by Robert Coram
In late 1952, Day survived the first of a series of incidents that had killed more experienced pilots.
To understand the nature of Day’s initial brush with death, one must first know a bit about a design peculiarity of the T-33.
To oversimplify a complex problem, a jet engine always needs more air. The greater the amount of air, the greater the venturi effect at the rear of the engine, and therefore the greater the thrust. In the T-33, not enough air came through the intake during the takeoff run to generate the thrust necessary for the jet to become airborne. As a result, the T-33 had what were known as “sucker doors” atop the fuselage. The spring-loaded doors inhaled air when the engine was idling and during taxi and takeoff. When the aircraft reached a speed of about 130 knots, the doors automatically closed. The sucker doors were directly behind the main ninety-gallon fuel tank, and the fuel tank was directly behind the pilot.
The fuel tank had a screw-on lid — not unlike that of a Mason jar — that had a rubber gasket that did not always seat properly. Part of the pre-takeoff checklist was to pressurize the fuel tanks on the tip of each wing to ensure a positive flow to the main tank. If the air pressure broke the seal on the gasket, fuel siphoned out of the tank, through the sucker doors, and into an engine running at full power. The pilot was notified of this by an amber warning light on the panel. If the light came on during takeoff, it usually meant the aircraft was seconds away from a catastrophic explosion.
Every aircraft has what is known as a “balanced field length” performance. This is the length of runway needed for the aircraft to stop in the event that the pilot must abort takeoff with the aircraft at flying speed. In most instances, there is not enough runway to stop; if so, takeoff is the only option. If a pilot experiences an emergency on takeoff, once he is airborne, the problems have a habit of multiplying. For instance, the T-33 can take off with a full load of fuel but cannot land; the shock to the landing gear is too great. If the pilot does manage to land without having the gear poke through the wings, the brakes will burn out before he can stop. Thus, he must burn off or vent hundreds of pounds of fuel before landing, and he must do this while in the middle of an emergency. Little wonder that when Day arrived at Moody, no T-33 pilot had ever survived a fire on takeoff. (In fact, shortly before Day arrived, World War II ace Don Gentile was killed in this fashion.) Even though the T-33 was the primary training aircraft for gunnery instruction and instrument training, and even though more aircraft and pilots would be lost because of this design flaw, it would be several more years before the problem was fixed.
One evening at the officers’ club, Day and other pilots were talking about how to handle a fire on takeoff. There was nothing in the Dash-1 — the handbook for the T-33 — about this issue.
Day parsed the problem in a lawyer’s fashion. “Here’s what I would do,” he said. “Airspeed is crucial. I think those guys who didn’t make it pulled up trying to gain altitude for a go-around. The climb slowed them, the fire went into the sucker doors, and they lit up like a Christmas tree. If I caught on fire, I’d keep the nose down and build enough airspeed to close the doors.”
Several days later, Day was to lead a flight of two aircraft — a two-shipper — to practice formation flying. They were taking off on the short runway at Moody. It was about five thousand feet long and had no overrun, and fifty-foot Georgia pines were off both ends. Day was Blue Lead. The other pilot was Blue Two. At about forty-feet altitude, Day’s fire warning light popped on. No other light in the cockpit can get a pilot’s attention so quickly.
“Blue Lead, you’re siphoning fuel,” radioed Day’s wingman.
Before Day could respond, the fuel caught on fire and his aircraft looked like a Roman candle. Blue Two said, “Lead, you’re on fire.” He paused for a half second and added, “I’m sliding out to the side. No sense in both of us blowing up.”
Because Day already knew the procedure he would follow, he did not have to think. “Moody tower, Blue Lead declaring emergency. Fire on takeoff.”
“Roger that, Blue Lead. What are your intentions?”
Day pushed the nose down, staying low, barely clearing the pine trees as he built airspeed. An eternity of seconds crawled by. The airspeed reached 130 and the sucker doors slammed shut. The fire was blown out by the airspeed.
