Text 14118, 68 rader
Skriven 2011-02-16 07:02:46 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
  Kommentar till text 14110 av Roy Witt (1:387/22)
Ärende: The Smolensk crash on April 10, 2010
============================================
Replying to a message of Roy Witt to Bob Ackley:

 RW> 15 Feb 11 07:14, Bob Ackley wrote to Roy Witt:

 BA>>>> The backenders (who ran the equipment) were assigned to the 6994th
 BA>>>> Security Squadron or one of its detachments.  When I was in it
 BA>>>> (1971-2) the 6994th was at Saigon, Det 2 was at Da Nang and Det 3
 BA>>>> was at Nakhon Phanom.  Don't remember where Det 1 was, maybe Nha
 BA>>>> Trang.

 RW>>> Ahhh. These frontenders don't say that on their site.

 BA>> The frontenders were all officers, the backenders were all enlisted
 BA>> swine.

 RW> And why they don't mention you guys.

I can't speak for their web site, I've never seen it.  www.ec47.com does
mention
the 6994th and has a roster of most if not all of the personnel assigned -
including
me.  Or at least it did, I haven't checked it in years.

 BA>>>>>> After the peace treaty was signed the unit at Nakhon Phanom moved
 BA>>>>>> south to Ubon RTAFB and the other two units merged and moved to
 BA>>>>>> Nakhon Phanom.

 RW>>>>> They may have been the unit that formed the 361st?

 BA>>>> Nope.  Strange setup, the pilot/copilot/navigator assigned to one
 BA>>>> unit, mission supervisor, radio operators and analyst (me)
 BA>>>> assigned to a different unit.  Of minimal interest is the fact
 BA>>>> that most of the pilots and copilots were not cleared to be in the
 BA>>>> back of the airplane during the mission.

 RW>>> The nature of the electronic equipment onboard would most likely be
 RW>>> the reason for that. A need to know, comes to mind.

 BA>> Some folks don't understand the conept of need-to-know.  Our pilots
 BA>> and copilots pretty much knew what we were up to.  One thing we did
 BA>> do - very unofficially and very illegally - was quietly brief the
 BA>> intelligence people at NKP; this stemmed from a situation where they
 BA>> were briefing a specific area as good for Escape and Evasion if one
 BA>> was shot down, but we knew that there was a fairly good sized unit
 BA>> of the North Vietnamese army there - so we very quietly alerted them
 BA>> to the fact (they never asked how we knew and we didn't tell them
 BA>> that).

 RW> Electronic survelence?

Of a sort.  EC-47s were airborne HF direction-finding platforms, the mission
was
to locate the bad guys' transmitters.  Dunno if anything ever came of the
material
we collected (well, there was ONE item we came up with that caused some
excitement).
IIRC given perfect conditions we could locate a transmitter (antenna) within a
couple
of hundred meters, which was close enough to have somebody go over and have a
look.
I don't know of any air strikes that occurred based only on our material - note
that we
- the back-enders - rarely communicated with the airborne command post, I don't
think
I did it more than twice in the hundred-plus missions I flew..

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)