From: skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu To: skunk-works-digest@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V3 #79 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Saturday, 17 July 1993 Volume 03 : Number 079 In this issue: Ben Bowles, Blackbird Pilot new book arrived! See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: dwbick@mnsmc1.mnsmc.edu Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1993 09:17:10 CST Subject: Ben Bowles, Blackbird Pilot The following article on Ben Bowles, Blackbird pilot, appeared in the Minneapolis Tribune Feb 6, 1992. I hope it is of interest to the list: When Ben Bowles was a little boy growing up near Roanoke, Va. in the 1930s, his father would sometimes hoist him aboard the family motorcycle, seating him on the gas tank, and tool around with Ben hanging on to the handlebars. It gave Ben a longing for speed, or something harder to name. Thirty years later, Bowles often found himself sitting in the front end of an SR-71 "Blackbird", the spy aircraft that is more rocketship than airplane, doing 2000 miles per hour, looking down from the edges of space at the blue green earth and up at starlit blackness, with no sound but the hiss of the ventilator in his spacesuit. "Sometimes I'd reach down and shut off the ventilator so it would be completely quiet, so I could just look and take it all in", he said. Bowles, 60, just retired as chief pilot for Dayton Hudson Corp. One day recently, he sat in the cockpit of one of the corporate jets he has flown for the past 15 years. His feet restlessly worked the rudder pedals back and forth as he surveyed the complex instrument panel. "I'm going to miss all this", he said. Bowles enlisted in the Air Force in 1951 with no thought of flying jets. He was training to be a mechanic when the Air Force, suddenly needing pilots because of the Korean War, ended its policy of seeking pilots only among college graduates and asked for enlisted volunteers. Bowles signed up and moved quickly up the ladder after flight training. He was flying the Air Force's hot bomber in the early 1960's, the B-58, when he was called into an office and asked by a Colonel if he wanted a secret assignment that would mean a transfer to California's ledgendary Edwards Air Force Base (since made famous in the book and movie "The Right Stuff"). The colonel had one more question: "Do you have and aversion to being called a spy?" Bowles did not. Moving to Edwards was like stepping through a looking glass, from a stuffy world where he flew twice a month and practiced for a war everyone hoped would never come to flying an unbelievable airplane almost every day. (A Blackbird can cover the distance between Minneapolis and Duluth in three minutes, 48 seconds.) "I'd walk out on the flight line with a grin on my face. The sun was shining and I was going flying," he said. And there was the sense of a mission. When the SR-71 was ready, it would go to work photographing other nations military secrets. It was constantly exciting. On almost every early flight, he said, he and other pilots experienced violent bouts of engine trouble. While cruising at mach 3 or more one of the blackbirds two engines would abruptly lose power. The effect was something like driving a car at top speed and having both wheels on one side suddenly lock up. "It sounded like a shotgun going off", Bowles said. The other engine, still producing full power out on the other wing, would take charge and shove the blackbird around. "Your helmet would hit the side of the canopyand there was a heavy aeordynamic rumbling. You had to remember which side of the canopy your head had hit so you'd know which engine had the problem. Then you had to go through some gymnastics to get the engine restarted." On one occasion, both engines shut down, but he got them restarted -- after gliding down from 80,000 feet to 30,000 feet. On another occasion one engine blew up and caught fire. His reactions, recorded on tape, were later used as "how-to" demonstrations for new blackbird pilots. "He was a mentor to us new guys," said Tom Pugh, who flew Blackbirds out of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa with Bowles in the late 1960's. If a pilot had a question about the airplane and the answer was'nt in the book, "Ben was at the top of the list." Frequently they flew over North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese brought down American bombers and fighters with anti-aircraft missles, but blackbirds, cruising at an altitude that is still secret, but which informed sources estimate at 90,000 feet, never were hit. By 1972 Bowles was 41 and a lieutenant colonel. He was looking at a desk job if he stayed in the Air Force, so he did'nt. Domestic Airlines were'nt hiring anybody that age. He found various piloting jobs including two years with Japan Air Lines before going to Dayton Hudson. Bowles smiled at the memory of is interview with Kenneth Dayton, since retired as chairman of Dayton Hudson Corp. " He said he understood I'd flown fighters and he wondered if I could fly smoothly. I said, "You have to fly smoothly in recon work" -- and you do. He bought it, I guess. Dayton said, "Ben was the brightest, sharpest and coolest of all the people I interviewed... and ideal pilot, ideal chief pilot, took great care of his passengers, but there was never any doubt that the plane came first... Never got us out of any tight spots because he never got us into any". To Bowles, being a pilot and a high-flying executive are similar. "We all go after our excitement in different ways. The corporate chairman is hanging it out there, too. To me, the pilot pilot is looking for a challenging machine. The reward is being in control of that machine." Now that he's retired, Bowles' life isn't exactly over. He can still work as a professional pilot, but first he's going to enjoy himself, take a trip or two, and spend time with his wife Marcia, and their five children. Marcia Bowles said she knows Ben not as a macho Blackbird flyer, but as a gentle man who likes to draw, design stained glass windows and photograph wildflowers. Retirement means change, "With as may unknowns as there are ... we're open to whatever comes," she said. Maybe he'll build an airplane from a kit, one that he thinks would take three hours to fly from Minneapolis to Duluth. So maybe the longing he aquired on his father's motorcycle was'nt speed, but that something that is harder to name. "Flying airplanes is easy. Retiring is difficult." awards: Air Medal Distinguished Flying Cross first person to fly 900 hours in the Blackbird ============================================================================== Daniel W. Bick N0HAM St. Mary's College of Minnesota "Who needs the supercollider -- Systems Programmer we've already got Amtrak!" dwbick@mnsmc1.mnsmc.edu -or- dbick@marys.mnsmc.edu (NeXTmail) ------------------------------ From: albert.dobyns@mwbbs.com (Albert Dobyns) Date: Fri, 16 Jul 93 01:42:00 -0500 Subject: new book arrived! Just wanted to let all of you Blackbird fans out there that Paul F Crickmore's new book just arrived. It's called Lockheed SR-71 The Secret Missions Revealed. I've just started reading it! - ---- MidWest BBS - 708-513-1034 -ILINK Charter Member, UsMail Regional Hub, Usenet ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V3 #79 ******************************** To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "listserv@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-skunk-works": subscribe skunk-works-digest local-skunk-works@your.domain.net To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address, with the command: unsubscribe skunk-works-digest in the body. Administrative requests, problems, and other non-list mail can be sent to either "skunk-works-digest-owner@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu" or, if you don't like to type a lot, "prm@ecn.purdue.edu". 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