8-30-44.
Dear Folks,
I have to fly at 12:00 but did want to write in case anyone was going with the mail in the morning.
This is perhaps the closest thing to combat as you could ever find without being in it. We have been flying anywhere from 6 to 9 hrs. a day. I have finished my day flying, finished it this afternoon with 3 hrs. of high altitude navigation. I flew 4 hrs. last night shooting landings here at the home field. This afternoon I did land at Bakersfield just to see what it was like because everyone in awhile during night flying here the fog rolls in pretty fast and catches you in the air which means head over in the valley and land at Bakersfield or Fresno. One nice thing about our night flying here is that there is a large moon up now which makes it alot more like day flying and not so much instrument work. It’s probably spoiling us in that respect. The climate here is hot and dry, just about like Arizona. We are just a few miles too far from the ocean to get any cool weather. This afternoon I had quite a time, when I got back to Estrella and started to land I found out that only my nose wheel and my right main landing gear would come down. I had to spend about an other half hour in the air going through the emergency procedures in getting the left wheel down. It was quite a relief to finally see it drop into place, however a belly landing would probably have been good experience but alittle hard on the airplane supply.
https://youtu.be/_sRoer4gMVc
Tonight I’ll be on night navigation and will more than likely fly to Bakersfield, Stockton and back to Estrella and then another one down in the southern part of the state. Suppose to fly till 6:00 unless the weather closes in.
The latest rumor has it that we will get our gunnery at Salinas in P70s before going to Fresno. If that’s the case we will be here another month. I flew a mission yesterday being controlled by a ground radar unit, they can maneuver you around into close firing range of another plane with out any trouble at all. When we got to Fresno that’s all we’ll be doing but they wanted to give us a taste of it here.
Enough for now – time for coffee.
With love,
Tom
