I'm a bit confused about the C-5s parked there (I noted at least two, might have been more). I thought all the early vintage C-5As were being structurally updated and retrofit with new avionics and CF6-80C2 FADEC engines. Were some of the early ones too far gone? They didn't build that many (50 C-5A IIRC, and a few of those were lost)?
BTW, listening to the voice recordings brought back an interesting old memory. Back during my college days, I was hanging out with some high school buddies during the summer. One kid's old man had been a B-52 pilot during the Viet Nam war. He'd snuck a cassette recorder along on a mission over Hanoi - 40 year old memory says it was during Nixon's Christmas bombing campaign (1972?). Anyway, the North was prepared and waiting - they lost 3 B-52s that day
. At the end of the tape, one of the pilots said something like 'God I hope I never have to go through that again'.
Listening to that recording was one of the most sobering events of my then young life. A few years earlier, I'd been accepted into an Air Force ROTC scholarship and pilots training, then got kicked out at the last minute due to a mysterious heart anomaly they apparently noticed during my physical (that never showed up in any other physical before or after
). Anyway, listening to that tape was the first time in occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't such a bad thing that I hadn't made it as an Air Force pilot
