I thought you might enjoy the humor in this story. I will put on my thinking cap
and I have a crew photo that I will locate and e-mail to you. I recall the day to day operations and the many hours which we worked on the aircraft. There is so much to say, but I am not really sure it would be of much interest since it only involves the work of a crew chief and supporting personnel.

SAC had its problems developing an EW capability and so did TAC and the Theaters. For some of that, I refer you to the History of US Electronic Warfare by Alfred Price. Volume II has quite a bit about the Wexval tests and the B-66, including the Brown cradle. It also covers the QRC-160 jammer pod, for which I was the project engineer at W-PAFB during development and flight test.

TAC had always been a fighter pilots command, with a different philosophy from the bombers and transports. The attitude of “Kick the tires, light the fires and the first one off is the leader” became obsolete when the airplane missions changed. And the change was painful.

I had nothing to do with the development of the B-66 but did recognize its potential if people would use it properly. Somebody (I wish I knew who) was very smart in building an airplane with good electrical power and some usable space.

My first exposure to tactical air was in January, 1958, when I was assigned to the 42nd TRS, 10th TRW at Spang, my first overseas tour since I got out of POW camp in 1945. I’d been teaching EW to senior officers in the Staff Course at Keesler AFB for several years and was up-to-date on the tactics and threats. A few months after I arrived, the Wing sent me to a B-66 conference in California, where I made some contacts in the Air Material Command. I soon checked out in the RB-66C as Raven 4, and realized that we were just boring holes in the air, with no real mission, in spite of what the books said. An opportunity came to volunteer for a short time in the Wing Plans section to help with an exercise, and I managed to get a slot approved as Wing EW officer. Then I rewrote the ECM Annex to the NATO War Plan and got it approved by a couple of friends in USAFE, placing responsibility for EW on the 10th TRW, the only outfit in the theater with any usable capability. By this time, I knew the B-66 capability and the potential of 10 TRW.

I heard that Bill Keels was coming in and managed to get him assigned to our Recce Tech, so we could build an Electronic Order of Battle. I’d met Keels when he was a Sergeant in Admin for the Staff Course at Keesler and helped talk him into getting commissioned. My friends in USAFE helped to task the Wing with specific missions and we built the EOB up until we could schedule missions for specific targets. Colonel Kemp gave me a free hand, with just the warning, “Gus, Don’t you get us into trouble!” I briefed the fighter outfits on EW and made them aware of our capabilities. At about this time, I made a trip to Adana, where we were intercepted and took the C-model nearly to the Mach. I decided the tail guns were of less value than the tail cone, so I proposed that we get rid of the guns and gain 35 knots airspeed. Colonel Kemp agreed after a cone equipped airplane won the photo competition.

An opportunity came to configure the RB-66Bs with jammers. I spent a long time trying to make some sense out of the wiring diagrams, but our excellent maintenance people, including Tom Sumpter, got it done. About this time, we had to move to England and the C-models went to Chelveston, while I went to Alconbury. But we had a systematic recon program which the 42nd TRS kept up and we could run recon/jamming exercises against the RAF, the Navy and others. I managed to bring the EW Staff Course instructors to Europe to teach our people and the USAFE staff about EW.

I realized that USAFE needed the equivalent of the SAC Blue Cradle if the weapon carriers were going to survive to their targets. I used our EOB to build up our jamming capability and was able to get the Brown Cradle B-66Bs reassigned from the 47th Bomb Wing at Sculthorpe to the 10th TRW. But we had to give up some other airplanes when Colonel Kemp refused to have more than 99 airplanes in our Wing. By the way, the 47th BW didn’t dump those cradle airplanes - I specifically requested them, along with their EW officer, Bill Reynolds. I proposed an alert force to be forward based on the continent to cover the weapon carriers in the initial attacks and requested Furstenfeldbrook, so the crews could get to Munich,but that was denied because the Luftwaffe had just taken that base and we couldn’t put our classified airplanes there, so we got Toul instead. We ran some impressive exercises against the RAF with those airplanes, including blanking out the entire British force. Then I got orders for SAC which I managed to get cancelled, so I could get to Wright-Patt.

At W-PAFB, I was assigned to ASNPVD, the ECM branch, as the Project Engineer on the QRC-160 jammer, which was just getting on contract with GE in Utica, NY. I traveled to McDonnell Aircraft to see the RF-110 (which became the RF-4C). It looked good so I selected that airplane as the target carrier for the pods. It had no pylons and no provision for external stores but it seemed to be a good design. We designed a family of pods, with ground support equipment. We tried to get an A/N nomenclature but had to stay under the QRC program. TAC gave us little or no support in terms of demand so we could not get high priorities. They did not like external stores, which I understood, but we knew they had to have electronic defenses and there was absolutely no internal space or power in the F-100s. That airplane had no wiring or cockpit space so we were limited to 3 wires and about 2 inches of panel space for our control panel. We also had to develop the QRC-160-7 pylon to mount the pod. Our flight test airplane was an F-100 and our pilot was Captain Ed White, the first Astronaut to fly outside the capsule. Unfortunately, he died in the Apollo fire. We finally delivered the first pods to TAC and heard that they’d jettisoned them in flight. We got on contract with GE for about 200 pods.

I was reassigned from the pod program to take over the group developing chaff, flares and rockets. I was happy to hear that the pods did well in SE Asia once TAC accepted them. That’s where the rest of the story is. It’s too bad that they didn’t have proper parts & maintenance support but they were QRC which meant contractor support, since TAC would not support our requests for conventional nomenclature.

Sorry to be so long-winded but maybe this will help clarify the stories. Take Care, Gus Seefluth