Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Radio Check

Lots of banter out there regarding the Call Sign of a certain Naval Aviator (story here). It even drew Lex into the discussion and he has several stories about his time in and around the bizarre ritual of naming Naval Aviators. Everyone that comes here regular knows I was a naval aviation ground pounder. While I had the opportunity to ride onboard the occasional War Hoover flight I was not one of the brothers that wore wings on their chest. Still and even I like what I did and would not trade it for a life of flying.

We had our share of odd Call Signs in ole VS-31. My first S-3 flight was piloted by a "Major Two-Dog", he was our Maintenance Officer and I was aboard for a maintenance call for a computer that would only fail while airborne. We also had a "Sun Dance" and a guy they called "Bullpup". The most odd was a Pilot we had that went by the call sign "Elsie" as in the cow on the cover of glue bottles.

All us guys in maintenance never knew how the names assigned and never did we use them except when that particular person was not around. Another interesting side note, we had enlisted aircrew in our squadron (about a dozen or so). They also flew however they were not given call signs. I guess they were not on the radio enough to warrant getting one. Too bad because our crop of AW's were a gas!!

Anyhow, the whole bent on this for me was to steer the occasional reader to Dos Gringos website and to their song "The Legend of Shaved Dog's Ass", which is a really cool call sign!! Enjoy!!

BT: Jimmy T sends.

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