University Place

cc >> --who was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. Graduated from UW Madison in 1966 with a degree in landscape architect. He entered the Air Force in pilot training at Reese Air Force Base in September of 1966 and graduated in September of 1967 in class 68B. He flew T-41s, 37s, T-38s aircraft in training. He entered the Strategic Air Command in 1967 flying KC-135s until his service commitment was completed in the fall of 1971. He then joined the Milwaukee Air National Guard flying the C-97 and the KC-97L at Mitchell Field until transferring to Madison Air National Guard in 1978, flying the O-2A followed by the AC-3, 37B, A-10A, and the local area supersonic flight and the F-16C, and then retiring in 1994. Tom was able to fly in the Air Force and Air National Guard for 26 years throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, South Asia, Panama, Thule, Greenland, and he has accumulated over 5,000 flying hours in military aircraft. In his general aviation world, soloed in 1964 in Morey Airport, Middleton, Wisconsin, and received his private license in 1965, flying in 152s and 172s, entering the military again in 1966. Managed the weather dissemination program, the -- and the GPS approach procedures, development Rockets for Schools ACE programs at Mitchell and Dane County Airports, and he has accumulated over 3500 hours flying general aviation aircraft, including helicopters. Retirement, he doesn't slow down of course. Very active in the UW Flying Club. Has flown over 300 Young Eagles, probably more now to date. Is part of the flight instructor of the Wisconsin Aviation and the director of Thomas Aviation Consulting Technologies. He was inducted in the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame in 2007 and is currently serving on the Board of Directors for the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame Incorporated. He also is area 4 chairman for the Wisconsin ESGR, Employment Support for Guard and Reserve, Committee. So please help me welcome back to the stage Tom Thomas.

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>> Thank you very much. I mentioned the Wisconsin ESGR, this is really a cool poster, and I brought a couple of these along if you want to take one home and hang it up in your hanger or in your window, I brought some along too. Still support our troops, our guard and reserve members that are serving now for our country, which is a really important thing. Really happy to be here to talk about an experience I had back in 1977 when I was flying with the Milwaukee National Guard. Outline for today. I'm going to talk about the introduction background, you got some of that already, the pre-flight and check out of the Boeing 377, the cross country pattern, entering the pattern at Dodgeville, the landing, and the final pavement. Final pavement. We'll talk about that too. And I'm going to have some other information about the C-97, the Boeing 377, so you get an idea of what goes on with the airplane, how big it is, and how the airplane flies. Again, my introduction, I started taking lessons in 1964 and went into the Air Force in 1966, went into the Milwaukee Air Guard in 1971. In 1971 when I went into the Air Guard, I was out of the Strategic Air Command and I was an instructor in the KC-135, and they said, well, we'd like to have you, Tom. We're going to get 135s in two or three months. That was December of '71 when I raised my hand. My last flight, my last flight in the 97 was on January 12, 1978. But what a wonderful experience. It was a step back in time flying the big old recip. A beautiful airplane. To give you an idea of the size of the airplane, our engines were Pratt & Whitney 4360s, the largest recip that flew regularly. This is a piston. Imagine the piston from 172 or 150 or Cherokee. I'm going to have this around so you can come and take a look at it too. It's quite a piston. Each engine had 28 of these. Four rows of seven cylinders apiece, and we had four engines. Imagine 112 of these popping and jumping and banging and sloshing around. They liked oil.

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When they designed the 97, as a matter of fact, in the nose of the 97 under the pilot compartment they built it with a 53-gallon oil tank. And as the airplane flew, the engines, Pratt & Whitney 4360 was designed to consume two gallons of oil an hour. Two gallons of oil an hour. They had a 25-gallon oil tank but still it would go low. Some would burn faster than others, so the flight engineer would pump oil from the oil tank reservoir in the nose to the engine that it needed. Now, being in the National Guard, I learned quickly that the National Guard were improvisors, and they could improve a lot of things. And all of our 97s, this one right here, right behind the cargo door, and you'll see where that is on the airplane, they installed, our mechanics installed a 50-gallon drum of oil with a hand pump on it. And as the oil went down in the lower nose compartment, they would pump the oil from our 50-gallon drum so we always had enough oil. Very important thing for the 97. Milwaukee had a variety of airplanes. They had F-89s. In 1959 they won the championship shootout with the F-89s, and it seems like whenever they did something well, the same in Madison, they would get a different aircraft. Milwaukee got the KC-97G model in 1960, and they flew the first --. In Milwaukee, we did a lot of interesting things. I recall one Saturday I showed up and they were having an air show at Milwaukee. They used to have them at Mitchell Field. It was really neat. And I was on a crew that was going to be inflight refueling F-100s. The top picture is of a tail with a 97 and three F-100s flying in formation alongside it. I had done this in the Air Force, so that was no big deal. We'd get a fighter behind us, and he'd kind of fly along the boom as we flew down the runway and then we'd fly away. They'd never make contact. I got up the first time, and it's harder to inflight refuel with a basket. They call it a drogue as opposed to a prob, and we refueled F-100s with a basket. We picked up a flight of F-100s from --. They came in, we're getting ready to go down the runway, and the 97 you do things a little bit different. I come to AirVenture, I see people making these low altitude, high speed passes. Remember those that at AirVenture? A great time. Well, we made high altitude, low speed passes.

