I was wondering if anyone knew the history of this facility. Looks like it used to be an Air Force base...is now L3 Communications.

http://www.l-3com.com/is/greenville/index.html

I was making sales calls in that area...made me curious!

[This message has been edited by CATAGBQ04 (edited 2/5/2008 3:59p).]

Back in the day when I was flying scheduled operations with the old Metro Airlines (now part of the American Eagle system) I flew in and out of Majors everyday. E-Systems had a contract (secret) to update military aircraft with the latest avionics at the airport and had several buildings on the airport.
I think it was a WWII training base that was turned over to the city of Greenville under the old Airport Development Act of 1947 where a lot of the WWII training bases were deeded over to the city (Waco, Temple, San Marcos, are other examples).
Down the road from there at Terrell Tx they had a glider base and an RAF training facility.

[This message has been edited by airplane driver (edited 2/5/2008 4:49p).]

airplane driver has the story, it was a WW2 training base and then turned over to Greenville and contractors have leased it to perform depot maintenace and upgrades for civil and military aircraft.

[This message has been edited by BQ78 (edited 2/5/2008 4:52p).]

In the mid-1950s Majors Field at Greenville was the location of a contract maintenance facility that did periodic repair and maintenance on KC-97 tanker aircraft. The work consisted of an overhaul of all systems and took about three months to complete.

In January 1957 my crew flew an aircraft to Greenville and picked up one in exchange. At the time there were approximately 800 KC-97s in the SAC fleet so I presume there were a number of maintenance depots like the one at Greenville scattered about the country.

I do not know what transpired at Greenville after that one trip in. I suspect that the KC-97 work continued into the early 60s then declined as the 97s were phased out. It is possible that the field was converted to service another type of aircraft.

Awesome...thanks for the info!

My dad grew up partly in Greenville...he told me about B-36's flying overhead in formation when he was a kid, were they based out of that airport?

The runway is 747 approved...something like 9,000 feet long.

Funny you mention the RAF in Terrell, I have a customer that is right next door to that museum.

Could you tell me more about the RAF training base...Royal Air Force right? Why in Terrell of all places?

Many cities lobbied the government for the lucatrive contracts that military training bases offered. It is my guess that the Royal Air Force(RAF) asked the U.S. to set up training bases for their pilot-trainees due to the better weather here than in England. I am sure there was more than one and was dependant on they type of aircraft they would eventually fly (single vs multi-engine aircraft).

[This message has been edited by airplane driver (edited 2/5/2008 7:10p).]

The B-36's were probably out of Carswell. I'm sure they were not based in Greenville. A single B-36 could rattle the windows of your house. And since they didn't fly all that fast, the "window rattling" seemed to last forever. As a youngster in the 50's, my dad was stationed at Manzano AB, in Albuquerque, NM. We lived in Wherry Housing, not far from the Kirtland AFB runway. The windows in our Wherry School got rattled quite often. B-36's were not stationed at Kirtland, but were frequent visitors.

Fossil: did you ever fly out of the old Lowery AFB in Denver? I lived 4 blocks from there when it was active and before they shut down flight ops there.

ad and NA ... I never flew into Lowery. During my time Lowery was an Air Force training center for a multitude of specialties. Some flilght training was conducted there in WWII but I don't know the details.

B-36s were first stationed at Carswell AFB, Ft Worth since Carswell was just out the front door from the Consolidated-Vultee factory. As they continued to roll off the assembly line the big birds were parcelled out 15 per receiving base: Biggs AFB, El Paso; Ramey AFB, Puerto Rico; Loring AFB, Maine; Fairchild AFB, Washington; March AFB, California; and McDill AFB, Florida.

The first B-36 came on line in 1947 and all were phased out by the end of 1958. It was a fantastic flying machine.

I was exceedingly far off in my report on the number of B-36s about the world. The number of primary bases was correct at seven, but the total number of the planes built was 384. I suppose that would equate to 50 assigned to a wing ... but during those days we did a lot of satellite basing in Morocco, Spain, England, Canada and Alaska. Since they had a range of 6,000 miles and a flight duration of up to 36 hours, I suppose a considerable number of the fleet were airborne at any time. The B-36 was a horse.

The B-36 was coming on line in the late 40s and the B-47 just a couple of years later. The SAC buildup in the early 50s was hard to realize even as it was taking place ... in addition to the B-36s, SAC added 2,042 medium range B-47s of various models, and more than 800 KC-97s. SAC had 37 bases worldwide with a ramp full of aircraft.

