Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is
retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Frank Blunt, but we're going to call
him Frank. He also served two tours in Vietnam. He piloted a C
one thirty and later a C one thirty gun ship there, and he's also
the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross. In addition to all that, he's
a witness to several other interesting pieces of history. And Colonel, thanks so
much for your time today. We appreciate it. Thank you, Greg.
Where were you born and raised, Sir? I was born in a little
town called Quincy, Florida. It's about twenty miles west of Tallahassee. I
grew up in Tallahassee. Is is my younger years, and I went to
school there, I mean Florida State, and I graduated from there in nineteen
sixty. Was there a history of military service in your family, not specifically.
There were a few of my cousins that served mored War two. Majority
of them were in the Navy. I had one uncle that was a tail
gunner on b seventeen. I think he was over in eight Air Force.
Why did you ultimately choose the Air Force? Well, I decided while I
was in Florida State, we were required to take first two years of Air
Force ROTC, and that kind of got me interested in pursuing my commission.
And then one day they had a B twenty five there that the rated officers
in the RTC program would fly to get their monthly flying time and thereby getting
their monthly flight pay. And they took me up in the B twenty five
one day and let me sit up in front and hold on to the wheel
for a while, and I thought, that's pretty good. I might like
to try this. Anyway, the way I kind of got started on it,
Well, tell me a little bit. Now. After you graduated from
Florida State, I assume you were commissioned as an officer into the Air Force,
and then you went to flight training, and from what I understand,
you did not exactly have a full wallet when you got to flight training.
Yeah. I reported racty duty and around the twentieth of June in nineteen sixty
and as I was leaving my home to go down to Bartow, which is
where I started primary flight training Bartow, Florida, it was a contract flying
school at time. Greg, My dad held out one hundred dollar bill as
I was leaving, and I said, Dad, I think it's time for
your son to paddle his own boat. And I holding to keep the hundred
dollars that I was in good shape anyway. When I arrived at Bartow,
I had sixty five cents in my pocket. All of my classmates said,
hey, we got to go to a meeting here. After the meeting,
we'll all go with the club and have lunch. And I said, well,
I said to myself, of course we all are not going to go.
I doubt if I can buy lunch for sixty five cents. We finished
at the meeting, the guy that was running meeting said, okay, all
you guys come over here this table and we're gonna pay you your travel pay.
I looked at the guy next to me and I said, what the
hell's travel pay? And you know they paid us so much a mile Greg
to drive from our home station down to Bartow and I think I got eighteen
dollars and sixty cents and I had lunch with my classmates. So once you
actually got to the airplanes, had you had any experience flying and were you
a quick study? How did how did flight school go for you? Flight
school pretty good. We had a pretty large class, Greg I was in
class sixty two eight and we had some aviation cadets along with all of us
who were commissioned officers. Pretty big class. I think it was around maybe
one hundred and sixty five or maybe one hundred and eighty guys starting in the
class, and I think you graduated about eighty five. At the end of
the road, none of the aviation cadets made it through the program. Wasn't
any of their fault, but I guess they just couldn't make it anyway.