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In the 97, but we refueled. And I'm listening on the radio to the announcer as well, and the F-100 came in, he got in contact with the bag, and as we flew down the runway we were actually passing gas to him. And they announced that too, and I thought, wow, these guard guys are really sharp. And they are. And this happened here at Milwaukee too. And you see the two 97s coming in formation on a fly-by as well. A lot of different aircraft here at Milwaukee. One in particular, 905 is the only one still existing in the state and it's up at Volk Field. How many people have driven by Volk Field on the interstate? You can actually drive in there and drive around these airplanes. 905 is still alive and well.

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I just heard last week, as a matter of fact, from a gentleman from Volk who told me that they got a call from NASA, and NASA still has a Super Guppy. Remember the Super Guppies with the big...? Those are KC-97s that have taken on a little weight.

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And they make them real large so they can carry things inside them, and they're still operating as Super Guppy but their fuel tanks are dilapidated and they don't work anymore and they need some more fuel tanks to replace it. And they're looking around and they call Volk Field and said, hey, can we swap out gas tanks? Do you have a 97? Can we possibly trade so part of 905 still might be flying again? A really neat story. And it is up there, and after the talk here and we're talking about the 97, you want to go and see one, if you can't get to Dodgeville, stop in at Volk Field and take a look at it. You can walk around it and take lots of pictures. What is a 97? What is it? Well, it's kind of a big airplane. It has a wingspan of 101 feet, four inches. That's pretty wide. And the length is 110 feet, two inches. That's pretty long. That's a perspective. Over 38 feet tall. The gear says 33 feet wide, but the actual center section of the gear, they're dual tandems, are 29 feet, six inches apart. The runway at Dodgeville was 30 feet wide, so the outside of the wheels were actually on the gravel or the grass. Before he paved the runway, Don Quinn, who owned the runway, it was 75 feet gravel, and he just paved 30 feet in the middle of it. So we were partially on gravel, partially on asphalt. But it was a pretty good sized airplane. Okay, 141 feet wide. Interestingly, if anybody had been into Dodgeville, the best way to go there was by car even when the runway was open.

