Captain Warlock
written by Paul Warnock
This story takes place in Taiwan. The year is 1968, and this old
Rockingham boy is twenty-six years old. This is right in the
middle of the Viet Nam War. This is the beginning of my
fourth and final year in the United States Air Force. I had
been married a little more than a year. War casualties are
mounting at the two hundred per week pace; they will exceed
fifty-eight thousand by the time the war is over. The war is
becoming more and more unpopular on the home front as
antiwar demonstrations are threatening to tear our Country
apart. That’s part of the price you have to pay for a democracy
with all the freedoms we enjoy. They even had antiwar
organizations in the North back during the US Civil War. They
were referred to as the “Copperheads” because they used the
figure cut from a copper penny attached to their lapels. But
this story is not about antiwar groups, or the disheartening
effect they had on the troops fighting the war. This story is
about overconfidence.
We were at the Ching Chuan Kang (CCK) Air Base near Tai
Chung, Taiwan. We were midway down the west side of the
island facing the Straits of Taiwan, only ninety miles from
Mainland China. We had about fifty members in our weather
detachment, and we provided twenty-four hour weather
forecasting service for an entire wing of C-130 cargo planes
and a squadron of C-135 tanker planes. We were in direct
support of the War. We had a Chinese lady as our secretary in
our unit named “Mrs. Rose Chen”. Note that when you see a
Chinese name, the family name comes first, the opposite of
our culture. Chen was her family name, Rose was her
“English” name. She had a Chinese name, but I do not
remember it. She and her family had come over from the
Mainland in 1948 when the Communists forced Chiang Kai-
Shek out of power and they had to flee to Taiwan. She was
married to a Chinese (Taiwanese) Army Officer. She could
speak English fairly well except she had problems with my last
name. Our unit commander was Major Tucker. I was the
senior Captain, and that made me second in command of the
unit, but there was little attached to that since I only had one
or two days seniority over the guys right behind me. Anyhow,
Mrs. Chen called me Captain Warlock. I tried to explain to her
that it was “War”’ and then “nock” not “War” and then “lock”.
I even explained to her the negative connotation of word
warlock. Then I tried to explain to her the difference in
English between the sound of an “N” and the sound of an “L”.
I said: “Now you try it: ‘War-nock.’ ” Then she replied: “That’s
what I said: ‘War-lock.’ ” She evidently was completely unable
to distinguish the sound of an “N” from the sound of an “L”. I
gave up after a couple of days, and ask her to just call me
“Paul.” I assume the others in the detachment enjoyed this
humor, but they never mentioned it to me.
We had three chaplains on the base, plus we had a nice Chapel
that would hold about three hundred people. We had over
seven thousand American Airmen on the base, which meant
we could accommodate a little more than 4% of the base for
one service. We had a Baptist, a Catholic and a Presbyterian
chaplain. The Catholic chaplain was in our BOQ (housing
complex); so I knew him better than the rest especially since
my roommate was also Catholic. Both he and my roommate
were not exactly the world’s best chess players as neither one
of them ever came close to beating me in that game. Back in
Rockingham and Gastonia, we brothers used to play chess a lot
when we were otherwise bored during summer vacation; my
oldest brother was really good; he could beat me three out of
five games. This base was an isolated tour, which means you
couldn’t bring you wife and family, as there were no facilities
for them.
There’s nothing wrong with being aggressive in your thinking
if you have thought about everything using some type of risk
management analysis. That is, you need to look at what you
might gain as compared with what you may loose (that is, the
positives against the negatives) and assign probabilities to
each. For example a plumber works for another man. He has
a good income, but he feels his boss (the owner of the
business) keeps too much for himself. His wife is sickly so he
can’t afford to be without work for very long. The man
considers going into business for himself because he is a very
good plumber. When he does his risk analysis, he realizes he
may not be a good business manager, which might lead him to
look for a partner who has good business skills and maybe not-
so-good plumbing skills. Overconfidence occurs when you try
to do more than you are capable of doing just because you are
very good at what you do. This person uses wishful thinking as
a substitute for risk management.
