The Six Merry Go Round (Read 769 times)

:-[We were scheduled for a night exercise. We had 12 darts ready that afternoon for the big evening show. Six on Able row and six on Charlie, with four T-33s sitting on Baker row (you'll understand why this is important in a minute).

The exercise was suppose to start with the first blare of the horn on the ops building, when the first pilot (the commander) would run out to his plane parked on Able 1 and fire it up. A minute later the horn would go off again and the next pilot would run out to Able 2 and so on through Able row and then Charlie row. So with the MA-1 time-in factored in, the aircraft were suppose to break chocks in sequence about a minute apart. At least that's what was suppose to happen.....

So the horn goes off and instead EVERYBODY comes running out of the ops building at the same time, jumps in their planes and ALL start up and start timing in. Now our commander wore glasses for take-offs and landings. So he breaks chocks and starts to taxi and as luck would have it one of the lenses in his glasses pops out. So he radios back to Ops that he's coming back in to Able 1 and needs someone to run his other pair of glasses out to him....

Unfortunately, as soon as he went by Able 2, that pilot taxied and got behind him. And of course Able 3 followed 2, as did 4, etc. etc.

Evidently when the commander came back to his spot, Able 2 was bearing down on him and he decided that slapping on the breaks and letting another six do a sigmoidoscopy on you would not be a career maker. So he decided to go around again...

As he turned off Able row for the second time, he looked down Baker and realized that he couldn't turn back down towards Able because the guys on Charlie row were now in the act and falling in behing the Able row sixes. Soooooo..... he continued past Baker row, turned down Charlie row and got behind Charlie 6.

At this point we have a completed merry-go-round of 12 F-106s going nowhere fast because when he gets back to his spot, he's still got the same problem as before and evidently no one ever heard of a radio. (Exercise integrity?)

Now I'm working the avionics board in job control during this mess and the three of us are hearing all this chatter on the maintenance radio and absolutely none of it is making any sense until the senior controller lines all the aircraft magnets up on the board; and when we see it, all three of us just bust out laughing at the same time...

Finally, after another round or so, somebody (probably the commander), gets PO'd and calls the whole thing off. So they all shut their planes down wherever they were. Crew chiefs got them ladders and they all climbed out and walked back to ops without saying a word. FMS spent the rest of the night towing the birds back to their parking spots.

That was the last time our commander flew without a spare pair of glasses.