Yet Another Crisis

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Arnold returned to Louisiana in mid-October and it must have been a joyous reunion, because by December Colleen discovered she was pregnant again. Having just made the last payment on his car, Arnold had money burning a hole in his pocket and an excuse to buy and a bigger airplane with his fourth child on the way. It wasn’t long before he located a used Beechcraft Bonanza nearly identical to the one he had drooled over 15 years earlier while a student at Rensselaer.In addition to being larger, the Bonanza was much faster than the Cessna 170 and had a retractable landing gear. The “call sign” of the Bonanza was N5125C, with the “C” being pronounced as “Charlie” in the standard aviation phonetic alphabet. It didn’t take long for Arnold’s children to dub the new airplane Charlie, and despite the fact that most people consider cars, airplanes, and ships to be “girls,” Charlie was always referred to as “he.”

Charlie

Arnold’s New Toy — Beechcraft Bonanza “Charlie”
(From Arnold Ebneter Personal Collection)

Colleen have birth to Kelly on July 5, 1962 and, save for a revolving door of cats, dogs, mice, and various other animals, the family was complete. Two months after Kelly’s arrival, Arnold, now with the 614th Tactical Fighter Squadron, headed back to Incirlik for what he assumed would be another routine deployment, with no expectation that anything as exciting as the Berlin Wall crisis would happen again. He could not have been more wrong.

On October 14, a U-2 airplane flying over Cuba took pictures that revealed the presence of Soviet missiles on the island. By October 16, the US was again in full crisis mode. Arnold’s unit went to high alert, stopping just one level short of sitting in the cockpits of their airplanes as they waited anxiously for the call to stand down or take off to deliver their nuclear weapons to targets in the Soviet Union. Back in the US, nearly every available F-100 in the Air Force headed to Homestead AFB, near Miami, to sit on the ramp with their own nukes pointed back at the Cubans. After 14 agonizing days, Khrushchev backed down, and the Soviets removed the missiles.

F-100s in Turkey on Victor Alert

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Although Arnold stayed in Greece for only three weeks, life at England AFB soon turned into a series of hectic rotations from the US to Europe, the middle East, and eventually Southeast Asia. The squadrons at England, along with other squadrons from Cannon AFB in New Mexico, deployed regularly to Incirlik, Turkey to participate as a maintenance officer in a Cold War mission known as “Victor Alert.” His first Victor Alert trip occurred in May1961, and his journey to Incirlik sounded more like  a cruise ship itinerary than a military deployment. Instead of flying an F-100 with in-flight refueling to his destination as he had at Foster, he traveled in the relative luxury of a large cargo plane, the C-124, with stops at Shaw AFB on the South Carolina coast, Kindley AFB in Bermuda, Lajes AFB in the Azores, Moron AFB in Spain, and Athens.

By the early 1960s, the Air Force had turned much of its fighter fleet into mini-bombers, the better to fight the “small wars” anticipated, and the F-100 was now capable of carrying a limited supply of nuclear weapons. At Incirlik, the Victor Alert mission consisted of four pilots and four F-100Ds laden with “tactical” Mark-28 1.1 kiloton nuclear weapons sitting on continuous alert. Another four F-100Ds were available for proficiency training. The pilots rotated shifts, pulling alert in a small trailer and sleeping in their flight gear. The routine was broken about once each week by a siren that sent the alert pilots scrambling to their jets. While the maintenance crews pulled safety pins and chocks, the pilots jumped into their cockpits, strapped in, and started the engines, not knowing until they were about to taxi that it was just for practice. Since Air Force rules did not allowed them to fly with the nuclear weapons on-board, they simply shut the engines back down again after being told it was just an exercise. The maintenance crews got a lot of practice topping of the F-100s with 20 or 30 gallons of fuel whenever an exercise occurred.