A lot of the officers were washed out. A lot of them went to
navigation training as a secondary and some of them went as staff officers. Now,
after training, you flew the Super Constellation. Is that correct? I
went from Bartow to Craig Air Force Base in Sellm, Alabama, where I
flew at T thirty three, and that was called basic training at the time
Craig. You started with timary and then you go to basic and when you
finish basic, if you graduated, you got your wings. Depending on your
rank in graduating class, you got to choose your following assignment, and I
picked a Super Contany in Charleston, South Carolina. Tell me about the plane
and why you chose it. Well, I kind of thought, you know,
if I can get some experience. You know, a Super Connie in
its day was really and truly a very famous airliner, A twa quite had
quite a few of them. Howard used with instrumental in that, and I'm
sure you probably remember. I thought, well, I'll get some time into
Connie, and if I decide down the road, I might want to go
to the airlines. I thought, well, it wouldn't hurt for me to
have some experience in a super constellation. I flew that for a couple of
years, and then the outfit that I was in, which was the forty
first Military and Transport service there at Charleston Air Force Base, we moved into
the C one thirty at that time. Let's talk about something. Assignments now
on the Super Connie. One of them was to fly families overseason back,
and I'm told you had a pretty effective way to wear the little kids out,
to get them from being too squarely for too long. Oh yeah,
the Super County was pressurized airplane, and we didn't never get much above twelve
fourteen thousand feet, although all the engines were Curtish right thirty three fifty turbo
compounds and which means they had super chargers as well as h prt s which
for power recovery turbines to the crankshaft. They were about three thousand horsepower each
and we mainly were cruised around twelve fourteen thousand feet. But we're all ninety
two passengers in the back, mostly families at the times what we were moving,
but if the kids started running up and down the aisle, you could
you could tell they were doing that because the elevator trim would roll nose forward,
rolled nose back, note forward, kid running up and down the aisle,
and the cabin attendants we had the female cabinet attendants at the time,
would say, now all you kids, sit down, and we're going to
serve you your dinner, and of course they didn't pay much attention to that.
So what we'd do we would ease the cabin altitude up from well,
I think we were maintaining around four or five thousand feet in the cabin alt
to cruise level. We'd ease up to maybe eight thousand or nine thousand feet,
and of course as the kids were running up down the aisle, they
were they were puffing and panting, and pretty soon they all just kind of
dropped back into their seats and dozed off, and the cabin tenants could serve
the meals. So that's that's kind of a little trick that we used.
Now, on a little more serious note, you also had an incident,
i'm told where you had a broken antenna from the tail to the cockpit that
you had to deal with mid flight. How'd you handle that? The Connie
had two HF antennas on it. Back in those days they were a M
transceivers, and there was a long wire that was hooked right above the cockpit
that went back and hooked the top of one of the vertical stabilizers in the
back. And we were out over the Atlantic one night and one of them
broke loose in the back. As we were cruising along. Of course,
the slip stream was whipping that long wire antennant from the left side to the
right side of the aircraft, and of course it was going wap wap.
We were all thinking we need to do something about that. I think maybe
one of the flight engineers said, let's try something. We had navigators in
those days, and they used a section to shoot three star positions on navigating
across the Atlantics. Anyway, the section and stuck up outside the airplane through
a sextant port. So he opened the secant port and Charon flashlight up there,
and every once in a while you could see the wire flipping back and
forth as it was beating each side of the airplane. If you follow that,
I think the flight in the air said let's try something. So they
took a coat hanger and put a little hook in it, stuck it up
in there and grabbed the backside of the wire and he pulled. We managed
to pull enough of it back down inside the aircraft. He took pair of
dikes and cut it in two and pulled it all in and that was the
end of the problem. He also had a very famous passenger at one point,
Alan Shephard, the first man in space for the United States. How
was at Patrick Air Force Base. Alan Shepherd came out and we were going
to take him down to one of the one of the islands for I think
he was monitoring a shot at the time. Anyway, just as we took
off from Patrick. Had a runaway prop on number three engine, and we
just pulled the airplane up and loaded down the prop and and the feather pump
drove the blades in the feather and we came back around, landed at Patrick,
and Alan came up front. He says, okay, guys. He
said that's enough for today. He says, I'll meet you all over the
Ulstra's Club and I'll buy you all around the drakes, which he did.
He's a nice fella. When we come back, Colonel Blunt tells us about
his shift to flying the C one thirty, flying through eighteen typhoons in East
Asia, his connection to Apollo thirteen, and his time flying Air Force One.
Our guest has retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Frank Blunt. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus.
Our guest in this edition has retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Frank Blunt.
He's a veteran of the Vietnam War and a recipient of the Distinguished Flying
Cross. Colonel Blunt now continues his story by explaining how he started flying the
C one thirty and discussing his first deployment to the Far East. The squadron
progressively got rid of the counties as we got got more and more C one
thirties in, and all of the ones that we had in there greg were
E models four bladed props. I went through a transition school up in Tennessee,
and when I came back then we started flying the Sea one thirty.
