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In-Flight Antics


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On a humorous note, I would like to hear about some of the in-flight antic's that we have all pulled form time to time in our illustrious career's.

To start the thread, I'll give you all a good one. 1979 w/ the 17TAS, we had a Instr. Nav that loved his cigar's, and with sure fired cockiness he smoked those things in flight. A real pr--k in every sense. Well, the AC got one of his Dutch Master's from his satchel, and creatively unpacked tobacco, inserted a firecracker, and then repacked the stogie. He placed it back in the pack so it was readily available inserted slightly out of the pack. As you all can well imagine, he was puffing away a few hours later and BANG! The neanderthal looked like something from a cartoon.......

Any other's out there?

Kurt

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You just reminded me of one I heard. Can't remember who it happened too, or when it was, but was before my time.

Apparently there was a guy who loved cigars, when he went to Kuwait he bought up most of the Cubans in the country and smoked them all the time, he also spent about three hundred on one and decided to light it up on the way home.

A few months later it was time to leave and he took a 130 back.Once they took off and were at cruise, he asked to flight crew if they would mind him firing it up with the sextant port open, they said it was ok, just get all the smoke out. So this fella opened the sextant port and light it up. He just got the flame going and held it up to suck out the smoke when it got sucked out and was never seen again. Three hundred dollars out the plane without so much as a puff.

Needless to say, I always waited till I got home to fire one up.

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We had a pilot for a short while that always tried the engineers. He adjusted the cockpit cabin temp and looked back with a "whatta think of that" look. I reached up and selected manual control as soon as he turned around. He adjusted the temp a few more tries and then used the manual control for more heat and gave me the same look. I reached up, ran the temp full cold, pulled the Flight Deck Tep Control breaker (we were on an E model) and gave him the same look. After a while he asked, "eng, can I have some heat?". I said sure sir, all you have to do is ask. :D The co-pilot and Nav just shook their heads. He never learned.

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The smoking antic that I remember was from the Rock. Student pilot in the right seat on a local pro. Shortly after takeoff the Nav lights up a cigarette and takes a deep drag and blows the smoke into the aft end of the small tube that runs along the windows that you hook the sunscreen on. All the student sees is smoke billowing out from the bottom of the overhead panel in front of him. Started screaming electrical fire and nearly had a heart attack before realizing what was going on. Don't think the nav made his christmas card list.

Mike

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  • 2 weeks later...

heres one that I only heard about but not witnessed; on a trip from Yokota to I think Osan,the cargo comp was full of RoK Army paratroops,when the Flt eng 'pukes' in a clear plastic bag,ties it off an then hands it to the first guy and gives the pass it back sign.As it makes it way to the back,half the guys are puking,the other half as green as their uniforms.The loadmaster finally gets it,opens it and starts to DRINK IT!! Everyone on board loses it and they had to abort the jump cuz of all the puke.After landing,a korean guy with a firehose tried to wash it out,but he ended up losing his lunch.From what I heard The WHOLE flt crew got put on do not fly status for a week. this happened I wanna say mid eighties?

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We were flying west in the afternoon. Me, in the engineer seat, enduring another check ride. The pilot reached up and increased the heat. I informed him I would be happy to use the temp controls on my panel to make him happy because I like happy pilots. He looked back and told me, I can handle it. I thought to myself OK big boy. After the third adjustment I reached down grabbed the autopilot and turned right. After he got us back on course he asked why I did that. I told him the sun was in my eyes and thought a new heading would take care of it. After a long silence he admitted lesson learned.

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Way back when flying was really fun and the har crews always tried to out do each other.

On a long over water, I think to Loges and back on a Nav Matuse run. We had a young new copilot. I always had a big camera bag hanging on the back of the pilots seat and it was jambed packed with lenses, filters, light meters etc. Out over the ocean I was playing with some of my filters and had to talk a wizz so I stepped out of the seat for a couple minutes. When I returned the copilot being bored asked what I was doing with the filters and I told him I was working on perfecting a clear air turblence dector with colored lenses and poloriod lenses. This was all over the inter com.....I was holding the lens up to my eye looking stright out in front and I clicked my foot button and announced that we had some turblence about 30 t 50 miles out in front of us. No way says the cp its clear as hell out there.....just a few minutes later the whole plane shook like hell and then went calm.....Wow says the cp....let me try and see next time you see something....I quickly take my black greese pencil and really line the inside of the lens edge with black greese pencil. Needless to say the cp never got to see any clt and he had a big black circle for the rest of the day and evening. I had worked it out with the load when I went for the wizz and the AC already had seen me do the same before so he knew what was going on...I often wondered what the cp thought when he got back to his boq and looked in the mirror.