On the way to Taiwan, we flew out of McCord Air Base near
Seattle. It was a twelve-hour flight to Tokyo and an additional
four hours to Taipei. At the end of that ordeal, they put us on
Chinese (Taiwanese) buses for the hundred-mile trip to our
base. It was almost impossible to sleep on those flights, so
about all we had to do was to talk with each other. I was just
sitting there when this other Airman came up to me and said:
“Hello, I’m Bob Taggie.” I noticed the gold-colored oak leaf
insignia on his collar, and replied: “Good evening, Sir” and
introduced myself. We started talking. I told him about my
background in North Carolina, married, no children yet, and
that I was a meteorologist. He then told me his situation, from
Pennsylvania, married, two children, and that he was a C-130
navigator. I remember that he told me that he had just spent
the last several weeks with his family, and then he showed me
pictures of them. The second of his children had just started
school. They had one boy and one girl, a perfect All-American
family.
When an airplane seriously damages its landing gear usually
due to a rough landing, they have to send it back to the States
to be refitted by factory technicians. There was such a C-130
that needed to go back to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma
City for just such a refitting. They would lock the wheels in
the down position for the entire flight. That would make for a
bumpy and slow ride, but for the crew it was a free trip back to
the States to see their families. This would not count as leave
(vacation), and they were required to stay until the plane had
been repaired because then they would need to fly the airplane
back to Taiwan. Major Taggie was the navigator of the crew
that had been selected for this flight to Oklahoma. The
aircraft commander and pilot for that crew, Colonel Vance
(name changed - I don’t remember his actual name), was one
of the C-130 squadron commanders (three to four squadrons
comprise a wing). As a squadron commander, he was a senior
person of high rank, in this case a full Colonel. Colonel
Vance had over 15,000 flying hours; so he was extremely
experienced and very good at what he did - flying airplanes.
We only had five full Colonels on the entire base and no
Generals.
The mission for the Vance crew that day was to make a
delivery to the front lines in Viet Nam. The cargo was
classified, but we can assume it was ammunition, food and
other supplies. The C-130 aircraft could descend very sharply,
deliver their cargo out their back ramp at several feet off the
ground, and then climb to altitude rapidly to avoid enemy fire.
In doing this, they never touched the ground. It was over a
thousand-mile trip one-way; so these missions could easily
take a total of six to eight hours. This mission was
complicated by the fact that the Vance crew had a second crew
in training on this flight. A C-130 crew is normally six, but
there were now twelve men on board. To complete that
mission the crew had to bring the airplane back to the original
base. Should they need to stop at an alternate base, they had
to stay with their airplane until they could fly it back to our
base (CCK). There was an Air Force regulation that required a
crew to have eight hours of sleep (if their flight was
interrupted) before they could continue if the original flight
had exceeded a certain time limit, and their flight had. The
bottom line of this was the Vance crew had to return this plane
to CCK that evening if they still wanted to take the crippled
plane to Oklahoma the next day; otherwise, an alternate crew
would fly the crippled airplane stateside.
Do you remember in the movie “Mary Poppins” where she
came into town as the wind shifted, and when the wind shifted
again, it was time for her to leave? When we had
northwesterly winds at CCK, we had a tendency to get massive
fog. We were only five miles from the coastline where there
was a seven hundred foot cliff straight down to the beach.
Normally (95% of the time) we had southerly winds and very
nice, clear flying weather. At this particular time we were
experiencing these northwesterly winds, and our base could be
fogged-in with zero visibility for many hours. That means
aircraft could neither land nor take off until the visibility
improved. An airborne crew could be required to land at an
alternate base such as Taipei or Tainan, both only twenty
minutes away but in opposite directions. These bases were not
experiencing our fog problem. We had had this fog for the
past two days, and we had forecast it to last at least several
more days. However, during this fog, the visibility could
improve for an hour or so, and then the fog would return again
with zero visibility. That meant a crew could wait a while (in a
circular holding pattern), and they might be able to land.
There was no way to forecast the good periods except they
seem to always happen during the heat of the day, never at
night. Colonel Vance came into our weather station the day
before his mission, and we apprised him of the situation. He
mentioned they absolutely needed to return to CCK as opposed
to an alternate. If they had to land at an alternate, they would
not be able to fly the cripple back to the States the following
day. He said that when he completed his mission he would
land at a coastal base in Viet Nam and refuel so they could
circle CCK for as long as it took. That sounded like good
reasoning.