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Before we landed, the windsock was too close to the runway. We would have hit it with our wings. So they lowered the windsock. Dodgeville, at the time in 1977 I was working for the state of Wisconsin Bureau of Aeronautics Department of Transportation in airport operations. And one of the things that I did there was visit the airports and check them for the FAA for their airport facility inventory. We would set airport inspection 5010 data, the data that you get in the airport when you call it up for your aircraft. I'd actually gone to Dodgeville before this with an engineer and we surveyed the runway. Dodgeville has a very unique quality. It's all downhill, basically. Runway 1230, 30 northwest is our landing direction. Primarily in the state it's to the north and northwest, 30. The elevation difference on the east end, runway 30 landing approach, and the west end, runway 12, was 84 feet. All downhill. 84 feet. So that was an opportunity, and this opportunity making, again, lemonade out of lemons, we'll land uphill. We have a challenge of landing a big airplane on a short runway, and if we use gravity on our side, going uphill it's going to help us land. Initially, when Don Quinn purchased the airplane in California he wanted to bring it back and make a restaurant out of it, a cafe. >> This is a military C-97 Boeing aircraft. Civilian terms, that's a Boeing 377. If that still doesn't mean much to you, maybe this will. This is the plane Farrah Fawcett used in her car commercials. The plane was built in the mid-'40s and used to haul cargo in the military. It's takeoff weight is 181,000 pounds, and it burns 600 gallons of gas in an hour. Don Quinn bought the plane Saturday in Long Beach and plans to have it flown into Dodgeville, land on a 2800-foot airstrip, and then put on a static display to be used as a coffee shop restaurant at the Don Q Inn. According to Claude Frickleton, temporarily securing the plane at Frickleton Aero, Quinn's always been an airplane nut and a heck of a promoter. The plane will be flown to Dodgeville late this week or early next week depending on the wind and the weather. Judy Nash, Wisconsin TV Network News. >> He had the Texas Air National Guard fly the airplane up to Wisconsin. And they landed it at Madison, and he paid them and got them airline tickets to go home to Texas, but they didn't want to fly it in because the weather wasn't good enough. Those Texas people are kind of smart. So he was looking for a crew. My boss came to work one day and he said, hey, Tom, he said, one of your airplanes is out at Frickleton. If you remember Frickleton operation on the south end of the field, and it's got Don Quinn's name on it and he's looking for a crew to fly it in, you ought to give him a call. I'd been to the airport, I knew the 97, I knew Don Quinn, I'd worked with him before, so I called him up and said, hey, Don, are you looking for a crew? And he said, yeah, I am. The guys from Texas couldn't fly it in there because the winds weren't right. So I got on the phone and I called around and I was able to get a couple other crew members from the 126 refueling that were in Milwaukee that were interested in flying it in with me. Dick Schmidt, Don Waligorski and myself. Don Waligorski was the flight engineer. Dick Schmidt was an airline pilot for Air Wisconsin, and, incidentally, he built a pit special himself that he flew around for air shows, and Ron -- says hello. He's the guy that signed it off. Active EAA member as well and a 126 refueling member as well. So I contacted Don Quinn, and he said yes. And it depended on the weather, so we waited for a good weather day. It happened to be Sunday, October 17th. The winds were pretty good, and they were light and actually out of the southeast so it favored runway 12. Too calm, basically. So we coordinated and got the three crew over to the Dane County Airport. Don Quinn was there. Don Waligorski, Dick Schmidt, myself, and the Channel 27 television reporter. We looked at the airplane. The television reporter, Dick Schmidt, myself, and Don Quinn flew in a Cessna 172SP to Dodgeville. And I