To find out who the hell tried to tear the roof off Senator Biden’s house with a C-5, a call to the Pentagon was followed by calls to the MAC headquarters at Scott AFB and the Dover wing commander
Author of two books and a former C-5 pilot with 12,500 hours of flight time, Jay Lacklen, Flying the Line: An Air Force Pilot’s Journey and Flying the Line: An Air Force Pilot’s Journey Volume Two: Military Airlift Command. He is currently working on the trilogy’s last volume.
Wilmington Air Show
One of my first stateside missions took me just up the road to Wilmington, DE as a copilot on an airshow crew. The C-5 aircraft commander, “Johnny Smooth,” had a high-powered job in Washington, DC, that paid very well. His work only allowed him to complete brief missions, and this would be one of them.
Air shows are the most dangerous missions crews will experience, excluding combat sorties. The risk increases not because of difficult flying, but rather because the crew is less cautious. With their guard down, the unit and crew run the risk of incurring the wrath of the command for terrible, embarrassing procedure violations. The crew believes in error that no one is looking because it is on vacation. Everyone is observing, including retired military personnel who collectively keep a careful eye on those that are now on duty.
Some retirees believe they handled things properly, whilst others believe the present force has laxed in terms of discipline and order as compared to the veterans. They’ll keep a tight eye on the crew’s behavior and report any inconsistencies they see as supporting their pessimistic assessment of the current state of military operations.
Old-timers unconsciously attempt to attract attention to their former accomplishments by criticizing current crew members for lack of discipline while the crew prances around to the admiration of the audience.
Johnny would provide a spectacular example of this air show syndrome before we even landed and would pay an embarrassing price for doing so. Years later, I would be a similarly hapless victim of the syndrome, but this day belonged to Johnny.
I had no inkling the syndrome was about to break out as we flew the fifteen minutes or so from Dover to Wilmington IAP about 40 miles north of the base. We canceled our IFR clearance and contacted Wilmington Tower for our VFR (visual flight rules) arrival. Johnny made the call to the tower himself.
“Tower, MAC 4017, request high-speed pass down the runway for a 5,000-foot right closed pattern to a full stop.” Tower cleared him as requested. I should have suspected trouble when he asked for 5,000-foot clearance for the closed pattern, but I did not.
About eight miles out on the final, Johnny pushed up the throttles and our speed rapidly increased from our 220-knot cruise speed. I thought he would stop accelerating at the 250-knot speed limit for flights below 10,000 feet, but he did not. Since neither he nor the tower had defined high speed, he defined it himself. As we descended toward the trees surrounding the airport our airspeed climbed to 300 knots. I looked down at tree-lined neighborhoods flying by in a blur with barely enough time for me to mentally register them before they were gone.
Low-altitude flying at high speed can be problematic. The pilot’s actions can make over-controlling pitch commands a problem, leading to a porpoise motion that is made worse by the pilot’s attempts to control it. The airflow across the control surfaces is significantly more than typical or expected. Fortunately, we did not experience this problem, but it should have been considered prior to accelerating to 300 knots. One misstep at that speed descending toward the ground could have been catastrophic.
Johnny pulled the throttles back as we approached 300 knots, mercifully, and we smoked down the runway at 200 feet in relative silence. The silence came to an end when Johnny accelerated the throttles to almost full power, raised the nose to 15 degrees, and made a right turn toward our 5,000-foot closed pattern. He set the throttles to idle after reaching 3,000 feet in order to slow the plane down for the last 2,000 feet of the climb. From there we made a normal landing. Afterward, he stated that he intended to offer an advertisement for the air show the next day.
With one exception, Johnny probably would have gotten away with this maneuver using the considerable latitude he had given himself. When he launched the large power burst from the runway’s departure end, he did so over the home of Joseph Biden, a recently elected congressman, and potential vice president.
Senator Biden was not impressed. To find out who the hell tried to tear the roof off Senator Biden’s house with a C-5, someone called the Pentagon, then the MAC headquarters at Scott AFB, IL, and finally the Dover wing commander. Before we turned off the engines, the base operations’ phone started ringing.
Johnny’s punishment for the incident was inspired by a Chinese Communist confessional, in which the offender is forced to publicly and harshly criticize himself for his mistake. The following month, Johnny addressed the audience that had gathered for drill weekend, including the wing staff, to explain how he could have been such an idiot to have done such things.
Photo by U.S. Air Force