In the late 50s and early 60s SAC began phasing out the B-36s, B-47s and KC-97s and replacing them with B-52s and KC-135s. For about 10 years we had a mixed force of various makes and models. The total number of B-52s delivered were 744 and of KC-135s 750. During the extended life of the B-52s and KC-135s various models were phased out and replaced with later versions. From 1964 to 1974 approximately one-half of the B-52 and KC-135 fleets were in Southeast Asia.

Thanks fossil. Great posts.

Fossil - one of my favorite movies is "Stragetic Air Command" with Jimmy Stewart. Kind of hokie plot but great flying scenes. Did you enjoy it? Being on the inside it may have been hard to watch.

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Funny you mention the RAF in Terrell, I have a customer that is right next door to that museum.

Could you tell me more about the RAF training base...Royal Air Force right? Why in Terrell of all places?

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When our son (A&M '09) was in high school, he played in a soccer tournament in the Terrel area. At least one of the games was at an athletic complex that was on one of the old airfields. My memory is fuzzy, but I think it was this area, just south of Forney

Google Map

There is a book about it. If I recall correctly, basically the training got farmed out because England was a lousy place to fly. Bad weather, small area to practice, crowded skies, and Germans in the air.

The local chamber of commerce types knew there would be training contracts let, so they lobbied and got one.

Several RAF cadets were killed in training and buried in Texas. War is sad, but can you imagine sending your 18 year old kid to a safe place, only to lose them, and have them buried some place you've never heard of, some place you could never afford to visit?

If I can find the book, I'll try to add a little more.

airplane driver ... That movie may have seemed to be a little "hokie" but that is the way we were in the early days of SAC.

By 1950 General LeMay was on a roll putting his command together. Apparently Congress had given him the green light to do whatever he thought necessary to meet the perceived Soviet challenge. Whatever LeMay asked for he got, whether it was new bases, new aircraft, first choice of grads out of flying schools, or any of the niceties for his crewmembers such as uniforms, living quarters, clubs, younameit.

By the time I came on board in late 1956, the culture was established within SAC that only the best effort was acceptable to go along with the best equipment that the country could provide. We lived proud and well, but that came at a price. The mission was paramount.

If low ceilings and vis threatened an "on time takeoff" we joked about the wing commander getting out his "ceiling jack." If tankers were scheduled to meet a flight of B-47s over the Atlantic and for some reason cancelled out, the tankers flew the refueling mission anyway meeting all control times and dropping refueling booms at the refueling control point and dumping the scheduled amount of JP-4. KC-97s routinely operated 30,000 pounds above designed gross weight of the Boeing airframe.

The reason LeMay needed 800 KC-97s was simply to be auxillary fuel tanks for the B-47s. LeMay wanted a jet bomber and the B-47 was only medium range. A B-47 required three topoff refuelings to get from the states to Europe ... to Russia was a one-way trip. But that was the way it was. The advent of the B-52 and KC-135 gave us a bit of cushion in operations.

The glory days of SAC were over in the early 1960s. Money got tighter, ground and airborne alert became more burdensome and less exciting, and of course Vietnam came along.

But in those early days, we would come in from a mission that tested the limits of airframe and human endurance and our own version of June Allyson would meet us at the door, smiling beautifully as she had been encouraged and all would be contentment and serene. And a few hours later we may be launched on a no-notice deployment or three or four day operational test mission to test our reflexes. What a life ... but we were good at what we did with what we had to work with.

Fossil I got sent to Burns Flat, Oklahoma last summer for a Pursuit Driving course. Oklahoma Highway Patrol had taken over part of the facility. The area where we did our slow speed stuff was the "alert" staging area for bombers. We stayed and had classes in the alert bunker/barracks. I found it quite nostalgic when I walked into the briefing room and the original theater seats with crew positions still painted on them.

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the tankers flew the refueling mission anyway meeting all control times and dropping refueling booms at the refueling control point and dumping the scheduled amount of JP-4.

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So they just dumped it into the air? Wow...hate to find JP-4 raining down on me!

Canyon...here is the airport:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=terrell+airport&sll=21.616579,-67.5&sspn=70.340383,118.476562&ie=UTF8&ll=32.722021,-96.258259&spn=0.065855,0.1157&z=13&iwloc=addr&om=0

One of my customers is on Silent Wings blvd.

Again...thanks for the info guys, does anyone know where a B-36 is on static display?



[This message has been edited by CATAGBQ04 (edited 2/6/2008 9:35a).]

Fossil - I meant the plot with June Allyson being stressed seemed over played but in retrospect I bet it wasn't. I love the movie and watch it about every six mos or so. BTW. ad jr ('06) is in the Air Force at Minot and loving the Air Force life if not the weather.