Muff

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At CCK I had a hard crew except for a copilot. Since my AC was an IP, we usually got a new CP when we went on a shuttle. We had something we would sometimes do to the CP ... The AC told the co-pilot to hand fly the airplane for awhile.. I went back up on the cargo door and grabbed one of the rudder cables and began slowly pulling .. I could feel the co-pilot pushing against me as I pulled harder and harder (he was unconsciously correcting for yaw).. when he had a pretty good pressure built up, I let go - the airplane yawed quickly since he had all that pressure on one rudder pedal. The AC asked him what the heck was he doing? He said he didn't know what caused that... I did it a couple more times, with the AC really giving him a rash of s**t about his sloppy flying... I think the CP was convinced the aircraft had a problem. He finally figured out what must be happening because he said to the AC, "Where's the Load?" The whole crew had a good laugh over it...

Jim Houston

776TAS LM 1968

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Wow, what a category! Where do I start?

Well there was the old standby form F carbons rubbed all over the apn-59 scope hood and the sextant eyepiece, always good for a laugh at the new guys.

Chains under the seat cushion, another old standby, usually the pilots would figger it out after a bit but I remember one flight, all four hours the copilots was shifting around in the seat bitching about how uncomfortable the seat was.

Once I was on a med shuttle hauling a USO Polynesian dance troupe around (oh hard duty, spank me harder, there a lot more story's about that med run for sure :) ).

Well we were cruising along and the AC was standing behind my seat trying to score some time with one of the dancers. Well I figured it was a good time to go in the back for a smoke but first I field tripped a generator and put it back on line to give the gen out light. After I was in the back for a while I had the load (Mel White) go up front and ask the pilot "hey whats that light?" Oh the pilot crapped himself and started screaming for me to get up front now, so I wandered up said "whassup"? He starts going off about the generator so I just reached up and reset it and went to the back to finish my smoke. He looked kinda confused and just a little funny to that little hottie LOL.

Another time we ended up in Iraklion, we had a brand spanking new nav butter bar (I think he was a second) and he thought he was the chief of staff fer petes sake.

Well going in to land we had a really good split airspeed and it turned out that the co's pitot tube was bad.

Well spank me again, it took almost a week for that thing to show up but by the time we got ready to go the lox was at 5L, the minimum. Well this little dweeb nav (we called him frodo) starts creaming his pants about taking off with min lox (Iraklion was almost shut down at this time and didnt have any lox servicing equipment) but nobody else had a prob with it.

Once we got to altitude I had the copilot press to test the lox indicator and I pulled the breaker at zero L, and I also started to depressurize the plane to 10K.

We gave it a few then started talking about "Oh wow, were losing pressure and I cant stop it. Then the co says look at that we dont have any lox" then I tapped on my reg and said well we still have pressure so we should be good. Meanwhile frodo is really freaking out screaming "I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU WE NEEDED IT SERVICED" then we hear a huge hiss and look back and frodo has put on a POK and pulled the green apple. Man he was/is a real dork.

A really good one dosent really qualify for inflight antics but it was sweet anyways. It was way back in the dim dark days of my crew chief years on E3A's. Well standard part of CC postflight is to get the turd hearse and service the crappers (they were 707-300's with the commercial johns in the back). Well the system worked like this, you opened the sealing hatch and then supposed to hook the hose up.

Once you got all hooked up and ready to drain you pulled the t-handle in the service bay to open up the drain flapper to move the turds to their new home.

Now to the meat of the story, we would usually initiate our new jeeps and make them run the back side of the truck (draining and flushing), but before we brought the truck up to service we would get someone to pull the drain t-handle and push it back in, that way the solids and fluids held the drain flapper open and the pressure hatch was the only thing containing all that bio hazard. So when yon jeep flipped open the pressure hatch to hook up the hose he got a very nice blue bath:eek:

Boy that was always good for a laugh:cool:

If I thought about it I am sure I could come up with another twenty or thirty pages, lots of evil can be done over a span of 24 years LOL.

Dan

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We were hopping around Columbia, SA dropping supplies and other things when we landed at a remote field in the jungle. I was out front on the headset waiting for a forklift to unload.

The A/C looks out the window and sees someone outside the fence taking pictures and says "I've been around here so many times that the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia) probably have a whole folder of pictures of me".

Bubba the Nav says "yea me too, I can't count the number of times I've been here".

I said, "they don't have any pictures of you Bubba!!"

Bubba said, "why not?"