Day proceeded to burn off some fuel before returning to base. When he landed, the aft end of the aircraft was black from the flames. An examination revealed the fire had badly burned the control cables. Had Day made one hard movement, the cables would have snapped and he would have had to eject at low altitude — not a pleasant prospect in the T-33, as the cockpit was so cramped that pilots often broke their legs during ejection. And the parachutes of 1952 were not made for low-level bailouts.
As far as can be determined, Day was the first and only Air Force pilot to survive a fire on takeoff in a T-33. Just as he said in the officers’ club, airspeed was crucial. Had he done the intuitive thing and pulled the nose up, he would have bled off enough airspeed that the fire would have gone into the engine and the aircraft would have exploded. Word of the young lieutenant’s experience quickly made the rounds in the Air Force. Fighter pilots all over the country played and replayed what this guy Bud Day had done down at Moody.
That was the first time the Air Force heard the name Bud Day.
The next incident was not far away.
IT is said that the military always refights the last war. That was certainly true in Korea. Within the relatively new USAF, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) reigned supreme. Should a full-scale war break out with the Soviet Union, it would be SAC’s job to fly bombers loaded with nuclear weapons into the heart of the Russian motherland.
Korea was SAC’s first war, and it was not going well because its fighting doctrine was based on big bombing raids like those conducted by the 8th Air Force over Europe during World War II. In Korea, however, a combination of adverse weather and enemy defenses exacted such a heavy toll on those raids that they were discontinued and the war became a fighter pilot’s war. The star of the air-to-air war was the F-86 Sabre Jet, and almost all bombing was taken over by single-engine, single-seat fighter-bombers such as the F-80 and the F-84. When the war thus shifted, units flying those smaller aircraft back in the States were caught in the turmoil. Suddenly nothing was certain about assignments, about missions, about anything.
Day discovered this in November 1952, after he received his green card and was ordered to Tyndall AFB near Panama City, Florida, for a two-week transition course into the F-94. But there were no F-94s, and the backup F-89s had been grounded. Operation Fair Play was canceled and, with it, Day’s surefire ticket to combat. Devastated, he concluded that not being able to fly combat and being forced to live in the Florida panhandle were the two worst things that had ever happened to him.
Doris agreed. Her vision of Florida had been palm trees, gentle breezes, and soft surf. They rented a small concrete-block house in Mexico Beach, a fishing village about twenty miles east of Panama City. Space heaters could not warm the house, so they were always cold. The white powdery sand from the beach was everywhere, all through the house. Doris believed in keeping a clean house, and — as it had been in Texas — the sand was a constant annoyance. This was their second Christmas away from Sioux City, and the only decoration on the Christmas tree was a string of colored eggshells. Doris was miserable the entire time Day was at Tyndall.
So was he. Bud and Doris had grown up in the clean fresh air of Siouxland and could never adjust to the pervasive stench of nearby paper mills. When Bud or Doris complained, the locals shook their heads and said, “That’s the smell of money.” The acrid, stinging odor of the paper mills was in their clothes and in their house. It could not be escaped.
On weekends, to get away from the stench, Bud and Doris drove east or northeast. They never ventured west along the panhandle; there was nothing there but a series of nondescript little towns.
The only good news at Tyndall was that i
n December 1952, Day was promoted to first lieutenant. His base pay was about $280 per month. Following the promotion came an assignment to Bergstrom AFB near Austin, Texas. Bergstrom was a SAC base where he could fly the F-84.
When Bud and Doris left Florida for what they hoped would be the last time, they saw what they considered a beautiful sight: Panama City in the rearview mirror. “Thank God we’re leaving that place,” Day said to Doris. “We will never come back.”
Bergstrom was Day’s first operational assignment. Flying a fighter, he drew an additional $200 per month. He made a vow that as long as he was on flying status, most of this would go to his parents back in Riverside. Clerks who handled the paperwork talked of this, and the word quickly got out among Day’s fellow pilots at Bergstrom. They chided Day, telling him he was under no obligation to his parents.
“Yes, I am,” he said. He also sent his parents extra money at Christmas.