As the maintenance officer, Arnold didn’t have to sit alert, but instead flew airplanes after maintenance to make sure everything had been fixed before turning the airplane back to the alert crews. After a few weeks, the mission became a bit of a grind, and Arnold looked for some other things to do. The base at Incirlik had an aero club where non-pilots could theoretically learn to fly small airplanes. However, the club’s only working airplane was a Cessna 120 that no one knew how to fly. They also had a bush plane called a Beaver, but it was in pieces. The president of the club was an Air Force helicopter pilot in charge of the small search-and-rescue unit at Incirlik, and he decided to take advantage of Arnold’s status as a mechanic and civilian instructor to reinvigorate the dormant club. On the Fourth of July, the two would-be civilian pilots took the Cessna up to fly around the base and the neighboring countryside. The flight turned out to be the only one they took. Unhappy Turkish officials shut down the operation the next day, and Arnold and the helicopter pilot had to find something else to do in their spare time. However, there was one small side benefit for Arnold. To reward him for their brief Cessna fling, the helicopter pilot took him for his first helicopter flight on one of the unit’s Sikorsky H-19s.

Just as Arnold thought he was about to go home, the Cold War flared up. Since early June, the East German government had been stockpiling materials to build the Berlin Wall and on August 13, they shut down passage to the West. The wall began to go up and President Kennedy put the US military on high alert, including the mobilization of over 100,000 reservists. At the end of September, instead of flying back to the US, Arnold flew in a C-130 cargo aircraft to Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany to join other F-100s in the Cold War stare-down.

F-100s at England AFB and More Deployments!

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So now that Arnold had his airplane design, he went out and built it, right? Not exactly. For starters, the Air Force had other plans for him.

After graduating from Texas A&M the summer of 1960, Arnold and his family moved to England AFB in the central part of Louisiana, arriving just after the Fourth of July weekend. Arnold soon found a rental house in nearby Alexandria, a small town just a few minutes from the base. The neighborhood was filled with young military families, so it had all the benefits of living on base without having the headache of maintaining a yard to exacting military standards. Yard work was not high on Arnold and Colleen’s list of priorities.

Once again performing duties as a maintenance officer, Arnold was assigned to the maintenance squadron in the 401st Fighter Wing, but he was attached to 613th Tactical Fighter Squadron, for to maintain his flying proficiency and combat-ready status. Although many pilots would have groused about being in the maintenance squadron, for Arnold it was the best of all worlds. He loved overseeing the maintenance on the F-100s and as a bonus got more flying time than most of the other pilots – in addition to the flying he did to stay combat-ready, he had his pick of the maintenance test flights that occurred and also got to regularly ferry aircraft to and from a repair base in northern California, McClellan AFB.

Like his previous unit at Foster, the 613th spent much of the time on the road, and one month after he arrived in Louisiana, he deployed with his new unit to Greece for a NATO exercise. Before he left, he had to re-qualify in the F-100, which had undergone many changes in the two years he had been away. His first flight at England was in the new training version of the F-100, the “F” model, and shortly afterwards he checked out in the new “D” model. The biggest improvement in the F-100D was a set of flaps that helped to slow the airplane down for landing. Although a normal landing speed for the “C” model was nearly 200 mph, the “D” could land at a more pedestrian 170 mph, saving much wear and tear on both the airplane and the pilots.

Arnold wasn’t the only one scrambling to get checked out. Despite having a pilot’s license, Colleen had never learned to drive, since the family apartments in Texas were within walking distance of shopping. However, the neighborhood in Louisiana was at least three miles away from the base and shopping, and to get there required crossing a set of railroad tracks and driving along Highway 1, a busy state road. Fortunately, the family car had an automatic transmission and the quiet neighborhood made for an excellent impromptu training course. Colleen passed her driving test just a few days before Arnold departed for Greece.

Doesn’t look like there’s been any time so far for building airplanes …

The Dream Begins, Part II!

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In the last post, I talked about the original airframe and engine design of Arnold’s world record aircraft. Here’s the rest of the airplane and a sketch of the original design.

To deal with the long flight time, Arnold designed a seat that reclined 30 degrees, not knowing that this design would become a standard feature of high-performance fighters built in the 1980s and later. For building materials, he needed something readily available to the average homebuilder.  He chose a tube and fabric fuselage similar to the Cubs he was so accustomed to working on. He needed to seal the wing so he could carry fuel, and he thought he could use an all metal structure that would either be internally sealed or covered with fiberglass. The sketch below is taken from Arnold’s original report for his class project.