knew the airport, so I flew the 172 over there. We landed uphill. We dropped of the television recorder with his video machine and Don Quinn, and then Dick and I walked the runway. And we looked at potential obstacles and potential situations if we got a flat tire, and that's when we had them lower the windsock, and different options that we had before we just took off and flew in there and landed. When I talk to some people sometimes and they wonder how the airplane got in there, I say, well, you couldn't really land an airplane that big there. They actually took the wings off and put the fuselage and wings on a train and took it in and reassembled it. And they believe that.

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But we looked at the airport first, and we looked at the options. And the Dodgeville Airport had a number of unique qualities to it, and one of them was the terrain. But landing uphill was on our side. So we checked that out before we flew in for the first time, and only time, with the 97. This was the 1970 Wisconsin airport directory, again that I worked with publishing when I worked at the state. It shows the runway being 2700 feet long and 30 feet wide. Before we flew over to Dodgeville, we wanted to make sure that the 97 was working okay. That everything on it was working as it was supposed to. So we took off from Madison, and when we took off, we took off on runway 31, one of the shorter runways, which was, I think, about 5400 feet long, which was a piece of cake. We flew out to the northwest practice area, and we did slow fly maneuvers. We left the gear down. Lessons learned again. If the gear is down, you don't need it, leave it down. What ain't broke, don't try to fix it. So we left the gear down, flew the airplane flaps, slow flight. Very stable, very good, and then before we landed, we wanted to make a landing at Madison and make sure that reverse worked. We had four engine reverse on that and we want to make sure it worked, it was even across the board, so when we decelerated we wouldn't get any movement to the right or the left. So we came back in to land at Madison and they want us to go to the long runway, the 8,000-foot runway as opposed to the one that was 5,000-something. And we said, no, we'd take the 5,000-foot runway. If we couldn't land there, we couldn't land on 2700 feet. So we came around, we brought it in, we called up the air spades and had the reverse lock lever. On the 97, with the throttle, there's actually a panel that sits up against the throttle so you can't reverse it inadvertently in the air. You actually have to open the reverse lock panel. As we came down, I was watching the air speed so close, calling it off, and we touched down and Dick went to reverse and it didn't reverse. I thought, whoops. My hand was on the reverse lock panel. Opened it up, we went to reverse idle, even across the board. It looked good, solid. Went back, forward thrust. Brakes worked good. Braked evenly. No movement one way or the other, which was crucial. So then we took off and we headed for Dodgeville. Left the gear down. We had some 10,000 pounds of fuel on board. We could have made it to the east coast. We had a lot of gas. It wasn't a problem. Our limiting factor, remember what I told you about? Oil. On the engines. If you get down to 15 gallons, you get a warning light, and if you get down to 10 gallons, you shut the engine off. When we were coming in to land and we lowered the nose, we actually were getting low level lights on our engine oil. Interesting. Interesting opportunity. When we got to Dodgeville, we did a standard traffic pattern. And this is the standard traffic pattern from the dash ones. We have a couple dash ones you can look at over in the book as well. And it shows that just like if you're flying a 172 or a Piper, Dakota, you fly it downwind, we have the continued turnaround, and then the final approach. When I looked at this, it's interesting you can see the downwind, the turn to final approach. It says 25 knots above stall speed. We were a little closer than that on final. But you see it touching down on the runway. What was the wingspan? >>