Though the pay was an improvement and Panama City far away, Bergstrom was far from heaven. SAC was stultifying in the extreme, especially to a young officer. Micromanagement kept pilots under tight control, and the general attitude was “If you haven’t been there, you can’t go. If it hasn’t been done before, we can’t do it.”
Day found it hard to reconcile the narrow bureaucratic attitude with the fact that the Bergstrom cadre was peopled with legends: fighter aces, men who had flown against Rommel in North Africa, men who had flown in the Italian campaign and even in Germany. They were some of the most colorful men ever to don flying suits; one of them, a married man, flew his girlfriend around in a military aircraft. They were majors and lieutenant colonels and even full colonels who, at the officers’ club, behaved like rambunctious second lieutenants.
Bud had much professional admiration for these men. But he and Doris had grown up in a different world with different values. They rarely went to the officers’ club; now that Bud had settled down, it was too wild for them. Because an officer’s social life revolved around the club, however, Bud and Doris had few friends at Bergstrom. They were slightly prudish, their solid Midwestern values firmly imbedded. Doubtless, some laughed at them.
SAC used so much of its budget to support big bombers that little was left over for young pilots flying fighters. The Air Force did not even provide flight suits; Day bought his from Navy surplus and Doris patched it so many times it looked like a worn quilt. He bought his flying boots from an outdoor-supply store and his gloves at a sporting-goods shop.
SAC also had a dismissive attitude toward young pilots such as Day — “newbies,” they were called. The feeling was that the World War II pilots and the pilots who had been recalled would be doing the flying in Korea and that the newbies would never be of any use in the war. The danger of that attitude became abundantly clear to Day on a training mission when, for the second time, he narrowly escaped death.
Part of the reason for his mishap involved the flying characteristics of the F-84. A popular Air Force song of the time best describes the most treacherous and dangerous attribute of the aircraft.
Don’t give me an F-84, she’s just a ground-loving whore.
She’ll whine, moan, and wheeze, then clobber the trees.
Don’t give me an F-84.
This inelegant verse was based on the well-known fact that the F-84 was so sluggish that, on a strafing run, the pilot pulled back on the stick to begin the climb-out the instant he fired his guns. Older pilots knew this from experience. But Day had never made a gun pass in an F-84 until one morning when he tagged along with three recalled pilots who wanted to go to the range and shoot.
The weather was marginal, but weather gurus said the low overcast would break up by midmorning. It did not, and while the pilots circled in anticipation, the four aircraft were burning JP-4 at prodigious rates. The flight had to shoot or return to base. The leader checked in with the range and was told the bottoms of the clouds were at five hundred feet, the tops at eight hundred feet.
Day shook his head. He had a green card and could handle almost any weather. But popping out of a cloud only five hundred feet above the ground in a jet aircraft was foolhardy. This mission should be canceled.
However, he was the newbie who was here to learn, the man whose opinions meant nothing. So he pressed on.
Targets were on a thirty-foot-high berm. The front side of the artificial ridge where the targets were located was almost vertical. The rear was sloped and descended into a declivity formed when bulldozers scraped up dirt to build the berm.
The range officer who controlled the aircraft was in a fifteen-foot-tall tower located about fifty yards from the target. He had an unobstructed view of the berm and, once they poked through the low overcast, of each aircraft as it rolled in at about four hundred knots on its strafing run.
Day pushed through the low clouds. He was to fire his guns at about twelve hundred feet from the target. But he was too far out, too flat and too low, dragging the aircraft toward the target. When he was closer, he pushed the nose over, fired, and pulled back on the stick. But nothing happened. The F-84 mushed toward the ground. Day applied full power, but the aircraft continued to mush. He narrowly missed the berm and disappeared into the declivity.
The range officer was horrified. A crash and fatality would mean days of paperwork. If an inquiry decided the accident was his fault, that he had not exercised the leadership expected of a range officer, his career could end.
The F-84 wallowed out of the declivity and began climbing.
The range officer’s voice was shaking when he radioed Day. “Get off this range and do not ever come back.”
“Roger that,” Day replied in an equally shaky voice.