There is cargo runs. We were doing mainly the same basic step that we
were doing with the county, except we weren't hauling too many passengers at that
time. We were mainly cargo hauling. When were you deployed to Vietnam for
the first time. I stayed at Charleston until nineteen sixty seven. In nineteen
sixty seven, I got an assignment to du Guam in the fifty fourth Weather
recon Squadron out there. That's when I was flying typhoon reconnaissance. Tell me
about that. I mean, you've you've flown through what I'm told are eighteen
different typhoons. So explain first of all why you did that, and then
secondly how to do that successfully. We penetrated at five hundred millibars, which
is about ten thousand feet and it wasn't wasn't a terribly terrifying experience. Greg
I had a cup of coffee in my hand all the time. I drink
a lot of coffee, and I went all of those eighteen typhoons with a
cup of coffee in my hand. I think I only spilled the coffee one
time, believe it or not. Anyway, the purpose of us going in
there was to measure the bare metric pressure inside the typhoon itself, and also
we would log in the latitude and longitude of the storm and which way it
was moving, so we could give an advanced notice down the line as what
islands might be hit or whether it was going to hit the Philippines or Japan.
I did eighteen typhoons out there. He also had a difficult landing with
a mouth functioning nose gear, I believe, during that deployment. So how
did you deal with that? Well? In two winners. At Christmas time,
there was an operation in Elmendorf Air Force based in Alaska, and they
picked me to go up there as well as the rest of my crew,
and we were seating the super cool fog up there because there was a lot
of s onety one moving in and out, and they would come out of
Vietnam. First stop would be Elmendorf, and if the weather got bad a
lot of times the ceiling was low and they couldn't get in. What we
would do is I had authorization take off zero zero, believe it or not,
the crew and I flew over the top of the super cool fog and
seated. It would dry ice, which made it snow out, and when
it did, the ceiling raised and all the one forty ones could get in
and out of Elmendorf. And so I did that two years in the row.
Well, after you came home from that first tour in Vietnam, you
were in part of another story that I think a lot of folks will remember
well, and that's nineteen seventy The nation in the world are riveted to the
fate of Apollo thirteen and the problems they had in space and their effort to
return safely to the Earth, which thankfully they did. But once they did,
I returned safely. Their next flight was with you, right, Explain
Explain what happened there? Well, I just all I did was just transport
him back to Washington because they were going back to shake hands with the President,
and they all got on board. I was flying seven h seven at
the time. You may have seen some of those they say United States of
America on the side. Anyway, I flew him from Honolulu back to Washington,
DC, and Jack Swiger was on board, of course with the three
Asian level. Anyway, Jack came up the cockplit and he sat down behind
me, and I had never met the man before, and we I introduced
myself to him, and he I can't stand all that bs in the back
with all those newspeople, He says, can I stay up here with you
guys? So he said behind me most all the way back. Very personable
guy. And that was a great loss when he passed away. It is
at a way too young of an age as well. As you mentioned flying
seven h sevens with the United States of America on the side. Is that
the part of your career where you were at Andrews and flying Air Force one?
That's that was the outfit? Yes, how did you get that assignment
that used to be called a twelve fifty fourth transport weighing up there? I
always kind of wanted to be in that outfit. It was a pretty select
outfit. I sent in my application with my credentials and everything to them,
and they sent me all the paperwork backs to begin the initial screening to go
up there, because we had to have special clearances flying out of that outfit,
as I'm sure you can appreciate. Anyway, my biggest problem was I
do not have fingerprints. I understand a lot of people do, but I
just happened not to have fingerprints, and the Secret Service has sent me several
notices about how they needed to screen that portion of the application carefully. Anyhow,
the funny part that happened was, and I didn't realize this, greg,
what happened was the Secret Service went when you put down your references,
the Secret Service had agents that made door to door trips and sat down and
talked to the people that you put down as your references. And of course,
after that happened, I got a call from some of my very close
and dear friends. They called me and said, Frank, what in the
hell have you done? Because the Secret Service has been here, they won't
know all about you. I guess they thought I had robbed a bank or
something. Craig, but that was all part of the screening to get up
there. Well, speaking of bank robbery, I'm glad you used your no
fingerprints for good and not for evil that could have made it hard to find.
