Previously Held NEC AD-0000-Aviation Machinist's Mate
AD-6416-J-52 Jet Turbojet Engine First Degree/IMA Mechanic
139X-Unrestricted Line Officer - Pilot (In Training)
131X-Unrestricted Line Officer - Pilot
163X-Special Duty Officer - Intelligence
Worst Moment Forgot to close the canopy on my first take-off. The instructor did his best to try to call my attention to my oversight, but with my head up and locked he finally had to yell, "CLOSE THE CANOPY!!!". Boy was I stupid.
Other Memories How beautiful everything looked from up there.
Spins.
The bailout trainer.
I remember struggling to memorize procedures until my roommate, Dwayne Currie, taught me to use the oval carpet in our barracks like the traffic pattern at the field, and to imagine I was in the airplane, flying around the pattern and do the procedures over the various positions on the carpet. It was a brilliant suggestion and it worked. I used that technique throughout flight training.
One Sunday afternoon, my roommate, Dwayne Currie, and I returned from liberty with our wives. It was against the rules to have women in the barracks, but everybody but us had been doing it for weeks and nobody seemed to care, and our wives had been bugging us to see what our barracks room looked like, so this Sunday we let them peek inside when out of nowhere the duty offcer came by and wrote us up. Nobody else was written up, just us. Were we lucky or what? Anyway, commissioning was next week, so we had to spend all our spare time that week walking punishment tours with rifles so we could graduate and get commissioned.