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>> Yeah. Look at the width of that runway. Boy, I'd like to land on that runway. Not quite standard what we're going to do. We got to the pattern, and we had told them before we'd landed in the 97 we were going to make a low approach. No matter if it looked good or not, we were going to make a low approach to make sure everything was set up right, air currents and everything looked good. We'd go around and then if it did, we would land. If it didn't look good, we were going to fly back to Madison. Or the east coast. We had enough gas.

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So they said okay. We went in and we made a low approach, first of all. Then we did a go-around and we decided we'd use the call sign eagle one, the eagle has landed in tie with the astronauts landing on the moon. Eagle one going around and he called us on a brick. He was on a brick. He said how come you're going around? And we said we told you we're going around. We wanted to make sure it was okay. We'll land on this approach. So we came around and we're landing on runway 12, uphill again, and off the end of the runway on 12 there happens to be a ravine that's some 150-some feet deep. Really quite a drop off. On the other end of the runway is Highway 23, and that was about a 15-foot drop off. So it's important to stay on the runway.

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So we made the call when we came in at Dodgeville, eagle one, gear down. Base runway 12, full stop, Dodgeville. As we continued turning, we made the next call. Dodgeville traffic, eagle one, turning final, runway 12, Dodgeville. Everything was looking good. Pretty fall colors you can see in October. It was a beautiful day. On final, Dodgeville traffic, eagle one, short final, runway 12, Dodgeville. This is landing at Dodgeville Airport. Again, October 16th, sorry, 1977. And you see us touching down lightly there. We're going to have a video that we're going to show you, and you'll see the actual landing. We came down and on short final the reverse lock plate was open so the copilot didn't forget. And I call off the air speeds, and they were in the low 90s when we came across final coming up to the end of the runway. And we virtually hit the first brick. That's a term that maybe it's an Air Force or Navy term. It's the end of the runway. They're not made out of bricks but if you imagined if they were, you'd want to hit the first brick if the runway was short. Actually, it was about 10 feet from the end, but from our size of an airplane it was the first brick where the wheels hit. I went back there again to inspect it, and there were our wheel marks. But we hit the ground firmly. And you'll see the airplane skip gently, as the television reporter announces it over the video, and smoothly touched down. We came down and we hit that runway, ka-bang. No, we didn't hit the runway; it hit us. It was coming uphill. And we bounced and the airplane shook, but I felt that was okay. I've had ones like that on normal land. But we bounced uphill and we didn't bounce that far and we never got very high because we're going uphill. Don Waligorski thought, our flight engineer, we were going to be going around, and he was ready with the throttles. Dick and I both felt, ah, piece of cake. We've got it made. About 200 feet, we came down, smooth landing. We're rolling straight and level. Dick brought the throttle back to idle. I looked, I said even idle across the board, brought the throttles back. Well, the engines are outside of the wheels, and you know that the wheels are right on the edge of the runway. So both these big props are out over the grass and the dirt and the sand. So when we went reverse, we blew all that stuff up. And I'd landed a good number of times in the winter in a multi-engine airplane and the 97, and when we reverse the props we would get a whiteout from the snow because it goes up and you can't see. You're momentarily blinded. Well, we had a brownout and couldn't see the ground, couldn't see anything, but we were going straight. It looked good, it felt good, and we were slowing down good. Dick brought the throttles up to idle, back to forward thrust and the dust and sand dissipated. And we were about to where the hanger building is, which is about 1500 feet down the runway. We hadn't gone much more than half way down the runway, and we were slowing down to the point where we really didn't even have to brake. And it was the topography, going uphill, that was helping us slow down. >> The Don Q almost didn't get off the ground yesterday as the crew and the owner played a waiting game with the weather. Clear skies made for excellent visibility, but 10 mile an hour winds were a problem. The wind speed was important as the runway in Dodgeville is shorter than is usually necessary to land a plane of this size. Wind wouldn't help. But late in the afternoon, pilot Dick Schmidt fired up the plane's four engines, taxied down the runway, and headed for Dodgeville. Minutes later, the destination was in sight. The World War II vintage plane circled above while a crowd of spectators watched from below. Schmidt made a practice attempt before climbing back in the sky for one last pass. The Don Q then came skimming over the treetops and softly touched the runway before being engulfed in a cloud of dust. It was a very happy crew that was greeted by plane owner Don Quinn, but yesterday's flight was the last for the Don Q, once a wartime fortress now to be remodeled into a coffee shop. Paul --, Wisconsin TV Network News. >> Well, Don Quinn told us that the ground was very firm and there's a lot of limestone around that area of the state and Dodgeville and we shouldn't have a problem taxiing on it at all. And we were just a little over 100,000 pounds. We weren't real heavy. So we taxied off onto the grass, and somehow word had gotten out that we were coming in to land. We didn't even know we were going to land, but people showed up. The highway was blocked with cars. There were all kinds of people around and thousands around. I was worried about crowd control, we all were, about people running up and those big propellers, so we got off onto the grass and we shut down the outboards. And this is what we'd normally do when we're coming back from a mission. We'd shut down the outboards. We'd taxi in on the inboards. Save fuel. You don't need them all. But we did it not only to save fuel but to save people in case they came running up. Went through our checklist, and then we proceeded to taxi in. Dick pushed the throttles up, pushed them way up, pushed them up against the wall. We just sat there. We sunk into the ground. We couldn't move. Oh, nuts. Okay, Don, we want to start the outboard engines. So I looked over at number four. When we started the outboard engines, pilot and copilot would give the flight engineer eight blades. We'd count them, eight blades, and tell them he got eight blades, and then he'd put the mixture to it, bring the throttle up, and it would start. So I gave him the one on the right engine, Dick gave him the one on the left engine, started up all four engines. And while we're sitting there parked, Don Quinn called us on the brick and said, hey, have you got any problems, eagle one? Nah, we don't have any problems. All four engines, brought them up and we got that thing out of the ground and it started moving, but it took all four engines to taxi, to keep that thing moving. We taxied up on the hill, basically where it is now, and parked it, and people were down below the hill and it was a mass of people. They were all around. And we parked it up on top, went through the checklist, and shut it down. The people stayed down. They stayed away, which was really very good. Shut down the airplane and then climbed out. And an interesting thing, my boss was Fritz Wolf of Flying Tiger. I don't know, some of you maybe know Fritz Wolf from Shawano, Wisconsin, who was inducted in the Aviation Hall of Fame as well. Flew for Chennault in China Burma before World War II. And he told me when he heard I was going to fly it in, he said, okay, Thomas, you just don't tell them you work for the state. Don't mention the state of Wisconsin. So when they asked me after I landed, I was also in the Civil Air Patrol. Have we got anybody in Civil Air Patrol? Good organization. I was with the Civil Air Patrol cadet program, so when they asked me what kind of flying do you do, I said, well, I fly with the Civil Air Patrol.