I said "they don't make a wide angle lens big enough to get that fat a** of yours in one picture".

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this one time was an un-intentional antic but gave me a chuckle later. On my first TDY out of Yokota as a FNG,during the flight,the other crew chief decided to take me in the CC and play a round of "whats this?". I really couldn't figure out why most of the 20 or so passengers were watching us and getting very visibly nervous, until later that day I realized what they were seeing: 2 crew chiefs standing there with one pointing up and the other one (me) standing there with a puzzled look shaking my head.When we landed at Osan, the pax couldn't get off the bird fast enough!

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I use to fly with a load who like to stand at the paratroop door with the parachute retrival winch control under his arm and run it up and down in front of the pax sitting below the winch, If they said anything he would watch it for a few minutes then look at them like they were crazy. Some of them had to have had a sore neck afterwards, following it up and down for a couple of hours. And now you crew chiefs know why the winches burnt out on a non drop mission. lol

Mike

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We had one flying into Bagram. We were going from cruising altitude to the ground real fast. Fast enough that the empty water bottle I was holding started to crush from the pressure changes. I spent the whole time watching the bottle thinking how cool it was until I looked across the C/C. We were also flying two ladies from AAFES to start the BX there, both in their 40's and 50's. Both ladies were staring at the bottle with their mouths open and eyeballs bugging out. By the time we landed one had fainted.

I actually feel a little bad, but it was pretty funny. We chatted once we got on the ground and I explained it was nothing to worry about, they said they never thought anything like that could happen.

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Woke up on a very comfortable pallet in the back of a MC-130E and discovered the Load, "Spoon", had tied me down by weaving 780 cord over every appendage like a spider web. I couldn't move. To top it all off, he asked Eng to give some heat in the back as I was directly under one of the vents near the wing box. As I tried to get out everyone came back to take a look at Gulliver, the AMT.

Later, I took "Spoon's" helmet bag and duct-taped it into a small ball which we played catch with for the remainder of the flight. He didn't discover his helmet bag missing until after landing; had no idea it was his bag we were playing catch with until I told him later.

Another flight overseas to do a Fulton demo in Korea we stopped at Yokota on the way back. The load bought a very nice 15 speed bicycle at the BX and hung it upside down from the tires by the ramp and door. Before take-off I let the air out of the bike's tires so they wouldn't pop during flight (I figured 65 psi might be a bit much at altitude). But my evil side make me keep it a secret. About halfway in the ascent I emptied my bag lunch and out of sight blew the bag up and popped it very loudly. I made sure I was positioned close to the bike hanging upside-down in the back. Eng came running back around the pallet asking, "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT". I got up and squeezed the bike tires and said, "tires blew out at altitude, guess you'll have to buy new tubes when you get home." He looked so sad pushing his bike off the ramp when we RTB.

I have some more "back end stories"

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We were in Athens in 66 staging for a NATO exercise. One of the not to be mentioned first time overseas loads (me included) fell in love with an especially endowed working girl. Following the breakup (cash ran out), he managed to keep her DD bra as a rememberence. On the trip back to Texas, we (I was not alone in this) got ahold of it and closed one strap between the ramp and door on the last leg from Dover to Dyess. Surprisingly it survived the trip and was on display when the squadron landed in front of family and friends for the welcome home. The load was known as DD for quite a while. Weren't you RW?

Anyone besides me ever ride chocks on the rollers until the A/C asked why the weight was shifting when we didn't have any cargo? I called it air surfing back then.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had turned on the PA switch at the Nav's panel earlier and waited until about 20 minutes after take-off then hatched my plan. I had an old head pilot who could tell I was up to something but didn't know what yet.

So I started a mundane conversation asking what tail number this was, then said "Hey isn't this the plane the Nav got killed on?" The pilot picked up on it right away and agreed that it was. I said I thought this was the haunted plane. That the Nav still messes with things. APU turning on, on its own. Switches flipping on their own, etc.

The Load knew what we were up to and played it up too adding credibility to the story. Then I reached over to the PA gain volume switch next to the pilot and started running this up and down. The pilot saw what I was doing and started laughing.

About 15 seconds later the Nav comes out of his seat yelling and pointing at his desk. We finally calmed him down enough to ask what was up. He sounded like a little school girl at a spelling bee when he talked! It had us in tears for the rest of the TDY.

For those that don't know, if you use the gain switch on the pilots side shelf, it will move the volume knob on the Nav's master PA control panel. It will also work from the Loadmasters PA panel on H-1's. I can't speak for other versions.

Oh, I got more!

Edited by KJam
lack of knowledge by reader
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