The Secret Service said that very thing to me, Greg. They said,
you know, you would have made a great bank robber because you've got
no fingerprints. Once I got to Washington, they called me down to the
Secret Service Department downtown Washington, DC and they said, don't worry, we
can get your fingerprints. And they took him and took him and took him,
and finally they looked at me and they said, Frank, you know
you don't have any fingerprints. And I said, yeah, that's what I've
been told. Well, which president that sounds like about President Nixon? About
that time that you were flying around. Nixon and Ford were the two that
were in office while I was there. And an interesting thing that happened that
I was not flying Air Force one at the time. When Richard Nixon resigned
the presidency. The tail number was two seven thousand, which happens to be
the Boeing seven h seven that's in the Reagan Library in Semi Valley. Anyway,
when he took off from Andrews Air Force Base. After he had resigned
the presidency. He was on Air Force one halfway across the United States.
Gerald Ford was sworn in as President of the United States. The only time
an airplane is air Force one is if it's an Air Force airplane and the
current President of the United States is on board. Halfway across the United States.
Richard Nixon would no longer the current president of the United States. That
was Gerald Ford back in Washington. So when they landed out in California,
they were not Air Force one. Did you have much interaction with either of
them? Not very much. With Nixon, he would all say thank you,
gentlemen. Gerald Ford. I flew him a lot when he was vice
president, and he was a very personable guy. And of course the call
signed with the vice friends. Air Force two coming up, retired US Air
Force Lieutenant Colonel Frank Blunt tells us why he turned down an assignment in the
US to fly gunships in Vietnam. You'll also hear what combat was like for
him there and what it was like to fly a mission after the war had
officially ended. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans
Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition has retired US Air
Force Lieutenant Colonel Frank Blunt. He's already told us about his work flying through
typhoons, bringing the Apollo thirteen crew to Washington to meet the President, and
flying the President himself aboard Air Force one. But we returned to his story
in nineteen seventy two, as Colonel Blunt rejected his assignment here in the States
and demanded to be sent to Vietnam. Well, the Air Force, in
their great wisdom, decided that I should not continue flying airplanes, but I
should go to what was called the Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery,
Alabama. I did everything I could to get out of it, and I
had to go. As long story short, during the most miserable year in
my twenty years, and Air Force were called it was gone flying and all
of my classmates seemed to love it, but I hated it. The only
thing that I did while I was there, Greg, was I did go
to graduate school and got my master's degree. But a lot of my classmates
we'd go in at seven o'clock in the morning, and usually the classes would
last until about one o'clock. And most of them then would head to the
golf course, and that's when I headed over to my graduate school classes.
So I usually finished those up around five or six o'clock in the afternoon.