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That's all I told them. But in the paper, and we have a paper here we'll show you in a bit, they published it and they said that Tom Thomas works for the Wisconsin Aeronautics Commission. I thought, well that's the end of my career. Well, there was no such thing as the Wisconsin Aeronautics Commission. So I got out of trouble there. But they came and interviewed us and wined us and dined us and then flew us back home that night. Dropped me off first at Madison, Don Waligorski at Milwaukee, and then Dick up to Appleton. A couple days after the flight, this newspaper was published. And in here there's a lot of statistics about the airplane itself. And I'm going to talk about some of those things, and some of the pictures they had in here as well. Because the story does go on after they talked about the landing and then different things came up. This is the Dodgeville Airport in 1989 shortly after it closed. It was purchased by a construction company, and now the runway has construction equipment on it. You can actually drive down it to the far end, which I have a couple of times. But you sure can't land on it because it's got all this equipment on it. So the Dodgeville Airport is no more. Thirty years afterward, in 2007, the Chronicle was published, a special issue, an anniversary issue of the landing of the airplane. We had a reunion there, and Don Quinn passed away with stomach cancer. Had quite a fight with it. And during the reunion, his wife was there, and she talked about going to California to pick up this airplane with Don Quinn. This airplane had belonged to the United States Air Force. It had been sold to Project Hope for a dollar, and as a cargo airplane it was used to fly supplies to Biafra in the Congo during the Biafra revolution there. They had five C-97s. Three of them remained in Biafra. Two of them came home. This is one and its sister is located at the Pima Air Museum. Anybody been to Pima Air Museum? Great place to go. If you see a 97 there, this is its sister. Incidentally, the people from NASA might be calling the Don Quinn too about its fuel tanks, which would be a new life for this airplane, which is interesting. So we had the celebration there, and Don's wife mentioned that they had gone in to look at the airplane. A company wanted to buy it and fly it down to South America and get it certified through the FAA there because they couldn't do it here because there were so many things to get done to it, and they had almost tried to purchase it and the bank had it and they wouldn't sell it to them so Don put in a bid and he purchased the airplane. And to get it flyable back home, he had to buy some oil for it. Remember, it needs a little bit of oil.

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So he says, hey, honey, have you got that Texaco card? She said, yeah. He says, would you pay for the oil, I'm over here talking to these guys. Sure, honey. So she goes and gives the Texaco card, comes back, $673 for oil. She goes, wow, that's a lot of oil. And in those days it wasn't that much. So she paid for it, and she said that was the most she'd ever paid on a credit card in her life was the oil for this airplane. She said she got home and a week or two later when she got home Texaco called her up and said, well, we think the decimal is off. It should be $68 not $680. They thought it was wrong too. But the airplane needed so much oil. It did need a lot of oil. So that was her largest purchase price on any credit card. Payment. Before we took off to go fly, we talked about it in our crew of how much we were going to charge and how much we were going to get paid. We were kind of excited about the challenge of doing it, and paying would be nice. It wasn't our primary motivation. You learn something from your experiences. Don said, I'll pay you well. Okay, good, he's going to pay us well. On our flight back that night after the big ceremony we talked about how much it was going to be. What we thought well was going to be. And I think it came up to something like $150 a piece. That was initial price anyway. There were other things that we talked about. This was '77 again, October 16th. We got rid of the airplanes in January of 1978. And that was the last flight I had on a 97. We were all together, Don Waligorski, Dick Schmidt, and I, at guard drill in Milwaukee. We thought we'd go over to the Don Quinn and get paid. So we rented an airplane Cessna 172 from Aerodyne and we split the cost of it and we flew over to Dodgeville. The runway was plowed. I remember it was cold, and we got wined and dined. Well, I didn't get wine because I was the seeing eye pilot. So I just had Coke. And Dick and Don had their mixed drinks. We were ready to go and getting ready to go out to the airplane. It was shooting 11 o'clock. And this is on tape, okay. We decided, Dick, ask him, ask him for our checks. We want our checks. And Dick says, well, we'd kind of like to get paid, we came over to get paid. And Don said, kind guy, great heart, he said, well, what I'd really like to do is have you come back with your wives and we'll have a party, a celebration, and we'll write your checks out then. And Dick says, yeah, okay, that's fine. We walked out to the airplane and we got the 172 started in the cold, cold weather and we found our way back to Milwaukee. It wasn't snowing that hard. The rest is kind of history, but every day I'd go out to the mailbox and look for that check. Maybe in a blue moon someday it might come by.