SAC life was tough on wives, and that was true throughout the command's existance. In those early days a second lieutenant's pay was a bit over $400 a month, there was no on-base housing, the guys were on temporary duty elsewhere half the time, and the wives had to manage the household and kids the best way she could. Wives were also expected to play June Allyson roles at teas and luncheons and formal occasions at the Officer's Club on top of taking care of the home. Inflight emergencies were commonplace and major accidents not uncommon ... just enough to keep he anxiety level up. The wives were an integral part of the life.

I admit that I was caught up in the atmosphere of the times. The name of the game was being selected for the most difficult missions and keeping a performance record of every sortie unblemmished by any deviation from what was planned and briefed. Looking back on those days, I think the wives who stuck it out were as brainwashed as we were.

When on alert, wives had seven days where they had to take care of everything by themselves. My wife would pack supper every night and come visit me at the alert facility. She'd get great advice (but no help) on how to fix problems at home and get tasked to help me with things because I could not leave the base. Then after seven days she had to put up with my crap as I lounged around the house for four days on crew rest.

Then it was 1.5 weeks of mission plan, fly, mission plan, fly, weekend off, mission plan, fly and then crew rest to go back on alert for another week... lather, rinse, repeat...

Found a B-36! Actually has some history here in the DFW area...

http://www.cowtown.net/proweb/last_one.htm

It is hard now, and equally hard back in the day, to appreciate just how big the B-36 was. The only way was to park it beside something else that was BIG and note just how much BIGGER the B-36 was.



The photo above compares a B-36 to a B-29 from WWII. The KC-97 was basically the same airframe as the B-29, just a fattened cargo version. The wings, empenage, wings, lower section of the fuselage and the four Pratt & Whitney R-4360 engines were the same. The KC-97 used the same brakes as the B-36 to help out in stopping distance because of the heavier weight the KC took off at.

The B-36 had six R-4360s capable of churning out 3800hp each, combined with two pair of J47 jet engines for a boost on takeoff.

The P&W R-4360 was the largest reciprocating radial engine ever made. Each engine had 28 cylinders and 56 sparkplugs. It was typical that an engine would burn through 50-100 gallons of oil in a ten hour flight.

But those engines, whether on the B-29, KC-97 or B-36 had a characteristic drone that was recognizable immediately to anyone in the vicinity who had ever been around them. That was the sound that the crowd missed when the final flyby at Ft Worth was cancelled.

(I was at home at College Station in about 1985 and heard that sound. The wife and I heard it at the same time and ran out the door in hopes of seeing one of the old birds. Turns out it was a "Pregnant Guppy", a C-97 modified by NASA with a hugely enlarged fuselage to ferry rocket components to Cape Canaveral ... it had the same R-4360s. One never forgets something like that.)

CATAGBQ04-

That's the Terrell airport. We were at Forney, the athletic fields and high school were built on top of one of the auxiliary fields there.

Terrell did a ton of glider training, and the Silent Wings Museum was originally there. For some reason it was not supported, and it was moved to the west side of the Lubbock airport.

Silent Wings Museum

Museum Location

There's a DC-3 parked out in front (west) of it now.

fossil - this last July I took my son and age 4 and 5 grandaughters to a pretty good sized airshow at Tinker AFB. Lo and behold, there was a SUPER Pregnant Guppy on static display. I had thought those were long gone to the boneyard, but I was wrong. I live near Tinker, and wish I had seen that sucker land or takeoff, but I missed it.


FWIW - SAC (95th Strategic Wing) had the last AF C-97 (not KC) at Goose Bay in the 70's. I got assigned there as a Lt Weather Officer right after it went to the D-M boneyard, but I got to know several of the pilots that had flown it. It was used for a weekly milk run from Goose to Pease AFB and back for cargo and PAX.

I work with a lady whose dad was a KC-97 flight engineer. As a young girl, her family spent two years at Harmon when her dad was stationed there.

Majors was completed in 1942 and served as a single engine fighter training base. There were smaller satellite fields at Caddo Millls, Cash and South Sulphur.

My grandmother (who has lived all of her 83 years within a few miles of South Sulphur/Webb Hill) says that there were RAF pilots training there.

It was also the training base for the Mexican 201st fighter wing that saw combat in the Pacific flying P-47s.

Today, it is not unusual to see all kinds of aircraft, including Air Force One, flying over Greenville, going to the L3 (most people still call it "E-Systems" facility there.

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My memory is fuzzy, but I think it was this area, just south of Forney

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There was an antique store in Forney about five years ago with a Mig 15 or Mig 17 parked out front. I think they said they got it from Poland. Is that still out there?

Yup...still there!