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Memorial to Frozen War

Vlad

Well Known Member
There is a fascinating place in upper right corner of US. Two years I was trying to get there and it finally happened. An alien Air Force guy I knew closely asked me to land there. I still don't know why, the base was on his unit target charts.
I couldn't get permission to land, an authority of the phone told me they don't accommodate planes on weekends. "If something happens..." was their argument.

Anyway, after almost three hours of flying I finally got closer to Loring AFB.

It's May but Northern Maine still have ice on some lakes.





Beautiful Mt Katahdin. From here the Appallachian Trail starts.






There are not many suitable spots for emergency landing. Logging roads mostly.






Here comes the base.










There were nobody in the air. Rarely a burst of French on advisory frequency. Nobody interfered with my imagination. :)







 
Ironing the Base :D















Mission accomplished, course set to Aroostook.






Northern Aroostook was deserted there was no phone reception. I jumped in the plane and went to Jackman, Maine. It's only one hour away...
 
It's not Aroostook...it's Are-U-Stuck?!

I've seen snow fall over 4 feet in a 48 hour period here. Then I had to shovel out every fuel pit on the parking ramp to ensure those thirsty B-52s got what they needed. The most famous hardstand (parking spot) was hardstand 53! It was the northern most hardstand with no wind protection.

Those rusty fuel tanks in the pictures used to hold millions of gallons of JP-4. I had to manually "stick" every tank daily to ensure nothing was leaking.
 
Vlad and tkatc,

I've been wanting to fly into Loring for a long time now...it's a little out of the way from San Antonio though!...

My Dad was stationed and flew out of Loring, and I was born there in Limestone almost 60 years ago (gasp!)

Anyway, it would be nice to revisit the place sometime.

Thanks for the write up Vlad!

Tom
San Antonio
 
Loring

Vlad:
I spent one night there back in 1978. We were on the way to England from Florida in an HH-53 Super Jolly Green Giant. We took almost the same route as Mark Albury in his RV-8 Odyssey. We had a big advantage though; air to air refueling with petrol that the taxpayers were paying for!

Hope to see you up there in that part of the world around the 4th of July if I can make it to the gathering at the secret cabin on the lake!
 
Memories

Landed and spent the night at Loring in 1971. On the way back from Germany in a C-130 and we had to cage number 4 just before we went feet dry.. so Loring here we come. It was quite desolate and the club served a great breakfast. Just one of the many happy memories earned pushing Herks around for years.

Loring was a key base during the cold war years and even after it was an active air defense forward base. My only visit was in the summer so I did not get to enjoy a northern Maine winter on the ground!
 
Loring is just a bit colder than Plattsburgh, neither very desirable during the winter months.

I was at Plattsburgh during the "cold war", part of a contingency of SAC aircraft - B-47's and KC-97's. Loring had B-52's and KC-97's.

Both bases were closer to Russia than southern bases so the reaction time to get all aircraft air borne was shorter due to timing of theoretical incoming missiles. SAC liked to get their bombers as close to Russia as possible. The place was quite a bee hive when the alert klaxon sounded. The 97's had engine heaters running 24-7 during the cold snaps.

We lived in the mole hole seven days at a time ready to launch. There were a lot of guys living there around the clock, generally we spent 2 weeks a month in the hole. What did we do with all that time, some time in class rooms studying the war plan, watching movies, eating, sleeping - and poker. There were games going on constantly when nothing else was on the docket.

During the Cuban missile crisis, SAC decided there was insufficient time to launch so aircraft were disbursed to civil airports around New England. There were B-47's at the Burlington airport, for example. The KC-97's were fueled up and programmed for a one way trip, off load fuel somewhere over Canada and ditch the aircraft. Our navigator picked out what looked like a good fishing lake, we had survival gear and planned on surviving if radiation did not do us in. Everyone had sent there families out of NE, mine went to Minnesota.

Speaking of Aroostook County. I went deer hunting there one time with a friend from Maine. We hired a guide and I shot a skinny doe (they probably had all the nice bucks locked up somewhere for local hunters). The guide volunteered to drag the critter out while I went to reconnect with my friend. When we arrived back at the car, the guide said we have a problem - a game warden was just by and he said you guys violated the law by not accompanying the guide dragging the deer - he wants to see you at his house this evening. So we went to his house that evening and paid him off. Between the guide, the warden, the permits, lodging and food and fuel to get there, it was a mighty expensive week end for one scrawny deer - which tasted like eating pine needles. Must be they live on pine needles in the county, nothing else grows there.

Aroostook County did not like outsiders in those days, they liked our money but not us - including my friend who was from southern Maine, that was obvious. I promised myself never go back there for any reason and so far have kept that promise.