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The 97 did some really interesting things. One of the neat things I was able to do, in 1972, December, there was a real bad earthquake in Nicaragua. Howard Hughes was staying in a motel on the top floor there. Some of you remember it. Nicaragua is a sister to Wisconsin so they needed some food supplies. We got four 97s to fly down with 20,000-some pounds of food on each one. I got to go on airplane number four and fly down to Nicaragua. We actually flew to Texas, stayed overnight, and then entered Nicaragua the next day during daylight. They had no power. They had no lights, no radios. We talked to a guy in the jeep. We landed, offloaded, and then flew in to Panama and stayed overnight. But I have this slide for a specific reason, and it talks about the ingenuity of the Wisconsin Air National Guard maintenance men. The airplane was going to deploy to Alaska for two weeks, and the maintenance man asked Colonel Bailey, the commander, if they could take a car to Alaska because our license plates were good here and there. And Tom Bailey said, Colonel Bailey, ha ha ha, if you can get it in, we'll take it, ha ha ha. He figured no way. Look at the size of that door. Could you get a car through there? They did.

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Somehow, I don't know how they did, and every time I see a 97, the one at the museum in Ashland, Nebraska, has got the cargo door open, I look at it and I just wonder. They must have taken the wheels off and, I don't know, the bumpers, twisted it around, got it all together, got it all strapped down, and they got it inside. And Bailey found out and he went up to the airplane and he walked up there and he saw it and says, get that out of here. Okay. But they got it in there. They did take it out and disassembled it, but somehow they were able to squeeze, kind of like putting a ship in the bottle. How do they do that? But the 97 mechanics were outstanding. Fueled a lot of different airplanes with the KC-97. This is an F-4 Phantom jet. When we went to Germany in the middle '70s, operation called Creek Party, we flew out of Frankfurt. And the 97 was the only plane that could fly out of there because the KC-135 made too much noise. They had noise sensors set up all around Frankfurt, and you had to fly a planned departure route and if you set off the noise sensors, you'd be in trouble. You'd be fined. But the 97 could operate safely out of Frankfurt, and there were a lot of F-4s in Germany at the time. Neat aircraft that I was able to refuel in the 97 was the YF-17. Probably haven't heard of the YF-17, but this looks kind of like the F-18, doesn't it? Well, it was in the fly off competition with the YF-16. It was a YF-17 two-engine jet. The Navy didn't buy the YF-16, but they took the 17. They bulked it up. This had a single nose wheel in the front. Made double wheels, beefed up the gear, beefed up the airplane, and we have the F-18. It was in a fly off competition with the YF-16, and we in the National Guard were able to participate. Texas, I mentioned to you about Texas before. I was able to fly out the first crew from Milwaukee to Edwards Air Force Base California for the fly off competition. We landed, this guy showed up in an orange flight suit and a 12 case of Oly beer and said you guys are great. Gave us all a beer, we got off the airplane, boy, this is a great place to be. Edwards, I heard all about the flight testing here. Boy, the guard is great. Texas was just here and they really supported us, did us good. We were going out on a mission and the Texas 97 took off and the nose gear was stuck down. It happened to me twice. And we said, well, I guess you're going to have to cancel, we're going to have to go back in, and Texas says, no, if you can refuel at 190 knots we're in good shape. So they said okay. So they're up there with this airplane flying around with the nose gear, and there's a YF-16 coming and get gas and doing its stuff. More gas. They're flying along, all the sudden the airplane would start to shake when you lose an engine quite often. Number two starts to shake and smoke. They shut number two down, break away, break away. F-16 went back and said, gee whiz, you guys are going to have to go back and land. We'll do the mission later. And they said, no, that's okay, if you can refuel at 190 knots. So here's this airplane with the nose gear hanging down, number two feathered, and the refuel in the YF-16. One of my additional duties in the Air Force and the Air National Guard was aviation safety.

LAUGHTER

Somehow Texas kind of missed out on things. Nothing happened but stuff can fall off the airplane. But they completed the mission. And I thought, geez, I got to follow that story. As it turns out, we flew for two weeks. We had one VHF radio right up the airplane. Flew great the whole time. We never had a problem. And it was great refueling the YF-17. Neat airplane. Local flights. The 97 would fly around Libby Parod. Put Libby, Libby, Libby on the table, table, table. Anybody remember Libby Parod from Cable? Yes. The first woman inducted in the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame. This is Cable. Cable, Wisconsin. And the pilots from Milwaukee knew Libby because they would fly up there in their corporate jets. Well, one day they were out for a cross-country training flight and they call up Libby and she asked them to make a low pass down the runway and check it out. And so it would do that too. Local flights. This is our squadron picture taken in 1976. You can see on the left side of the picture, kneeling down is my name Tom Thomas. Right close to me is Dick Schmidt. Standing up behind us is Don Waligorski. We may not have been the smartest or the best air crew members in the refueling squadron, but we were the best looking.

