I've been off all week...

I was going to post this yesterday for TBT, and forgot... And I don’t feel like doing politics today.

Back in the day, the P-3A/B aircraft had a radio operator. Yes, he operated the HF and secure radios and TTY (teletype) and morse code. And he was also a forward observer, depending on what we were doing.

The problem was, due to ‘limited’ space, the radio operator didn’t get a nice hardened TTY. According to what I was told, the unit was ‘originally’ meant to be used by secretaries/shore operators in the comm center. Soooo, they gave a ‘fragile’ TTY to a bunch of ham fisted guys bouncing around in an airplane...

Amazingly, a lot of the folks made them work anyway!

And this pic has been floating around for years...

These were the six operational squadrons flying out of NAS JAX in the 70s-80s under Commander, Patrol Wing Eleven. This was when we had 24 active squadrons between the four bases, plus the 13 reserve squadrons during the Cold War. The picture was taken in 1985, one of the few times we had birds from every squadron in town. Usually, at least one of the squadrons was deployed.

And yes, if you were there, the other squadron was VP-30, but it was a training (RAG) squadron, not operational, plus VP-62, the reserve squadron.

And we deployed all over the world with them.