WRA_Original Design

After adding everything up, Arnold found he had a problem common to most airplane designs – the airplane weighed too much. It was now 438.5 pounds empty, 28.5 pounds above the original design goal. However, even at the higher weight, he thought he could achieve a distance of 4068 nautical miles and he proposed two routes. The primary route went from Los Angeles to St Johns, Newfoundland and the secondary route went from Fairbanks, Alaska to Miami, Florida.

Arnold’s design numbers, driven by the exuberance of youth that still believes anything is possible, were wildly optimistic. However, Hamner and his other engineering professors were impressed with the overall idea, and they submitted Arnold’s paper about the design to a regional student competition sponsored by a professional engineering organization, the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences. The IAS was the precursor to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

The competition was held at the end of April, 1960 at a luxury hotel in Dallas. In addition to Texas A&M, twelve other schools participated, including aeronautical engineering powerhouses such as Notre Dame, the USAF Academy, and Georgia Institute of Technology. Students from each school presented their papers to an elite panel of judges from four major aircraft manufacturers. Most of the papers were about exotic topics such as “midcourse interplanetary guidance” and a “turbo-athodyd engine.” Arnold’s paper was the only one involving the design of an actual airplane, and perhaps that swayed the judges to award him first place. The award came with a bonus of $500, a tidy sum for someone with a family and an expensive hobby.

With an airplane design under his belt and his degree in hand, Arnold could have been satisfied that he had met his youthful goals. He was a pilot, a maintenance officer, and now an engineer. However, having an engineering degree and doing something useful with it are two different things. Arnold had designed an airplane, but would it really fly? And could it really set a record?

The only way to find out was to build the airplane.

The Dream Begins, Part I!

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In early 1960, as Arnold neared graduation, he had to complete a senior design project, but had great latitude for choosing the specific project. As he pondered what to do for his first real airplane design, he perused Jane’s All the World Aircraft, a thick, hardbound annual publication that catalogued new aircraft, aviation achievements, and technology advancements. One article was about a Finnish pilot who had set a world distance record in 1957. The pilot, Juhani Heinonen, had designed and built the small airplane himself. For record-setting purposes, the FAI, keeper of aviation records, divides aircraft into classes by type and weight. Heinonen’s airplane, called an HK-1 was in the class known as C1a – an airplane with a combustion engine (as opposed to rocket) and weighing no more than 500 kilograms, or 1102 pounds. Heinonen flew the HK-1 non-stop from Madrid, Spain to Turku, Finland covering 1766 miles in 17 hours and one minute. Fascinated, Arnold wondered if he could design an aircraft that would do even better. After his professor, Ben Hamner, approved his idea, he put his design skills to the test.

His main design consideration was to ensure the airplane could fly as far as possible. This meant the airplane itself, without any fuel, people, or baggage, had to be as light as possible. All aircraft designers try to minimize weight, but most make some compromises for passenger or pilot comfort, or even for aesthetics. However, to get maximum range, Arnold’s airplane had to carry as much fuel and have as little drag as possible, meaning he had to squeeze every last ounce out of his design. He also had to consider pilot comfort for a long duration flight – he had learned that lesson well during his many lengthy overseas hops in the F-100. A last requirement was to use construction materials available to a homebuilder in 1960. All of this was a tall order for an airplane weighing only 1102 pounds, including the pilot, any supplies, and the fuel.

After comparing the weights of various long-range aircraft available, Arnold decided his airplane would weigh 410 pounds without the pilot, baggage, or fuel. To achieve that weight meant he could have only one seat and as few instruments as possible. He also decided to use a new type of tail called a stabilator to save weight. A conventional elevator used on an airplane to make the nose move up and down is a small moving part attached to a larger surface called a stabilizer. In a stabilator, the entire surface moves, which is more efficient, so the stabilator can be lighter.

