I well remember my days up in the nose wheel well of C-130s on the frozen, wind blown flight line at Elmendorf replacing APN-59 RTs and antennae alone, freezing to death and breaking my back without any help. That system was at least half our workload there which included ALL avionics systems, as we were severely undermanned and expected to fix it ALL right after we transitioned from AAC to MAC. As they told me right after I got there from Moody AFB in December 1979, “You’re no longer a comm/nav troop. You’re an avionics troop”.
