gizzard

Okay guys, after listenin' to my rants for 23 months, I hereby announce I received my VA disability claim completion today. Yep, finally.. thanks to the folks up in Maine. Now my confirmation stuff came from Baltimore, and had notations that I still needed to send them my wife's SSN and the routing number for my bank account. all of which I sent and and have copies to verify it, However, I find it easy enough to send it to them again and be done. So my advice is if you live in maryland, MOVE before you file any claims..... 23 months of back pay comin', too...................Okay now I have to find another windmill to tilt with. and thanks to allmof you guys for the encouragement.......

I don't see any side rails on the floor, either, and what is tha spider web lookin' thing up front??

Maybe they can use the 27's to haul the Barretta factory out of Maryland after OWE-Malley and the liberal state legilsature throws the bone to....................

Oh stay there, Mt. Chief, Tinwhistle, and me are comin' to raid your fridge..........AND why don't you drift up to wright-pat in June for the 316th reunion????? I was pleased last year to see more maintanence guys show up. I thought that was great, cause without you guys, we would not have had any big toys to play with............. Giz

Still no excuse for not stoppin' by!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL!!!! Yeah, I knew about the -5's goin' from M'burg. i have an 18th century re-enactor friend, a loady of course, who is a full-timer there and he told me that several months back. I think many of them are excited to be able toget back to some good airlift instead of airline ops. Funny how Bob Byrd got them to spend beaucoup bucks to build up the runways and such, new hangers, all that, for the FRED's and now they are going. BTW, part of the tail section of the -5 was built down there, around '69 or so................

I thought maybe they would be from Charleston, WV. Is there still a 130 unit there???? Back in the days when Martinsburg had REAL planes ( see 'Real Planes have PROPS), we were often treated to an airshow. Once two crossed the house so low I could see the rivets and urinal drain tubes on the bottom. another time, my daughter was comin' home from nursing school, rounded a turn up the road from our house and was face to face with one. I had seen it come down the ridgeline up the road here and then trun and she must have been in the right place to see it. OF COURSE, each time these planes were at or above min. AGL......(wink, wink) NOBODY would fly unlawfully low. Anyway, thanks to the 167th. for rattlin' up some old memories for me............ Giz

Sparks, I think Bob lived fairly close to where you are there in Florida...........he was a character, no doubt...... giz

Last night, about 1700, my wife was thrilled to see a Herk jump over a ridge near Allegany Community College, in Cumberland, MD. Oh, she knows it was a Herk beyond a doubt, and she was wavin' at it as it went over. From her description it was a slick...........Any idea where it was from and what it was doin' there???? and, one other thing, if any of you on this site was on that beast, you coulda buzzed my house and waved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Damn, wish I coulda seen her.................been quite a while since we saw one around here ...................... Giz

hanks for puttin' this up, Bob. I was going to, but hoped you would, in order to add a few more details. The reunions won't be the same, that's for sure................... RIP, Bob Craft............. Giz

yep, remember all that...........went to crete once with one of tem, pretty sharp troop, was really willin' to work.....I had been in tech school same time he was, I think i wasone block behind him...

Bob, my fuzzy memory makes me think it possibly was dyess bird.........not sure and somehow I tend to think, after John's posting fired some long dormant neurons, that the guy killed was either a stan/eval, or was a permanent party guy gettin' his quals in. I know I flew a series of drops in '73 for qualification of some airborne troops, I think we were flyin' out of Weisbaden, and the second load was from the Moldyhole aerial port........to be kind, he was less than skilled at it......He was on headset for the checklists for one drop, was rather erratic. We got back on the ground, my AC, Joe Broderick, calls me to the side and tells me he does not want "that &*&*( on headset for another drop...He ain't got a clue.... So that's what I did.............I guess, in all fairness, they didn't get to drop as much as we did, but, stil............

That is pretty much what I remember of the incident... I thought it may have been in Europe. and that old turnbuckle type device is what I found almost stripped out of the nut. I never could figure how it got that bad, unless on a previous drop it had been stressed really bad someway..................Like I said, there certainly are/were a lot of snakes back there to bite us on airdrops, weren't there?????????? Giz

Sometime around late '70, early 71, if my feeble memory is good, a loadmaster was killed , (I think), after being hit in the head when one or maybe both, static line bracket supports, I think that is what they were called, pulled loose on a troop drop. These things braced the bracket that held the anchor lines for troop drops, and where right aft of the troop doors. The pole-like supports, 2 each, went up to upper part of the aircraft. Immediately after this, we had to go to life support and trade the beany helmets we had for full head types, if we didn't already have it, and have a boom mike installed. anybody remember the incident???? I seem to recall findin', on pre-flight, an anchor cable tensioner almost stripped out, and coulda pulled out with a load application. The back of the bus could be a very dangerous place, as John can verify without dispute. Giz