On the day of the mission, they were able to take off as
scheduled. Everything went smoothly until they arrived back
at CCK about 2200 (10 PM) that night. I was working the
second shift that night from 4 PM until midnight. Colonel
Vance called me on the radio and we went over the situation
thoroughly. We were fogged completely with zero visibility,
and that was exactly what we had forecasted for him as his
flight left that morning. It was unlikely that there would be a
break in the fog until at least mid-morning the next day. He
mentioned that he was circling at one thousand feet, and that
he could look straight down and see the base, but when he
attempted an approach he couldn’t see anything and had to
pull up. He continued to call me about every thirty minutes
until my shift ended. I briefed my replacement about Colonel
Vance who was still airborne at that time.
Now as a full Colonel and as a senior pilot with over 15,000
flying hours, there was a loophole in the safety regulations
that allowed Colonel Vance to make an instrument approach
in zero visibility. He would attempt his approach, and if he did
not have clear visibility at one hundred feet, he was required
to pull up and go around again. He could attempt this as many
times as he desired. And he had been doing that since 10 PM.
Finally at 0200 (2 AM) the next morning while making one of
these zero visibility approaches, he thought he saw the runway
and adjusted his flight path to be able to land. He lost that
visibility very quickly, but he continued anyhow using only his
judgment and memory for where he saw the runway (this
involved only a few seconds). His left wing hit a tree and
flipped him. There was a loud explosion, which I heard from
my BOQ. I dressed and went back to the weather station. My
fears where realized. We had just added twelve more
casualties to the Viet Nam War cost since they had been on a
combat mission.
There was a morose atmosphere around the base for at least a
month. They had nice memorial services for the deceased at
the base Chapel. The bodies were identified using dental
records. I still think of Major Taggie even today and the
conversations we had going over to Taiwan just four or five
months before this accident. His children would be in their
mid-forties by now. There was an accident investigation Board
(of course). Major Tucker and his boss from Guam attended to
represent our weather unit. Our weather-related radio
conversations had been recorded and were used at the
investigation. The verdict: “Pilot Error.”
written by Paul Warnock
This story takes place in Taiwan. The year is 1968, and this old
Rockingham boy is twenty-six years old. This is right in the
middle of the Viet Nam War. This is the beginning of my
fourth and final year in the United States Air Force. I had
been married a little more than a year. War casualties are
mounting at the two hundred per week pace; they will exceed
fifty-eight thousand by the time the war is over. The war is
becoming more and more unpopular on the home front as
antiwar demonstrations are threatening to tear our Country
apart. That’s part of the price you have to pay for a democracy
with all the freedoms we enjoy. They even had antiwar
organizations in the North back during the US Civil War. They
were referred to as the “Copperheads” because they used the
figure cut from a copper penny attached to their lapels. But
this story is not about antiwar groups, or the disheartening
effect they had on the troops fighting the war. This story is
about overconfidence.
We were at the Ching Chuan Kang (CCK) Air Base near Tai
Chung, Taiwan. We were midway down the west side of the
island facing the Straits of Taiwan, only ninety miles from
Mainland China. We had about fifty members in our weather
detachment, and we provided twenty-four hour weather
forecasting service for an entire wing of C-130 cargo planes
and a squadron of C-135 tanker planes. We were in direct
support of the War. We had a Chinese lady as our secretary in
our unit named “Mrs. Rose Chen”. Note that when you see a
Chinese name, the family name comes first, the opposite of
our culture. Chen was her family name, Rose was her
“English” name. She had a Chinese name, but I do not
remember it. She and her family had come over from the
Mainland in 1948 when the Communists forced Chiang Kai-
Shek out of power and they had to flee to Taiwan. She was
married to a Chinese (Taiwanese) Army Officer. She could
speak English fairly well except she had problems with my last
name. Our unit commander was Major Tucker. I was the
senior Captain, and that made me second in command of the
unit, but there was little attached to that since I only had one
or two days seniority over the guys right behind me. Anyhow,
Mrs. Chen called me Captain Warlock. I tried to explain to her
that it was “War”’ and then “nock” not “War” and then “lock”.
