I flew tow several times and you never felt safe as those
characters were using real bullets. Just once someone hit a tow ship.
Shooting from different angles at the target taught us how far ahead
of the target you had to be to aim in order to hit it. We shot 100
rounds each and one time I had 51 hits! The tow ship had to fly low
over the field and release the target before landing. We never liked
to fly the tow ship as it was so monotonous flying back and forth for
hours.
We started to fly more formation flights of two or three planes and
another plane would try to "attack" us from out of the sun or from
the clouds like an enemy would. This taught us to keep our heads
turning all the time to keep track of the sky all the way around us.
We would take evasive action to try to keep the enemy ship from
getting behind us. We also did a lot of formation flying close to the
ground which trained you to stay close together in formation. In the
tomato and vegetable farms in the Sacramento valley the pickers would
be out in the fields with crates stacked about six feet tall and we
would fly down so low that we blew the empty crates over. I imagine
we were cussed a lot! A couple of times someone would come back and
land with telephone wire or fencing caught on the underside of the
plane. I loved to do acrobatics and when I was up alone, I would do
rolls and snaprolls and all the fun stuff.
We were on duty two days and had the next one off so we had plenty of
free time and spent a lot of it in San Francisco.
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