose wheel like the later model Cessnas. It also had a control stick instead of a control wheel.