I served in the U.S. Air Force from 1968 until 1972. It was in January of 1970 that I became stationed at Clark AFB in the Philippines. I was assigned to the 6200 Field Maintenance Squadron. The mission of the squadron was to serve needed supplies to different places in the Philippines where we had American service members stationed.
In 1971 I became a flight mechanic and a crew chief on a C-47 aircraft. When I entered the Air Force in 1968 I was hoping to work on jet aircraft. However, that was not to be. I became an aircraft mechanic on propeller driven aircraft. The C-47s at Clark AFB at that time were built in the early 1940s. Because of the way it took off and landed with the tail wheel it was known as, The Gooney Bird. I loved flying to different places in the Philippines that I would normally never have gotten to if I was not a flight mechanic.
A couple of my favorite places was to a city in the mountains called, Baguio. Baguio was where the officers loved to go and hold conferences. Actually it was where they went to play golf. Baguio airstrip is at an elevation of 4,251 feet. The runway is very short and when we took off the pilots would sit at the end of the runway and rev up the engines. They would knock of the brakes and we would take off just before the runway ended and the mountain dropped a couple of thousand feet. Kind of a interesting take off.
Another place we flew to was on the southern island of Mindanao. We would land on a grass airstrip that was in the center of a huge Delmonte pineapple plantation. The pilots would contact ahead before we left and when we landed we would unload our supplies and then they would give us a dozen pineapples to take back with us. Now those were the freshest pineapples you could get. I remember as we were landing you could smell the aroma of the pineapples.
I loved flying around the Philippines and there were two times that I was really scared. The one time we were were going to Manila. Usually we went there to pick up the Four Star General and fly him back to Clark Air Force Base. On this particular flight the copilot was landing the plane and he always seemed a little snockered. There was no doubt in my mind that he should not have been flying. The flight was routine until the landing. We hit the runway hard and bounced up and down on the runway three or four times. The last time we hit the runway we swerved out into a field next to the runway. The one wing went down and touched the ground and as we were tipping my words were, "Holy Shit." We spun around and came to a stop. I walked up to the cockpit and the pilot said, "Are you alright." I was, but shaking pretty bad. Needless to say that copilot never flew again, Thank God. The plane was still flyable and we made it back to Clark AFB in one piece.
The second time I was scared was once we were taking off from Cebu. The weather wasn't the greatest and as we took off we were in cloud cover for quite a while. As we gained altitude and we finally came out of the clouds we could see it getting brighter and brighter. Finally out of the clouds there was a mountain directly in front of us. I really thought, this is it. The pilot pulled back hard on the wheel and we climbed just missing the mountain and cleared the treetops. I can remember the fear that took over my body to this day. That was close, really close.
All of my other flights were pretty routine, but those two will never leave my mind. It is not what happened that scares me, but what could have happened. The C-47 is the military version of the DC-3, built during the 1930s and 40s. Over 10,000 were built and now Eighty years later there are still about 400 that are still in
service.
My flight time took me to many interesting places in the Philippines, when there was a typhoon about to hit the Philippines we would fly to Taiwan. I once got to fly to Okinawa where my plane was taken for corrosion control. My plane was eventually flown to Vietnam and was then going into service in the Vietnam War. Vietnam, I was only there for four hours. The pilots and I sat in the terminal at Saigon and had a few beers and talked before we got a flight back to the Philippines.
It is funny how I can remember things from the early 1970s, but can walk into a room now and can't remember what for.
Copyright Larry W. Fish 2016
