It's a good life
As a retired P-3 PPMC, I still say the best part of P-3s was the navigation. I joined my first squadron in December and five weeks later I was navigating my P-3A from NAS Whidbey to MCAS Iwakuni, Japan. We had only one NFO per crew, so the NFO was both Nav and Tacco. I LOVED long range navigation, probably because it was so challenging. None of the nav gear worked except the sextant, the drift meter, and somethimes the APN-153 Doppler/Nav. From one side of the Pacific to the other using just the sextant and DR Nav and hitting the ADIZ right on the money. That was a real hoot. By the time I retired in the P-3B TACNAVMOD, nav had become basically watching the automatic systems do it all by themselves and logging a position every 30 minutes from Omega, XN, and DA plots.
Being TACCO could also be fun but it was often a 3 hr preflight for an eleven hour mission at 20,000 feet at night dropping 32 sonobouys in a passive pattern and waiting for Ivan to run into one of them before you broke your neck with the "nods" so there was something to do. There were zero overland missions like today's guys do. When we were tracking someone it was great fun, right down to passive (simulated) attacks on Russian subs who never knew we were there.
The traveling is great and we went places and did things that sand crabs can only dream (or lie) about. And we got to take our own plane. Hawaii, Guam, Midway, Okinawa, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam (lots of Vietnam), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, the Azores, the Canaries... the list goes on and on and every one is a fond memory (except the Canaries -- got food poisoning from a beach pizza -- Europeans do not refrigerate their cold cuts -- BEWARE).
Mt tacair flights in training (T-1A Seastar) were fun but I didn't that much like being strapped in wearing all that jet gear crap for several hours at a time listening to the other guy breath over the open mic. My first choise was VAH -- heavy attack (A-3s or A-5s). Got my second choice -- Nav School, and out of that VP. Was the best break I ever had.
Hope this helps.
As a retired P-3 PPMC, I still say the best part of P-3s was the navigation. I joined my first squadron in December and five weeks later I was navigating my P-3A from NAS Whidbey to MCAS Iwakuni, Japan. We had only one NFO per crew, so the NFO was both Nav and Tacco. I LOVED long range navigation, probably because it was so challenging. None of the nav gear worked except the sextant, the drift meter, and somethimes the APN-153 Doppler/Nav. From one side of the Pacific to the other using just the sextant and DR Nav and hitting the ADIZ right on the money. That was a real hoot. By the time I retired in the P-3B TACNAVMOD, nav had become basically watching the automatic systems do it all by themselves and logging a position every 30 minutes from Omega, XN, and DA plots.
Being TACCO could also be fun but it was often a 3 hr preflight for an eleven hour mission at 20,000 feet at night dropping 32 sonobouys in a passive pattern and waiting for Ivan to run into one of them before you broke your neck with the "nods" so there was something to do. There were zero overland missions like today's guys do. When we were tracking someone it was great fun, right down to passive (simulated) attacks on Russian subs who never knew we were there.
The traveling is great and we went places and did things that sand crabs can only dream (or lie) about. And we got to take our own plane. Hawaii, Guam, Midway, Okinawa, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam (lots of Vietnam), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, the Azores, the Canaries... the list goes on and on and every one is a fond memory (except the Canaries -- got food poisoning from a beach pizza -- Europeans do not refrigerate their cold cuts -- BEWARE).
Mt tacair flights in training (T-1A Seastar) were fun but I didn't that much like being strapped in wearing all that jet gear crap for several hours at a time listening to the other guy breath over the open mic. My first choise was VAH -- heavy attack (A-3s or A-5s). Got my second choice -- Nav School, and out of that VP. Was the best break I ever had.
Hope this helps.
