By David Himes

by Dave Himes

       On Sept. 11, 2001, my wife and I were visiting my mom in Lawton, OK on the occasion of her 80th birthday just two days before. My dad had passed away some years earlier. At the time I was a captain at Northwest Airlines, and we had flown into Oklahoma City a few days earlier “pass riding” on one of my company’s airplanes. Our plan was to reverse that process in a few days to return to our home in Florida. My wife turned on the TV that morning and informed me that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. The “little airplane, tall building, bad weather” scenario came to mind. It had happened very occasionally in the past… a tragedy for a few but little more. Soon video of the second impact showed up and it was obvious we were witnessing something entirely different. Then came the announcement that all civil air traffic was grounded indefinitely. We would not be flying an airliner back to Florida. I opined that we’d have to rent a car for that trip. At my wife’s insistence, I called out to the Lawton airport (about the only place you could rent a car there) and the only agency still with cars was Hertz. I planned to pick the car up the next day and hit the road. Once again, my wife was more in tune with the unfolding disaster than I and insisted that we pick up the car ASAP. We headed for the local airport in my mom’s car and got the last rental car in Lawton, OK just before it left for Dallas. Apparently, all the national rental car companies were ferrying everything they had in that part of the country

to Dallas to deal with the thousands of stranded airline passengers at the two big airports there. The smaller markets were stripped bare. 

      We hit the road the next morning so I could be in place for my next airline trip. As we now know, there was no hurry on that score.

When the airlines were finally allowed back in the air a couple of weeks later, I was assigned a trip out of Dulles airport (IAD) near Washington, DC. The government had allowed the airlines to position crews and airplanes the previous day. My crew and I stepped off the hotel van at the airport into a solid wall of people both inside the terminal building and out. We knew where the employee entrance through security was but getting there resembled football practice on a hot afternoon. I sure could have used my classmate Charlie Jarvis, an amazing Army running back, as a lead blocker. We finally got to our airplane and the next few days were repeats of that experience. Our military training gave us the confidence to keep the planes in the air even under these most unusual and difficult circumstances.  Getting back to normal airline flying was a long-term process with the eventual creation of the TSA in November 2001. My fellow airline pilots that were actually flying on Sept. 11 had a lot of interesting stories.   

 Himes – A Tribute to Two Great Pilots – 1970

Those of us who graduated from West Point, but entered the US Air Force for our service, gained a different military family. The Air Force is a smaller branch of our military, so we would become close friends with a set of budding pilots. Some of us did our flight training at the same base while others were assigned to other training bases. Regardless of location, we all went through the same training program flying the three training aircraft in use at that time. The title photo of an amazing jet is the T-38 advanced jet trainer that we finished our training on. For obvious reasons we called it the White Rocket. And, yes, it flew like it looked.     

On this Memorial Day, it is appropriate to remember two classmates that chose to go into the U S Air Force instead of the U S Army. Some of us Air Force guys would cross paths again after West Point; some not, but we shared a love for being airborne. Today, we salute their service and commitment to our Country.

Dave Kirby and I were both in the same cadet company (B-4) for 4 years. That meant that starting with Beast Barracks through graduation we lived with the same couple of dozen fellows…. for better or worse. Kirbs was definitely on the “better” side. To be fair, they were all in that category. My B-4 classmates were as outstanding a group of young men you could find. My only regret in going Air Force was that I’d likely never see most of them after graduation. Anyway, my academic prowess was mediocre at best; Kirbs was way up there. I don’t think he actually worked a lot harder than most of us, but he could grasp difficult math and engineering concepts on the first read. As a result, his GPA was far above mine and I think he was ranked at the top of the list for those of us going AF. A small backstory: Our required academic load left very little room for elective courses. In my case I took 4 years of Portuguese (2 years of a foreign language were required) mainly because it was one of the few classes I could get a 3.0 in. Second semester of Firstie year, Kirbs took what was for all practical measures a post-grad level engineering course… CH499, I think. Naturally, he got a 3.0 in it. Course numbers ending in “99” were never on my class schedule. FYI, at the time 3.0 was the max grade in a course; 2.0 was barely passing or “tangent”. After all, we were all engineers back then. On the off-duty side, Kirbs was a car nut. He had a Pontiac with the biggest engine GM put in the thing.