I even explained to her the negative connotation of word
warlock. Then I tried to explain to her the difference in
English between the sound of an “N” and the sound of an “L”.
I said: “Now you try it: ‘War-nock.’ ” Then she replied: “That’s
what I said: ‘War-lock.’ ” She evidently was completely unable
to distinguish the sound of an “N” from the sound of an “L”. I
gave up after a couple of days, and ask her to just call me
“Paul.” I assume the others in the detachment enjoyed this
humor, but they never mentioned it to me.
We had three chaplains on the base, plus we had a nice Chapel
that would hold about three hundred people. We had over
seven thousand American Airmen on the base, which meant
we could accommodate a little more than 4% of the base for
one service. We had a Baptist, a Catholic and a Presbyterian
chaplain. The Catholic chaplain was in our BOQ (housing
complex); so I knew him better than the rest especially since
my roommate was also Catholic. Both he and my roommate
were not exactly the world’s best chess players as neither one
of them ever came close to beating me in that game. Back in
Rockingham and Gastonia, we brothers used to play chess a lot
when we were otherwise bored during summer vacation; my
oldest brother was really good; he could beat me three out of
five games. This base was an isolated tour, which means you
couldn’t bring you wife and family, as there were no facilities
for them.
There’s nothing wrong with being aggressive in your thinking
if you have thought about everything using some type of risk
management analysis. That is, you need to look at what you
might gain as compared with what you may loose (that is, the
positives against the negatives) and assign probabilities to
each. For example a plumber works for another man. He has
a good income, but he feels his boss (the owner of the
business) keeps too much for himself. His wife is sickly so he
can’t afford to be without work for very long. The man
considers going into business for himself because he is a very
good plumber. When he does his risk analysis, he realizes he
may not be a good business manager, which might lead him to
look for a partner who has good business skills and maybe not-
so-good plumbing skills. Overconfidence occurs when you try
to do more than you are capable of doing just because you are
very good at what you do. This person uses wishful thinking as
a substitute for risk management.
On the way to Taiwan, we flew out of McCord Air Base near
Seattle. It was a twelve-hour flight to Tokyo and an additional
four hours to Taipei. At the end of that ordeal, they put us on
Chinese (Taiwanese) buses for the hundred-mile trip to our
base. It was almost impossible to sleep on those flights, so
about all we had to do was to talk with each other. I was just
sitting there when this other Airman came up to me and said:
“Hello, I’m Bob Taggie.” I noticed the gold-colored oak leaf
insignia on his collar, and replied: “Good evening, Sir” and
introduced myself. We started talking. I told him about my
background in North Carolina, married, no children yet, and
that I was a meteorologist. He then told me his situation, from
Pennsylvania, married, two children, and that he was a C-130
navigator. I remember that he told me that he had just spent
the last several weeks with his family, and then he showed me
pictures of them. The second of his children had just started
school. They had one boy and one girl, a perfect All-American
family.
When an airplane seriously damages its landing gear usually
due to a rough landing, they have to send it back to the States
to be refitted by factory technicians. There was such a C-130
that needed to go back to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma
City for just such a refitting. They would lock the wheels in
the down position for the entire flight. That would make for a
bumpy and slow ride, but for the crew it was a free trip back to
the States to see their families. This would not count as leave
(vacation), and they were required to stay until the plane had
been repaired because then they would need to fly the airplane
back to Taiwan. Major Taggie was the navigator of the crew
that had been selected for this flight to Oklahoma. The
aircraft commander and pilot for that crew, Colonel Vance
(name changed - I don’t remember his actual name), was one
of the C-130 squadron commanders (three to four squadrons
comprise a wing). As a squadron commander, he was a senior
person of high rank, in this case a full Colonel. Colonel
Vance had over 15,000 flying hours; so he was extremely
experienced and very good at what he did - flying airplanes.
We only had five full Colonels on the entire base and no
Generals.
The mission for the Vance crew that day was to make a
delivery to the front lines in Viet Nam. The cargo was
classified, but we can assume it was ammunition, food and
other supplies. The C-130 aircraft could descend very sharply,
deliver their cargo out their back ramp at several feet off the
ground, and then climb to altitude rapidly to avoid enemy fire.