One quick story of those cold, cold winter times. One morning a B-52 diverted from Loring to Plattsburgh due to weather and landed with fuel vapor in the tanks - he was so low on fuel there was insufficient weight on the gear struts to compress them which locked out the brake system. The 52 rolled off the runway and into a row of parked 97's fueled up for war and on alert status - plowing into 3 or 4 of them. I remember one 97 took a wing tip in the cockpit and got turned 180 degrees. There were thousands of gallons of 120 octane avgas and JP4 on the ramp from the collisions but it did not ignite. It was too darned cold! What mess.

The good news was the base was down graded off alert status for a while and guys in the mole hole could go home. :)

The pictures of Loring are reminiscent of times gone by. The world sure is changing before our eyes. Today drones get the job done anywhere in the world, all from a comfortable office is sunny Arizona, at least not at Loring or Plattsburgh....a far cry from sleeping in a mole hole
 
Landed and spent the night at Loring in 1971. On the way back from Germany in a C-130 and we had to cage number 4 just before we went feet dry.. so Loring here we come. It was quite desolate and the club served a great breakfast. Just one of the many happy memories earned pushing Herks around for years.

Loring was a key base during the cold war years and even after it was an active air defense forward base. My only visit was in the summer so I did not get to enjoy a northern Maine winter on the ground!

It was also a good alternate for commercial flights from Europe to New York and probably still is. The local economy did well when the weather in NY was down.
 
Loring in Winter

When I was flying the F-106 stationed at Griffiss AFB in Rome NY we used to serve alert at our detachment at Loring for a week at a time. We were housed in those two stand alone hangers at the south end with the high speed taxiway. I think we were OK to takeoff northbound up to a 30 knot tailwind. It was tough duty in the winter but when the weather was good it was the greatest place to fly. Canada was 10 miles east and we had the sky to ourselves. No restrictions from the surface to the moon. My favorite wintertime activity was a contest to see who could raise the highest rooster tail of snow when we buzzed a lake.......

When the wind was from the North and the Russian Alpha missile boats were close to shore the B-52's had to be moved down to the south end to save taxi time. They would put one poor son of a gun in the airplane so that he could begin the start sequence while the rest of the crew beat feet down there by bus. We used to sit in our alert shack and look out at the line of Buffs with one small light in each one. I really felt sorry for those buggers, especially in the middle of the winter when there was no heat and the planes were iceboxes. Worse still was the guard standing outside in the wind.

The Cold War really was for many of us.
 
How Cold Was It...?

Just to keep the playing field level, maybe we could ask Vlad how cold the winters are in, oh...say, Murmansk for instance. Or, at whichever Northern Siberian base he was blessed to operate from.

Even though this thread hasn't held strictly to RV bidness, I for one have enjoyed these reminiscences. The best part of them is all that nuclear war readiness between mega powers - fingers hovering over "the button" - is now in the past. God help us to keep it that way.
 
Thanks for sharing your stories

Dart, David, Pete et al thanks for sharing your stories. I would say the same military routine was behind the Iron Curtain. The only difference was metrics and language :)
John, I was privileged to choose my first garrison and it was in European Theater. Primary targets were located in Italy, Turkey and Greece. Had good time while my buddies were freezing their rears in Far East. However, they survived the collapse of evil empire and made it to good pensions with big stars. Those who were left behind in third countries were less lucky. Or more, depends how you look at it :D



Loring







Plattsburg







Engels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels-2
 
stories ....

Many years ago I worked with a civil engineer who, in his USAF days, was stationed at Loring for awhile. He said the boredom in the winter was awful. For kicks, they used to flip a coin to see who would get to drive the monster auger-type snowplows to clear base streets and roads. He recalled actually taking out sections of curb with the plow - and watching bicycles (previously buried in the snow) being shot out of the auger many feet with the snow. The bikes, as you might imagine were an unrecognizable mass of twisted metal. He was awestruck by the raw power and weight of those big plows. :eek:
 
Terry, your story reminds me of another. Those trucks looked something like this..
1953OshkoshW-Series4X4RotarySnowBlower.jpg


They would spew snow 50 feet into the air easily.

One evening while refueling a B-52, one of the bored crew chiefs thought it would be funny to roll a can of hydraulic fluid into its path. You know, the old round cans you had to puncture to open. Upon seeing the red liquid mixed with snow, the truck operator thought it was the blood of an airman he just ran over. The story has it that the operator had a heart attack and died. Another casualty of the Cold War.
 
Speaking of "fast and efficient" snow removal from runways and taxiways Soviets used jet engines on auto platforms. Something similar to these civilian decepticons.






 
OK, so how would the anti-splat gust lock (or any other gust lock) hold up to one of those snow blowers?

Enjoy this thread, however.
 
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