Arnold also had to design the wing to minimize drag while still providing as much fuel as possible – two diametrically opposed problems. To minimize drag, a designer wants the wing to be as small and thin as possible, but carrying a lot of fuel requires a big, fat wing. The wing also had to be something he could easily build in a garage, so that eliminated many design choices. After making many calculations with his slide rule, Arnold settled on a reasonable compromise. His wing was capable of carrying 65 gallons of fuel, and he included an additional 15-gallon fuel tank in the fuselage. Since a gallon of fuel weighs six pounds, the airplane was capable of carrying nearly 500 pounds of fuel, or almost half the total weight of the airplane.

Arnold picked an 85-horsepower engine that would be powerful enough to take off in a short distance, but still provide economical fuel consumption while cruising. He also decided to use a retractable landing gear to minimize drag. His optimistic calculations told him he would save over 30 pounds worth of drag and he thought he could build a retraction mechanism that weighed only about eight pounds.

I’ll finish the initial design and have sketches in the next post!

Back to Engineering School as an Aggie

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After returning from Mobile Zebra, Arnold found that the Air Force had accepted him to finish his degree, but like most things in the military, there was bad news along with the good. He had hoped to finish the degree at the University of Minnesota, but instead the Air Force had selected him to attend Texas A&M University in College Station. That wasn’t so bad, because College Station was only a short 3-hour move to the north, but the Air Force had also decided his major would be industrial engineering. Arnold had no idea what industrial engineering was, but it didn’t sound like it had anything to do with airplanes.

After doing some research, he found that industrial engineering involves optimizing manufacturing and repair processes. The Air Force had selected him for the program because of his background as a mechanic. He decided the degree would be okay – it was still a degree and maybe he could take some aeronautical engineering courses as electives.

The growing family moved to College Station in July 1958 – a pregnant-again Colleen, a toddler and an infant, a cat, and a Stinson 108, the family airplane. They found an apartment near the school, and Arnold began brushing the cobwebs off the differential equations, physics, and aerodynamics courses he had last taken eight years earlier. Fortunately, the Air Force program paid for two years of college, so he was essentially repeating his junior year.

He first had to figure out his class schedule, so he went to see his academic adviser, a military officer. When Arnold said he wanted to take some aeronautical engineering classes, the adviser said, “Take anything you want. Just take one industrial engineering class to make it look good.”

“You mean I can change my major?”

“Sure,” said the adviser, “but you will still be listed as a maintenance officer, not as an engineer. Are you okay with that?”

Of course. Engineer, pilot, mechanic – it was his dream come true.

Arnold’s new routine included classes during the week and flying on the weekends. To maintain his military proficiency and flight pay, on Saturdays he flew T-33s at Bergstrom AFB near Austin, about two hours north of College Station. On Sundays, he took the family flying in the Stinson.When his third daughter was born, he sold the Stinson and bought  a Cessna 170. He had planned to buy a different airplane from a dealer in San Antonio, but when they arrived to look at the airplane, Colleen spotted the Cessna 170 and decided she had to have it instead. The photo below was actually taken in 1961.

Colleen and Girls Plane 1961 July

The Family Cessna 170 with Colleen and Daughters (Kathleen, Eileen, Maureen)
(Arnold Ebneter Personal Collection)

Next week, I’ll start talking about the design of the E-1!

Finishing Up at Foster: Operation Mobile Zebra

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Arnold had many adventures at Foster flying the F-100, but you’re just going to have to wait for the book for those. I don’t want to give up all my secrets! I’ll talk about one of them that occurred before he moved on to Texas A&M to finish his engineering degree.

By 1957, Arnold had paid back his three-year commitment to the Air Force for pilot training (ah, the good old days — I think the commitment is up to ten years now). Although he could return to his job at General Mills, he and Colleen were enjoying the year-round warm weather in Texas and were in no hurry to head back north. The balloon job gave him freedom to be creative and he enjoyed flying the balloons, but he really couldn’t see himself being a balloon pilot for the rest of his life. In addition, he wanted to design and fly airplanes, not balloons. Flying for the airlines was a long shot – the airlines were still feasting on the glut of pilots produced by World War II and Korea.

If he wanted to fly and make decent money doing it, the Air Force seemed like the best option. Given that, what to do next? The obvious unfinished business hanging over his head was his incomplete engineering degree. If he could finish that degree, maybe he could become an experimental test pilot, or design airplanes in the Air Force. After talking with his superiors, he decided to apply for an Air Force program that would send him back to school.