Once on the ground, the flight leader said Day was unsafe and not worth the trust of fellow pilots.
Day could only nod and say, “Yes, sir.” But he knew the flight should never have gone up that day. No one was shooting to qualify; it was only to fill a square on paperwork, only to say they had been to the range. Day left the ramp as mistrustful of his fellow pilots as they were of him. And he was aware that, for the second time in his brief Air Force career, he had almost killed himself.
Day’s first ER at Bergstrom, the first of his flying career, was mediocre. The most favorable thing it said about Day was that he “willingly accepts any assignment given him and carries it out to the finish.”
His second ER also was ho-hum. Day received high marks for his legal advice to his squadron commander. This might sound good, but Day’s job was as a pilot and not as a legal adviser; he was being praised for something outside his job. The ER said that Day would make a good staff officer — again not his job — and that he was qualified to “instruct in a civilian institution.” Day’s boss assigned him to act as defense counsel in military courts and said, “The results were outstanding as far as his clients were concerned.” Another ER said that Day would do well in the JAGC (Judge Advocate General’s Corps) or as squadron legal officer but that his flying ability was “average.” SAC considered Day a lawyer more than a pilot. Things were moving in the wrong direction.
NEVERTHELESS, Day soon realized the dream of every fighter pilot: an overseas deployment. He was ordered to Chitose, Japan, for six months. Doris decided to go home to Sioux City while he was gone. Before Day left, he opened the first checking account he and Doris ever had. He told Doris that he wanted her to begin taking care of all family finances “in case something ever happens to me.”
At Chitose, Day flew the F-84 on tracking missions along the border of the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the most dangerous mission of the Cold War. Soviet bombers often violated Japanese airspace by cutting across the corner of Hokkaido. U.S. fighters were cleared to shoot them down.When Day took off, his guns were loaded.
Besides eliminating any Soviet interlopers, the Americans had another aim. Sometimes the F-84s flew toward Soviet airspace as if they were conducting a mass attack. The purpose was to test Soviet response time.
The Soviets were not the on
ly trespassers: American aircraft were flying deep into the Soviet Union to photograph military installations. When they returned, they were often being chased by Soviet fighters. Additional American aircraft waited at the Japanese border and hoped the Soviets would cross the line. And if Americans were in trouble, Day and his fellow pilots might assist in a rescue. During his deployment, a B-29 was shot down over Vladivostok Bay, and he was part of the flight that “capped” it — flew air cover until the crew was rescued. Through it all, America was shooting down Soviet aircraft and the Soviets were shooting down American aircraft. The Soviets did not complain because to do so would be an admission that their borders had been penetrated. And the United States did not want to acknowledge that American pilots were being shot down.
Once, Day was returning from a mission and ran short of fuel. He landed in Korea, where a squadron of the glamorous F-86 Sabre Jets was based. Day knew he would be on the base overnight and walked into the officers’ club. Moments later, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Dixon, the squadron commander, entered the club and in a tone of disgust said, “Who’s flying that hog on the ramp?”
Day’s pugnacious nature, fueled by the pride every pilot feels in his aircraft, surfaced. It did not matter that he was a first lieutenant talking to a lieutenant colonel. “I am. You want to step outside and discuss it?”
Dixon declined the offer. It would be almost two decades before he and Day met again. And that meeting would be even less cordial.
UPON Day’s return to the States, he went to “nuke school,” where he learned the theory and the delivery of nuclear weapons. He attended Squadron Officer School — a program that teaches officers the first level of command — and then was ordered back to Moody to learn how to be an instructor in instrument flying. Afterward, he returned to Bergstrom. There, he found things were still moving in the wrong direction.
Day’s next ER emphasized his personality and character, damning him with faint praise in irrelevant matters. He was a “good-natured, cooperative individual” who tackled his work “energetically and wholeheartedly.” He had a “keen logical mind” and “responds favorably to constructive criticism.” He would be “best utilized in a staff or administrative position at squadron level.” His flying abilities were “average” — an outrageous conclusion given his green-card status and his time as an instructor.