Keeping early warning in the air

Curt Campbell was 17 years old when he joined the military.

The Nuremberg trials were going on and he wanted to be a guard at those trials in 1948.

The problem was the military wanted the guards to be 6 feet tall. Campbell was only 5 foot 7 inches.

A couple of things were pushing him toward the military, Campbell said. His buddy's number was coming up to enter the draft. At 16, a judge told Campbell he had a terrible temper and asked him if he thought about using it somewhere useful - like the army. Campbell told the judge he was considering that.

Since he was too short to do what he wanted. He opted to join the Air Force. It turned into a career for him. Campbell joined in November 1948 and retired in December 1968.

Since he was only 17, his mother had to sign a waiver for him to enlist and both he and his friend joined the Air Force.

When he joined, he had not yet graduated from high school, but since then, he has earned a bachelor's degree and worked halfway through a master's program. He finished three years of college while in the Air Force.

Campbell became a flight engineer and flew B-29s and flight tested YC-130s,C-130As and C-133As. Of his 11,000+ hours, over 8,000 hours are in RC-121Ds Super-Constellation airborne and early warning aircraft.

Early on he got his general education degree (GED) in 1953 before going to the B-29 Ground Phase Flight Engineer Technician school at Chanute Air Force Base (AFB).

A college degree was not required, but in 1959, while at McClellan AFB he started working on a degree.

Campbell started his Air Force career with basic training at Lackland AFB, while his buddy went to gunnery school.

Campbell attended Aircraft Mechanic's Fundamental fifteen week school and specialized hydraulic mechanic training through the summer of 1949.

From there he went to Brookley AFB in Mobile, Ala. to work on C-54s and C-74s. That was short lived. He and his supervisor installed a nose landing gear selector valve backwards causing a C-74 to nose over causing major damage. In an apparent move to just have one story about the mistake, Campbell was quickly cleared off the base and sent to Alaska to work on B-29s, an aircraft without hydraulics.

After returning from two years in Alaska, he married "the first girl he met" and four children later, they divorced. But this happened after their next assignment to an aircraft ferrying squadron at Dover AFB, Delaware. As a crew chief he flew B-26s to the 12th Air Force in Europe and as a scanner he flew B-29s to England.

In the spring of 1953 he went to B-29 Flight Engineer School at Chanute AFB in Illinois. From there Campbell had a five-year assignment to the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB flying B-29s, YC-130s, C-130As and C-133Bs.

In 1957 Campbell, the first USAF flight engineer to qualify in a C-130, joined Major General Albert Boyd, Jacquie Cochran, Tommie D.Bennefield, Chuck Yeager and a host of former and current Edwards AFB test pilots to take the first C-130 overseas and flew all the new NATO aircraft.

After Edwards AFB, Campbell was sent to McClellan AFB near Sacramento, Calif., in April 1958. For the next six years he flew RC-121D airborne early warning aircrafts on 14 to 17 hour missions 600 miles off the western United States coastline. Other missions involved TDYs (temporary duty) to Hawaii for missile launches from Vandenberg AFB and Golddigger missions during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and 1963.

As a B-29 and RC121D flight engineer, he had several responsibilities including handling all of the power settings, managing the fuel use and mixtures, controlling the weight and balance of the airplane and setting the endurance time of how long you can stay on station until relief could come.

At McClellan AFB, the Wing's mission included an aircraft taking off every two hours on the half hour three hundred sixty five days a year. Each twenty five man crew in the three squadron wing flew 14 to17 hour missions every three or four days.

They flew 600 miles off the coast in "100-mile race track patterns" watching for Russian bombers. He did this from 1958 to 1964. Campbell joked that it must have worked, because the Russians never came.

From 1964 to 1966 he went to Travis AFB and flew missions from there in C-133Bs, the largest cargo plane in the Air Force at the time.

"They were terrible planes with mechanical problems," Campbell said. In the six years he was at McClellan Air Force Base, 10 of the 50 C-133s exploded in mid-air killing everyone on board. He was not looking forward to the change in assignment.

Because of his earlier experience on the C-133As at Edwards Campbell checked out quickly and soon was "flying the line," taking supplies to Vietnam and returning to Travis AFB with the bodies of troops killed in Vietnam. This lasted for two years and during the time Campbell was getting divorced. After leaving the C-133s in 1966 three more crashed but there were some survivors including men from Campbell's former unit at Travis AFB. For "humanitarian reasons" he was transferred back to RC-121D aircraft in his former squadron at McClellan AFB.

The Cuban missile crisis began in the Fall of 1962 when relations with Cuba took America to the brink of nuclear war as Russian ships began unloading missiles in Cuba. A squadron of early warning aircraft was formed to augment the 966th AEW&C Squadron at McCoy AFB in Florida. In 1962, a naval blockade was formed. Also at this time, an American U2 spy plane was shot down by a Surface to Air (SAM) missile.

The 966th at McCoy was overloaded flying their earlier mission covering the eastern and southeast coast, so a Golddigger Task Force was formed from McClellan AFB crews to protect other U-2s from SAM missile attacks.

Campbell flew those missions in August and September of 1963. Campbell said planes that normally flew at 11,000 - 14,000 feet now were flying 50 feet off the water for eight hours. "It was so hot, we were stripped down to bathing suits," Campbell said. The reason they were flying so low, Campbell explained, was to reflect their radar off the ocean to protect and warn the U-2s against SAM missiles.

Cuban gun boats were out there and their guns were higher than we were flying. "It was a stressful mission." He would see refugees trying to flee Cuba in flotation devices of all sorts. The crew often saw refugees being picked up by Cuban gun boats.

Campbell flew that mission every three days. He had to sit for four hours with his hand on four throttles. The props were going at the near full speed-2,400 revolutions per minute.

Six weeks after remarrying, Curt left his wife and four kids for an assignment to Hawaii for a missile launch from Vandenberg AFB where the first capsule containing a live chimp was snagged out of the air with directions from a high flying U-2 and the lower flying RC121D.

Six months after he remarried, Campbell again left his family. This time four days before Christmas for a tour of flying RC-121Ds out of Korat directing fighter strikes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They flew to station past the besieged marines at Khe Sanh on their missions every three days.

The 20 years went fast, and he was only 37 when he retired from the Air Force as a Master Sergeant. He was studying law enforcement and the cutoff age was 35, but he started as a deputy coroner and finished out his civilian career as a criminal investigator specializing in capital murder case defense. Of his 30 capital cases, six received the death penalty. Three of them died naturally on death row. In his 20 years as a criminal investigator he worked hundreds of murder cases and many more during his four years as a deputy coroner.

Campbell met Judy, his late wife, while at Travis AFB and had two more children with her. One is an attorney in Sacramento and the other a registered nurse in Jackson.

At 84 years old, Campbell said that 20 years in the Air Force changed his life. As a 16-year-old, he was considering becoming a member of the Italian mob. "That life was pretty appealing to a young kid, but I never got involved in crime," Campbell said.

The 20 years in the Air Force set the guideline for his life.

"Flying for a living is thousands of hours of sheer boredom with a few seconds of stark terror thrown in every once in a while," Campbell said.

"As a pilot or flight engineer, you've got the airplane and you have to stay ahead of it. One thing about emergencies is they tend to compound themselves ... and the airplane will get ahead of you and you will get killed and kill everyone else. You've got to keep your head."