LAUGHTER

The 97 is still sitting there. I went up there one Christmas and took this picture, and it is there on Highway 26 and you can stop by and see it. And now the rest of the story. The Boeing 377 wasn't the first four-engine airplane to land at Dodgeville. This airplane landed there before we did. It's a DC-6, and Don Quinn was flying it at the time for a company, and he landed it there. And he needed a copilot for insurance or something so he called up a friend of mine, Jerry Ehrlich, who was a flight instructor, multi-engine flight instructor at Morey Airport in Middleton where I got my license, which at the time had a gravel runway and two grass runways. A fun place to fly. And said, hey, would you fly in the right seat for me? You don't have to do anything, but I need you there. And Jerry told me about it, and they went up there and flew it. It was gravel runway then, and he landed and he taxied in and he got out in the flaps and the elevator in the back and the rudder are all fiberglass. Canvas but they make the fiberglass now. Full of holes from the rocks. Well, he used some duct tape, taped it up, and took it off and flew it out of there. But this was the first four-engine to land at Dodgeville. We weren't the first one. Don Quinn was quite an entrepreneur. He made a lot of stuff out of nothing, and he wanted to make a cafe out of this airplane. And his plan was to turn it around and back it into this big barn restaurant he has, hotel. At the second level, you would just walk off, and you would walk inside and you'd sit at the tables. He would have microphones set up to Unicom and the ATC frequencies nearby, so while you're having your burger or your cup of soup you could listen to the airplanes fly over and listen to the pilots talk. And it has two levels in it. It has a lower level. And the lower level was going to be the kitchen. It would work out real fine. Well, when he was going to do that there were some health employees from the state of Wisconsin that went out and visited him and gave him a list of things that he had to provide, elevators and all sorts of things and so many things he said thank you very much and decided not to do it. He couldn't do it because of all the restrictions. It sounds like a slam dunk to me, but he had so much help that he just couldn't do it. So he left it parked out in front, and people would come and see it and they would pay to go into it. School kids, they'd bring school kids in buses so they could tour the airplane. It was a great addition out there. He made, I think, twice the amount of money that it cost him to buy the airplane from people going through it while he was still alive and coming out on weekends and walking through the airplane. So he was an entrepreneur. Don Quinn also enlisted in the Army Air Corps in the early '40s. And here's a picture of him with a P-38. And he flew the P-38 in the South Pacific. Well, another very well known Wisconsinite, Richard I Bong, flew the P-38 in the Pacific in World War II. 70 years ago this year, 1944, Richard I Bong received the Medal of Honor. It was actually given to him on December 12th. Our own Richard I Bong from Poplar, Wisconsin. He had shot down 40 aircraft, but he didn't get the Medal of Honor for that. He actually, they started the paperwork in October and he was selected, he had 38 kills at the time, because he had shot down 10 enemy aircraft in eight days. And that's why he was given it. He still is the ace of aces. Nobody has matched his number of kills. He was put in the flight test program at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Was flight testing the new P-80 jet in January of '45, later in '45, and the engine quit on takeoff and he wasn't able to eject and he lost his life. It was 70 years ago today or this year that Richard I Bong received the Medal of Honor. We have some additional cards on the table. Rose Dorsey, who is the president of the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame, has some trading cards with Richard I Bong on it. And he was the first one we, with the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame, have produced, and we're going to be producing more. And she has some to pass out if you would like one after the meeting. There was one other special member that had a tie in Hollywood to our 97 at Dodgeville. Interesting story. Here she is. Farrah Fawcett. I remember, yeah, in technicolor seeing Farrah Fawcett with the commercials for the Mercury Cougar, and they actually were inside this airplane. And they had the cams on the back drive out. And it had a big Mercury Cougar on the nose of the airplane as well in the Mercury Cougar advertisement earlier in 1977 is when the commercial was made. And also, Farrah Fawcett signed the airplane herself. And her signature, again, is in the newspaper that you'll be able to see. The airplane was made very rugged, very capable, and the picture before that actually had two engines shut down. And that was part of its demonstration to the military to show how strong and how capable the C-97 was. If it would receive battle damage, it could fly home safely on two engines fairly easily. And it could. And with that, I'll open up to any questions, if you have any questions right now. I'll remain for a while, but if you have any questions that you think are of general nature that other people would like to hear.

APPLAUSE