Of course, he could (and did) take it apart and reassemble it like it was a Lego toy. I’m barely able to adjust the little chain in a toilet tank. Anyway, he got around the academy prohibition on car ownership by keeping the car titled in his dad’s name until Firstie year spring break. He died in a single car crash late at night shortly before Undergraduate Pilot Training graduation. In pilot training at Randolph Air Force Base the time of Dave’s accident was one of his West Point Classmates, 2LT Scott Nix (https://thedaysforward.com/scott-nix/). Scott was honored to be the officer who escorted Dave on his final journey home to his grief-stricken family – a sad assignment, but a real-life example of the camaraderie of graduates of West Point and the Long Gray Line. Dave’s untimely death left a big hole in the future of our Air Force. What if he had not been taken from us so soon. What could he have accomplished? 

     Kent Crenshaw and I were in different regiments as cadets, so our paths seldom crossed at West Point. After graduation we never met face to face, but our flying careers occasionally ran in parallel. Of the small group of us that went to USAF Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT), his aviation career overall seems most impressive.

    After UPT Kent was assigned to the C-7 Caribou tactical airlifter at Cam Ranh Bay and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals during his tour there. As some of you may recall, the C-7 was a light tactical cargo plane that supported Army Special Operations/Green Beret missions in what we now call USAF Special Operations Command. Tiny airfields and low altitude flying were the order of the day. Returning to the U.S. he was assigned to Westover AFB, MA as a B-52 heavy bomber pilot and later Warner Robins AFB, GA in the same aircraft. TDY deployments back to SEA were common for that aircraft. 

    USAF’s post graduate engineering school at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH was his next stop for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. The follow-on assignment was to US Air Force Academy as an academic instructor where he also was an instructor pilot in the cadet glider training program. In that capacity, he introduced a motorized glider into their system which reduced the need for routine use of tow planes. 

    After his teaching assignment Kent went to Edwards AFB, CA to the USAF experimental test pilot school and was the 1981 Distinguished Graduate. Another academic tour at USAFA followed. Then it was back to Edwards AFB as an instructor pilot in the test pilot school. An Outstanding Instructor of the Year award followed. I sense a trend here. Kent retired from active military service at USAF’s flight test center in 1989.

    Northwest Airlines hired Kent as a DC-9 pilot but after a few months he got the proverbial “offer you can’t refuse”. Northrup Grumman offered him a job as a civilian test pilot on the still super-secret B-2 stealth bomber. A return to the California desert followed where he remained as the company chief test pilot on that aircraft until the by now well-known B-2 production ended. Are we done here? Apparently not. Gulfstream aircraft, which builds long range corporate business jets, made the next offer. Kent and Judy were off to Savannah, GA where he was involved in flight test operations for Gulfstream’s growing line of large corporate jets. In this capacity he was testing the brand new G650 on Apr. 2, 2011 at Roswell, NM. During a takeoff planned for very challenging conditions, the test aircraft crashed killing the two pilots and two test engineers. Among other things, the accident investigation determined that Kent had flown the aircraft precisely as planned. 

    His wife Judy and their son Cameron lost a husband and father. The world-wide aviation community lost one of its best. We lost an irreplaceable classmate. Truly Best of the Line.

    My path into USAF from West Point was due to my dad. Army policy at the time allowed graduating cadets to be commissioned in another DoD branch if they were connected by way of a parent who was a career officer or NCO or if they were prior enlisted in that branch. My inspiration was my Dad’s story from an Oklahoma farm to commanding a heavy bomber crew in WW2 to flight testing the first swept wing jet bomber (B-47) on the planet to Mach 2 in an F-4. Those of us that went to AF pilot training were pipelined into the system with newly commissioned USAFA grads so most of our student pilot classmates were zoomies. AF policy at the time was to not send newly graduated pilots to front line tactical fighters… F-100s and F-4s at the time. I ended up as a KC-135 copilot as did many others. Once in the system, it was common to move us around to seemingly unrelated parts of the Air Force.