While Arnold awaited the results of his application, he took part in his last Foster adventure during an operation dubbed Mobile Zebra in the fall of 1957. Zebra was the Air Force’s first attempt at rapidly deploying a gaggle of 47 aircraft across the expansive Pacific Ocean. KB-50 tankers were to refuel the aircraft along the way. Arnold’s role in the exercise was only as a spare, which must have been a relief to Colleen, now stuck at home most of the day with two children under two-years of age (one of them was me).

mobilezebra

A Souvenir from Mobile Zebra Showing the Route
(Arnold Ebneter Personal Collection)

The first part of the exercise called for Arnold to fly to George AFB with 19 other F-100s – 16 of them primary aircraft and four spares. After spending the night at George, the pilots planned to take off and refuel 500 miles later over the Pacific, with only the 16 primary airplanes continuing to Hawaii. If one of the primary airplanes or pilots had a problem, one of the spares would replace him. Arnold was the fourth spare, so four of the primary aircraft would have to drop out before he had to continue to Hawaii. Given that, Arnold expected to turn around and head back to George for another overnight stay and then head back to Foster. He told Colleen he should be home for dinner two days after he left. However, the ambitious deployment had pushed the limits of the exercise planners, and it showed not long after the exercise began.

The flight to George was routine, and by noon the next day, the pilots had taken off again. After flying for about an hour, the 20 airplanes spotted the KB-50 tankers. As they headed towards the tankers, pandemonium broke out. The lead pilot’s radio wasn’t working and the gaggle hadn’t rehearsed what to do if that happened. Everyone started trying to talk on the radio and when more than one person talks on the radio at once, all it does is squeal, and no one can talk. This is called “stepping on each other,” and step on each other, they did. In the ensuing chaos, four of the primaries didn’t refuel, and they turned back with barely enough fuel to land at George. Arnold and the other three spares, who had all refueled, continued toward their unexpected Hawaiian vacation.

The next day, Colleen’s concern over Arnold’s dinner no-show turned to alarm as the night dragged on. When she called the operations desk at his squadron the next morning, the duty officer answering the phone said, “Why, ma’am, your husband had to deploy.” That no one had bothered to call Colleen to let her know didn’t seem to strike him as a problem – wives and children were not an Air Force priority during the Cold War. In the meantime, Arnold was sitting in a briefing room in Hawaii, preparing for the next leg of the trip to Guam.

Colleen settled in to wait for a postcard or letter from Hawaii, or perhaps Guam or Japan, but nothing came during the two-month deployment. Arnold claimed there was no time to write a letter and a letter would take too long to reach Victoria anyway. He must have realized he was in trouble though, as he bought her a string of pearls in Japan.

Foster AFB Gets the F-100 and Some Wild Rides

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In mid-1955, Arnold’s unit at Foster switched to flying the newer F-100, which was much sleeker and faster than the chubby-looking F-86. Arnold had already fallen in love with the F-100 in January, when he saw one during a visit to Eglin AFB in Florida. Much bigger than the F-86, he thought it “sort of mean and ugly-looking.” Although he couldn’t wait to fly one, the F-100 was grounded at the time to fix severe problems with the control system.

Despite the problems, however, North American had already started delivering F-100s to George AFB in California and by July 1955, the planes began appearing at Foster. Since Arnold was an assistant maintenance officer, he was one of the earliest pilots to check out in the F-100. He came close to crashing on his first flight in August 1955. Using the procedure the instructor had taught him, as soon as he took off the airplane began a pilot induced oscillation – a wild series of climbs and dives like a porpoise.

452nd_FDS_Flyby

Arnold’s squadron, the 452 Fighter Day Squadron, flies by at Foster AFB
From Arnold Ebneter personal collection

Although the term “pilot induced oscillation” makes it sound like it’s the pilot’s fault, it’s not. Instead, the control system in the airplane has a problem so that whenever the pilot tries to fly the airplane, it begins to oscillate. The only way to stop it is for the pilot to let go of the stick or freeze it in one position. Some oscillations are benign – even the Wright Flyer had a mild one – but some can tear an airplane apart and kill the pilot. An oscillation on takeoff or landing is especially dangerous because of the increased chance of slamming back into the ground.