In doing this, they never touched the ground. It was over a
thousand-mile trip one-way; so these missions could easily
take a total of six to eight hours. This mission was
complicated by the fact that the Vance crew had a second crew
in training on this flight. A C-130 crew is normally six, but
there were now twelve men on board. To complete that
mission the crew had to bring the airplane back to the original
base. Should they need to stop at an alternate base, they had
to stay with their airplane until they could fly it back to our
base (CCK). There was an Air Force regulation that required a
crew to have eight hours of sleep (if their flight was
interrupted) before they could continue if the original flight
had exceeded a certain time limit, and their flight had. The
bottom line of this was the Vance crew had to return this plane
to CCK that evening if they still wanted to take the crippled
plane to Oklahoma the next day; otherwise, an alternate crew
would fly the crippled airplane stateside.
Do you remember in the movie “Mary Poppins” where she
came into town as the wind shifted, and when the wind shifted
again, it was time for her to leave? When we had
northwesterly winds at CCK, we had a tendency to get massive
fog. We were only five miles from the coastline where there
was a seven hundred foot cliff straight down to the beach.
Normally (95% of the time) we had southerly winds and very
nice, clear flying weather. At this particular time we were
experiencing these northwesterly winds, and our base could be
fogged-in with zero visibility for many hours. That means
aircraft could neither land nor take off until the visibility
improved. An airborne crew could be required to land at an
alternate base such as Taipei or Tainan, both only twenty
minutes away but in opposite directions. These bases were not
experiencing our fog problem. We had had this fog for the
past two days, and we had forecast it to last at least several
more days. However, during this fog, the visibility could
improve for an hour or so, and then the fog would return again
with zero visibility. That meant a crew could wait a while (in a
circular holding pattern), and they might be able to land.
There was no way to forecast the good periods except they
seem to always happen during the heat of the day, never at
night. Colonel Vance came into our weather station the day
before his mission, and we apprised him of the situation. He
mentioned they absolutely needed to return to CCK as opposed
to an alternate. If they had to land at an alternate, they would
not be able to fly the cripple back to the States the following
day. He said that when he completed his mission he would
land at a coastal base in Viet Nam and refuel so they could
circle CCK for as long as it took. That sounded like good
reasoning.
On the day of the mission, they were able to take off as
scheduled. Everything went smoothly until they arrived back
at CCK about 2200 (10 PM) that night. I was working the
second shift that night from 4 PM until midnight. Colonel
Vance called me on the radio and we went over the situation
thoroughly. We were fogged completely with zero visibility,
and that was exactly what we had forecasted for him as his
flight left that morning. It was unlikely that there would be a
break in the fog until at least mid-morning the next day. He
mentioned that he was circling at one thousand feet, and that
he could look straight down and see the base, but when he
attempted an approach he couldn’t see anything and had to
pull up. He continued to call me about every thirty minutes
until my shift ended. I briefed my replacement about Colonel
Vance who was still airborne at that time.
Now as a full Colonel and as a senior pilot with over 15,000
flying hours, there was a loophole in the safety regulations
that allowed Colonel Vance to make an instrument approach
in zero visibility. He would attempt his approach, and if he did
not have clear visibility at one hundred feet, he was required
to pull up and go around again. He could attempt this as many
times as he desired. And he had been doing that since 10 PM.
Finally at 0200 (2 AM) the next morning while making one of
these zero visibility approaches, he thought he saw the runway
and adjusted his flight path to be able to land. He lost that
visibility very quickly, but he continued anyhow using only his
judgment and memory for where he saw the runway (this
involved only a few seconds). His left wing hit a tree and
flipped him. There was a loud explosion, which I heard from
my BOQ. I dressed and went back to the weather station. My
fears where realized. We had just added twelve more
casualties to the Viet Nam War cost since they had been on a
combat mission.
There was a morose atmosphere around the base for at least a
month. They had nice memorial services for the deceased at
the base Chapel. The bodies were identified using dental
records. I still think of Major Taggie even today and the
conversations we had going over to Taiwan just four or five
months before this accident. His children would be in their
mid-forties by now. There was an accident investigation Board
(of course). Major Tucker and his boss from Guam attended to
represent our weather unit. Our weather-related radio
conversations had been recorded and were used at the
investigation. The verdict: “Pilot Error.”
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