    After pilot training at Reese AFB, TX, I became a KC-135 copilot at Dyess AFB, TX. It was a pretty typical first assignment at the time.  In 1971, I began what would be most of my flying was out of U-Tapao Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand and Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. U-T missions were mostly fighter support over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. One that sticks in my memory was a night mission into southern China with 4 F-4s in formation carrying only air-to-air missiles and no external fuel tanks. My KC-135 tanker was for all practical purposes the “external fuel tank” for those 4 Phantoms. As a result, we were continuously “passing gas” as they took turns on and off of the refueling boom to keep topped off with jet fuel. A few minutes after passing the Plain of Jars in Laos my navigator exclaimed “Do you guys know where we are?” Yes, we did. The Plain of Jars, known in French as PDJ, located in central Laos, was constantly fought over, and changed hands frequently.

Ancient Laotian culture buried their dead in large clay pots there, hence the modern name. At the time “Plain of Bomb Craters” would have been more appropriate.  Our F-4s dropped away and we did a couple of big circles and they returned after a bit with a lot of missiles missing. All done in radio silence; we then headed south back into Laos and then our bases in Thailand. One of 2 times I actually put on my parachute in the KC-135. A useless gesture since the airplane did not have ejection seats for high speed and high altitude.

      Kadena flying was mostly B-52 support. The other time I actually put on my parachute in the tanker was when we came back to Kadena one night on fumes into a driving rainstorm dropping the visibility down to PAR (precision approach radar) minimums, the runway ankle deep in water, and maximum crosswind. Normally, a radar controller with a very precise 3-dimension radar talked airplanes all the way down to touchdown. A quarter mile visibility was usually our minimum acceptable, but if there is no Plan B, you’ll take anything! Enough fuel for one shot at the runway and then bail out into Naha Bay. After landing it felt as if we were water skiing down the runway.

    While at Kadena, I was assigned to flying an OV-10 Bronco at the 56th Special Operations Wing at Nakhon Penom Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.

 The OV-10 was designed as a counter-insurgency aircraft. It had two turbo-prop engines, long landing gear struts, and was armed with various bombs, rockets and 4 M-60 machine guns. It could operate out of small airfields as needed. It was flown by one pilot but had a rear cockpit for an occasional observer. The other airplanes in the wing were CH-53s, HH-53s, AC-130s, MC-130s, HC-130s, and EC-47s. The C-7s, A-37s and A-1s had already been transferred to the Vietnamese Air Force. Like the special operations forces in the other DoD services, we were USAF’s swiss army knife in Southeast Asia. Perfect job for a bachelor too dumb to know that his 25th birthday was not guaranteed. One engagement (out of a lot of options) of note was an all-day running gunfight outside of a Cambodian provincial capitol under attack by the Khmer Rouge. Another of our OV-10s had been over head since sunup and had done a great job of setting up the fight that was rapidly building. Rick (later the USAF chief test pilot on the B-2 program) gave me a detailed briefing on the tactical situation and I set about dodging .51 caliber heavy machine gun fire, mapping out the attackers’ positions, and telling the Airborne Command and Control Center (a highly modified C-130) to send me tactical fighters (an assortment of F-4s and A-7s as it turned out) with general purpose bombs on board. A couple of MK-84 (2000-pound bomb) Laser Guided Bombs from an F-4 took out (vaporized actually) an observation post on the 2nd floor of a former schoolhouse. Another F-4 put a string of 6 unguided MK-82s (500-pound bomb) within 50 meters of the friendlies. Scared the hell out of me but the translator said to keep it coming; we had caught a company plus in the open and there would be no survivors. And so, it went for a while; the good guys were winning. After a couple of hours my relief arrived, and I handed off the situation to him. By the time I landed back in Thailand, he was KIA. One of our helicopters picked up the body the next day. First Distinguished Flying Cross for me…not too sure I deserved it. 

    Post war, I got an assignment as an instructor pilot in USAF pilot training. Thus, began my tenure in the post-war peacetime Air Force. Probably about as frustrating to me as my Army classmates while political correctness overcame common sense. My dad’s example from Depression Era farmer to WW2 combat pilot to flying what was then leading-edge technology jet aircraft was inspirational to me even if I didn’t always grasp it growing up. Airplanes seemed like a natural part of my life and they fascinate me still.