It was a pretty long day in those days. Now to go back you
had to fly the one thirty gun ships. So how much of an adjustment
was that from your previous flying and what additional considerations are there when you're flying
a gunship as opposed to the regular see one thirty. A gunship is an
offensive weapon, as you well know, And would you like to know the
events that how I got the assignment absolutely When I graduated from commander staff,
they had a guy come in there from the Military Personnel Center. He was
a major and I was a major at the time. He sat down across
the desk from me and he said, I've looked at your records and he
says, I'll be your following assignment here. It's in the Pentagon. You'll
be a staff officer. And I said, I don't want to go to
Pentagon. He said, well, that's your following assignment, and I said,
well, I understand that the Air Force is accepting volunteers to fly the
gun ship over in ubon thaland he says, you do know they shot two
those down in April. Don't just say yeah, I know that. And
he said, you'd rather go over there and get shot at and go to
Pentagon? And I said, you got the picture. Anyway, he says
to me in a very condescending, sarcastic way. He says, well,
he says, you can't volunteer for that assignment. I wish you have two
thousand hours and see one thirty. I looked at him and I said,
I've got seven thousand. Is that enough? Anyway? That's how I got
the gunship assignment. So how much training or preparation did you have to do
before heading over to Vietnam. I went to Hurlbert Field in western Florida there
which is over or near Pensacola, as you probably know, that's where we
did the initial training and codify the patterns with the guns. And the model
had a one oh five holpser in the back and a forty millimeter cannon just
forwarded there at two gatling guns up front there were twenty millimeters. We practiced
shooting all those guns at Hurlbut Field. So when I went over to the
Ubon Thailand. I had only the experience of using those guns in the training
area. There was no any aircraft fire back in those days. Now,
one of the tricky parts of this, I guess you could say, is
that the guns were all on one side of the gunship. Correct, So
how did you accommodate for that? Yes, guns were all All the guns
were out on the left side of the aircraft, the one oh five,
the forty, and the Gatland guns. The Gatland guns, we very seldom
used those when we were interdicting trucks on the Ochimn trail. We were generally
too high for the Gatlands, so we used mainly the one oh five for
truck killing because, unlike the forty forty millimeter, hit had to be a
direct hit, but on the one oh a hit within one mill of the
target was considered to kill, and as you know, one mill as a
foot in a thous Anyway, we got a lot of aircraft fire in those
days, several hundred round every night. It was pretty lively out there.
How did you deal with that? Well, we had a guy that and
I that stuck out in the back end of the air believe it or not,
he we allured the ramp in the back and he hung out about halfway
up to his waist, and he was looking at the ground fire and if
it looked like a round was coming up where it might would hit us,
he'd call left or right break and that's how we eluded mostly in the aircraft
fire. It was kind of an unusual thing because we were up at eight
eight nine thousand feet and you can imagine him hanging out back, and you
know what the temperature would be in Those guys really earned their pay. I'll
tell you, as we've mentioned a couple of times in passing, Colonel,
you received a Distinguished Flying Cross. Tell me about your actions that led to
that recommendation. Well, I think most of us that had a tour in
the gun ship got an end of tour DFC on that. There's not a
particular engagement that that was connected to. No, but I do have a
real quick thing to tell you. It was. It was near Christmas in
nineteen seventy two and I had just crossed over the river into the zone where
we were shooting the trucks, and I heard one of our other gun ships
had just taken two hits in the left wing thirty seven millimeter hits. He
had already shot down number two engine and I called him and I said it,
where are you and give me an approximate location. I called GC out
side, have them vector me over to where you are. I'll escort you
back to the base. He said, I don't think that'll be necessary,
and I thought, well, he's busy and he's not thinking straight. Because
if you've got a problem and it looks like you might have to bail out
or go down, you're sure hell would like to have another gun ship over
your head to cover you. So I headed toward. I called GC eyes
side and I said, give me vector over to him, which they did.
I got with him about ten miles of him, and he exploded blue
two gunners out the back end of the airplane. Rest of the crew perished.
After we got back to ubon that night, I stayed over the wreckage
site and it was a big fire down there where the airplane crashed, and
the AMMO that was on board was cooking off from time to time. I
got a hold of the helicopter and vectored them into the air and they picked
the two guys up. They were blown out the back when we got back
to Ubon. Unfortunately, all the sensor operators were still in the booth when
that airplane exploded. So Greg I got all my crew together and I said,
I want to talk to you guys about something that I think you need
to be thinking about. If we are out there flying combat and we take
a hit from an anti aircraft fire in the cockpit, I said, you
know, that's probably gonna get all of us up there in the cockpit.
And I said, you guys might want to think about if we take a
hit in the airplane and you know that we've been hit, your job as
being an offensive member of the crew for shooting targets is over. It's survival
now. Like on a ship, I said, you know, the captain
says, okay, guys, abandoned ship. And I said, you guys
need to think about if we take a hit the cockpit and not going to
be anybody to say abandoned ship. So if we take a hit, you
get your ass up out of that booth, get your parachutes on, getting
the back of the airplane, and if you feel the thing's fixing to go,
get the hell out. And I don't know if they ever thought about
that or not, Greg, but I wanted to have them at least considering
that possibility, you know, which, of course was real at the time.