Fortunately, after several cycles of almost crashing into the ground, Arnold realized what was happening. He relaxed the pressure he held on the stick at the top of the next cycle and the airplane smoothed out. Several other pilots had similar experiences on their first takeoffs, some of them even banging onto the runway again after lifting off. The F-100 pilots quickly reverted to using the same takeoff procedure they had used in the F-86 and the wild rides ceased.

Another distinct F-100 feature was due to the afterburning engine the airplane used to break the sound barrier in level flight. Unlike later afterburners that lit in stages, the F-100’s afterburning engine was an all-or-nothing affair that delivered a jolt to the pilots as it lit. An F-100 taking off had a distinctive sound not heard before. The engine first screeched like a banshee as it spooled up to full military power. As the pilot moved the throttle to maximum power to light the afterburner, the screeching stopped for a fraction of a second. The afterburner then kicked in with a thud followed by roar as it propelled the airplane down the runway and into the air. A flight of four F-100s taking off left anyone near the runway unable to hear for several minutes until the noise faded into a low rumble as the airplanes disappeared on the horizon.

I remember hearing this noise many times as a kid, and even though I haven’t heard an F-100 in probably 30 years, I think I would still recognize it!

Foster Air Force Base and Jets: The T-33 and F-86

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Congratulations to Bryan Stinekens for correctly answering the question about the balloon registration number N7927A! It is the same registration number used on the E-1, Arnold’s world record setting airplane. And now, back to pilot training.

After finishing primary flight training at Goodfellow in early September 1953, Arnold was assigned to Foster AFB for advanced training. Foster AFB was located near a small town named Victoria, close to the Gulf Coast. Even in September, the heat and humidity were oppressive.

The cadets were assigned to small “flights” of three students, each led by an instructor. A flight with two Belgian students and a Norwegian student was appropriately named the “Falstaff Flight,” but Arnold’s “riff raff Flight” seems to have been assigned as a whim by the pilot training leadership. Other cadets endured colorful names such as “Yo Yo,” “Odd Ball,” and “Moonshine.”

At Foster, the cadets first flew the 800-horsepower T-28A. Once they were used to flying the more powerful airplane, they switched to a jet trainer, the T-33A. Arnold’s first flight in the T-33 was on the Monday before Thanksgiving, on November 23rd.

Foster_AFB_1953

Arnold flying T-33s at pilot training, Foster AFB 1953
From Arnold Ebneter personal collection

The Air Force commissioned Arnold as a second lieutenant and awarded him his silver pilot’s wings on March 15, 1954. After graduating, Arnold took two weeks of leave before reporting for his next assignment at Nellis Air Force Base, just north of Las Vegas for additional training. With no time to spare, he made a mad dash to St Paul and married Colleen on March 18, ending her patient two-year wait as he romped around the United States flying airplanes.

After the wedding, the furious pace continued unabated; Arnold and Colleen drove west to Las Vegas, arriving in time for a short honeymoon before beginning the next phase of his training. Like many military couples, there was no time for a real honeymoon, but at least the Air Force paid for the trip to Vegas.

At Nellis, Arnold learned to fly the F-86, which was then the Air Force’s frontline fighter. In addition, he learned the tools of the fighter pilot trade – air weapons, intelligence, aircraft recognition, Air Force operations, survival, physiological training, air-to-ground weapons, tactics, and both air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery. Part of the weapons training included special weapons, or “ABC” – atomic, biological, and chemical. After F-86 training, he returned to Foster, along with five of the other top cadets in his class for his first real assignment, this time with Colleen in tow. Although Foster had been a training base when Arnold left, by the time he returned it was an operational fighter base assigned to the Tactical Air Command, which was responsible for most of the fighter aircraft in the Air Force.