Yeah, Pat, I remember that sequence list, every damn thing from the electrons turnin' the green light on to each safety and restraint ties breakin' to the full extension of the suspesnion lines and the release carridge firin', the release spinner rotatin, to the collapse of the honeycomb when the pallet hit the ground............ I wonder if any other wings had that to contend with, or was it just our fortune to be at TAC headquarters??????????

A YEAR???????????????????? Man, you are on a greased rail..............I have been waitin' now 21 months, and just in the past two weeks have had my medical evals, for.....hearing ( WHAT you SAY), Diabetes (well that is a given now, hypertension ( don't know why, but my BP was the highest it has been maybe ever), AND a pretty signifcant loss od range of motion etc in my ankle that I broke, fallin' out of an airplane.............Waitin' now on the doctor's reports. Oh yeah, George, if this was your AO eval, I had a PA do mine,almost two years ago, but don't know where that went. I think, but I am not sure, that MD's make the final determinations. So who knows, you may be gettin' paid way before I do.My guess , and I am usually wrong in these things, but I COULD end up with maybe 400 to 600+ a month, with an outside of 800+. and a potential back pay of maybe $9k to $13K, and an outside of $19k. Now I know I ain't gonna do anywhere that well on any of them. I could reach in to barrle of P****ies and pull out an A&&&hole, just have to wait. BTW george, private message me your home mailing address and after I get back home next week, I'll get the stickers off to ya. Same goes for you, too, TW Giz

That is the size of the one Ken has on his truck............I think I can locate one for ya. I am goin' to get some for TW as well............ Giz

I'll take care of that for ya.....................

Lookin' good, brother, lookin' GOOD!!!!!!!!!!! Giz

That was kinda like what he did with me. i think the other load was TSGT Koch, who wrote my proficiency eval. anyway he pretty much was told just be there. Aftrerward, he told me 'Boy, devitt really did one on you. You did real good, though' Then later Koch did my proficency report, gave me all big marks but one that kept me from gettin' pro-pay. I asked him what I needed to do to improve, he says" Oh, you are doin' a great job, but I couldn't rate you all 8's or whatever they were, because that way you couldn't show any improvement on the next ones.""""" cost me like $50 a month or whatever the pro pay was............. Still haven't figured THAT one out.....................

I want a troop door, or a couple of intake plugs!!!!!!!!! Giz

All I can say about check rides..............CMSGT Vernon Devitt, the Gray Ghost, any 316th TAW loady will remember him!!!!!!!!!!!! You would NOT pass a check ride completely with him. Always corrective action, mostly based on trivia and chickenshit questions, but, at least IMHO, you sure as hell came knowin' more than you did goin' in.............................I had a tac checkride with him, heavy drop, and I called a no drop just before twenty minute warning, when i started hearin' a slapping on the side of the plane,HF antenna had broken off the front mount and somehow was hitting the fuselage. he acts real pissed when the AC agrees, turns us around, we go back to langley, get it fixed somehow, off we go, drop the load, i get wrung out on post flight orals, and then just as we are finishing, he says " about callin' that no drop, why?" I says i did not know what was on the outside, if the wire would get into the ramp and door, or the laod or whatever, and i didn't think it was justifiied just to get a check ride done." He glares at me and then says "" Good call."""" Of course I ended up with about four days of "corrective actions" on trivial stuff that we cared manuals to look up, instyead of memorize, but I betcha I would probably never got off the ground ever again if I had ignored that problem..... Devitt was TAC Stan/eval if I remember right, and he passed away just maybe three years or so. giz

What the hec is a TPRS????? I once had to retrieve a whole side full of static lines from a troop drop, when the retriver winch burned out. We used the TLO5K#TDS..... Two loadmaster operated 5K # tie down strap.....................

It's an '07, so there is a difference in the back. Maryland makes a fortune of their special plates, every organization anymore has one, my truck has IAFF tags, then you see what they call the CR tag, it has various campaign and award medals on it like the VSM, bronze star, purple heart, etc............PLUS thye have about five or six at least for farming, Cheasepeake Bay, Nurses, that sort of thing...................I'm surprised alaska does have one specifically for each war..... Giz

trying this again