A conversation brought on by a very tragic event, but exactly also shows
your leadership in that situation, thinking of your crew before yourself. You mentioned,
sir, the anti air aircraft fired before. I'd like to talk about
that a little bit more, because I understand they had a strategy of trying
to trap you, kind of a ropodope situation, to bring you in and
target you. How did you detect that and how did you deal with that?
Very foolishly, we were trying to work a couple of trucks on the
ho Chi Minh trail and this one one any aircraft gun just kept popping around
at us. I had to break several times to avoid the rounds that were
coming up. As I said, okay, I said, censor operators,
see if you can get that gun. Well, he had shot enough.
We had an infrared system on there, and the barrel of the gun was
hot because he had been pumping so many Any aircraft run and the IR operator
says, oh, yeah, I got that guy. I said, okay,
let's go over there and shut him up. Then we'll come back over
here and work the rest of these targets. And very foolishly, Greg,
I thought, well, I didn't see anything wrong with that at a time.
Or when I went over there and flung into orbit around that gun,
about six or eight more any aircraft guns came up on us, and I
said, okay, guys, we're out of here. But that was a
hard lesson for me to learn. I only did that one time. You
also flew on the final day of American involvement in the war in nineteen seventy
three. What do you remember from that mission? That was a very strange
thing because I think the war actually ended at twelve noon, and I flew
combat in Cambodia that afternoon, And I always wondered, Greg, if we
had gotten shot down that afternoon, how would they have explained that. I
guess they would have probably backdated my mission, you know, But that thought
occurred to me the war over and here we are out here, and wouldn't
it be ironic if we got shot down on the last day after the war
had ended. Thankfully you did not, But what did you do after that?
What happened after the war was over. After I finished my tour there
in Thailand with the gun ship, believe it or not, my following assignment
came down and I was going to be granted to go to the Pentagon as
a staff officer again. And I had a very close, dear friend named
Frank Preston. He was in the SAM outfit there. Special Air Missions is
what SAM stands for, and he had already made some strategic moves to get
me transferred back to the Special Air Mission to outfit. And here the Air
Force came down in my assignment to Pentagon, and I called him, and
he called a general that he knew very well, and had my assignment changed
back up to this SAM outfit in Washington. You retired in nineteen eighty and
what did you do in private life after that? I flew corporate aviation for
another forty years. I flew a total greg of sixty years. I was
very fortunate to be able to do that. Not many guys that are able
to do that, and I was very grateful for the fact that I was
able to fly for sixty years. And you've received what's known as the Wright
Brothers Award for fifty years of flying with no accidents. Yeah, yeah,
a lot of names on that list. Lastly, Sir, after such a
distinguished career, we've talked about so many different things. What are you most
proud of from your service to our country? I don't know that I have
a most proud moment. I enjoyed my twenty years. I had a promotion
that I think maybe I would have received. I have a squadron commander my
last two years in the SAM outfit. It was called the first Military Earlier
Squadron, and those are probably the two most rewarding years of my twenty I
always wanted to be a squadron commander and it was a pretty big outfit and
I got to hole that position for two years. And where was that Ed
andrews Yea in the eighty nine waiting Well, Colonel, it's been a real
pleasure speaking with you today. It's been fascinating to hear about all the different
dimensions of your twenty years of service to our country and of course, as
you mentioned, sixty years of flying. So it's been again our honor to
speak with you and thank you for your time and most of all for your
service. Thank you very much, Greg, it's been a pleasure Thank you,
Sir. Retired to US Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Frank Blunt serve
two tours in Vietnam, pilot at a C one thirty as well as a
SE one thirty gun ship late in the war. Recipient of the Distinguished Flying
Cross. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi. This is
Greg Corrumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the
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