Droguing with the T-Bird

One time I was on a mission down in Sardinia. We had just started something new again and that was droguing with a T-bird. We’d haul a big flag and 104’s would come along and try and shoot holes in it. They tried it a couple of years ago before I got there and they had problems with it and it was shut down so they got me to go back and organize a bunch of guys to go down and do it again. It was a very interesting trip because I was under the eye of the Italian commander, base commander who was quite upset with the way the mission went before so he was watching me and we had a, he gave us five minutes to hook up a T-bird with a drogue and have them take off and get it off the runway because they couldn’t close it down that long. We had a T-bird with 1,500 feet of armored cable on behind it with a 50 foot flag on the back which is called a drogue and it would roar down behind the airplane then and as the airplane went up the flag would come up and sit behind the aircraft – 1,500 feet behind the airplane and then they’d go out to the range and the aircraft would try and shoot holes in it and they’d come back and then he’d would have to drop it to the side of the runway and we’d have to pick it up without having a cable fall on the runway and if it did we had to get it off. It was kind of a tricky situation that had four or five minutes to do and we had to do it perfect so that the Italian commander would let us keep going again with it without shutting us down and it worked and we got along really good and that was quite an accomplishment because it was a lot harder, it took three guys is all I had and we had to launch it, string out, well we strung out the cables the night before and because we had only a runway that could either work 180 degrees, we never knew which way the wind was blowing so we had to have enough cables on each side of the runway to go either way, whichever way the wind was blowing. It doesn’t sound like much but it was quite a, quite a feat and we accomplished it with a, well everything went good and the Italian commander was happy and it made everybody else happy.