Arnold and his fellow lieutenants got down to the business of learning to be fighter pilots. This involved endless training in gunnery, air combat maneuvering, and instrument approaches, but there was also time for occasional fun. Not long after arriving at Foster, Arnold and several pilots in his squadron flew their F-86s to Miami for the weekend so they could practice their cross-country flying skills. Colleen was already learning about the lonely life that military spouses can lead and thinking like someone who would be moving a lot. When it came time to buy furniture for their small apartment, she bought end tables with legs that unscrewed for easy shipping.

The F-86 could fly faster than the speed of sound in a dive, and the pilots started “booming” Foster AFB every afternoon at 4:30 to announce the beginning of the retreat ceremony that signaled the end of the official day. One pilot would climb to a high altitude directly over the base, and then point the nose of his airplane at the ground. As the airplane accelerated through Mach 1, a loud cracking noise shook the ground below, rattling windows and waking babies. Although the nearby Victoria residents loved the daily air show, senior Air Force officials weren’t amused and soon told the pilots to knock it off.

Trying Out the Air Force

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By the summer or 1952, the Navy balloon program was waning and Arnold’s draft board was once again breathing down his neck. Fortunately, the Air Force still needed pilots, and, after taking another physical and passing some additional tests, the Air Force again accepted him for pilot training. He finally had a class date set for January 1953, but continued to work for General Mills until he departed for pilot training. As much as he had enjoyed the balloon flying and the freedom that came with it, he was also ready to move on to other flying adventures and warmer climates. On December 28, 1952, he left Minneapolis for Lackland AFB near San Antonio, Texas, to enter the Air Force’s “pre-flight” training.

cadets_lackland

Cadets at Lackland AFB, 1953
Arnold Ebneter personal collection

While his friends and family back home cheered in the New Year, Arnold and his fellow cadets exchanged civilian clothes for khaki uniforms, and began learning to salute, march, and generally just shut up and do whatever they were told to do by their trainers. Going from the freewheeling, make-it-up-as-you-go-along life at General Mills to a structured organization with rigid rules required some adjustment, but Arnold soon fell into the rhythm of daily military life.

After nine weeks of basic training, the Air Force sent the cadets to four different locations for primary flight school – Marana, Arizona; Malden, Missouri; Marianna, Florida; or Goodfellow AFB, Texas near San Angelo. The first three locations used contractor flight instructors, but Goodfellow used active-duty Air Force pilots, and Arnold was lucky enough to go there. After using a short break to race back to Minneapolis to fly in his civilian airplane and see Colleen, Arnold arrived at Goodfellow on Friday, the 13th of March. He flew his first cadet flight in the L-21A “Super Cub,” one week later. Although the airplane was quite familiar to him – it was simply a high-powered military version of his beloved J-3 Cub – it was much more difficult to land than a civilian Cub, and most of his landings, as well as his fellow cadets’, resembled controlled crashes.

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Arnold Ebneter at age 26 in USAF Undergraduate Pilot Training, Goodfellow AFB
From Arnold Ebneter personal collection

Military pilot training was fast-paced, and many cadets could not keep up – a cartoon in the class yearbook quips, “I dropped my pencil yesterday and missed the hydraulic, electrical, and induction systems lecture.” Arnold found his 1300 hours of previous flying experience to be a big help, and after six weeks in the L-21A, he graduated to training in the larger and more complex T-6G “Texan.” He transferred readily to the Texan, since it was similar in size and power to the war-surplus BT-13s he had flown with Paul and Forrest at Poynette. The T-6G was a perfect training airplane, having a sturdy landing gear to survive hard landings and a 550 horsepower engine with enough power to overcome the frequent buffoonery by the inexperienced plots who flew them.

At 26, Arnold was not only the oldest cadet in his pilot training class but also the most experienced pilot, which gave him a huge advantage over his fellow cadets. In June, he wrote to his parents that in his class he was “#1 in flying grades, #1 in academic work, and #4 in low number of gigs.”

However, despite his achievements, he was not yet certain he wanted to make the military a career. In the same letter, he also told his parents, “The military stifles originality too much; one of the reasons I liked working at General Mills was that I was given a free hand to develop my ideas. Sometimes it’s pretty wonderful to be able to dream anything you want as long as you don’t carry it too far. If you can put those dreams into practice, that’s better still.”