Yep, another one already. MOVING IN THE BUFF By Wilton Strickland
Several weeks after I arrived here at Seymour Johnson AFB, NC, in March of ‘79, I learned that one of our crews was going to deliver a B-52G from our unit to Edwards AFB, CA, for a test crew there to fly a couple of times with Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM‘s) during a weekend as part of the missile development program. My wife and two sons were still living in the little mountain village of Wrightwood about 45 minutes southeast of Edwards. We had moved there while I was a civil engineer at George AFB and just before I went to Greenland for a year. I wangled my way onto the flight to visit my family for a couple of days. Alice picked me up at Edwards upon my arrival there on Friday afternoon and dropped me off there for the flight back to Seymour on Sunday afternoon. Because I was beginning to build a house here in North Carolina, I needed some of my tools and equipment from our home in California. I brought several of those things back to NC with me in the BUFF: a twelve-foot aluminum extension ladder, a six-foot wooden step ladder, a radial arm saw, a gas-driven rotary lawn mower (fuel tank was drained and vented), several boxes of assorted tools and lots of “stuff.” To take my stuff out to the airplane at Edwards, we loaded it and the rest of the crew’s baggage aboard an Air Force Chevrolet Suburban driven by the Edwards crew. The long extension ladder was laid across the tops of the seats and the instrument panel (dashboard) for the short trip onto the flightline. One end of the ladder was touching the windshield; the other end was protruding slightly from the rear of the vehicle. We warned all the guys on both crews, Edwards and ours, “Don’t close the rear doors. You may break the windshield by shoving the ladder into it.” Sure enough, the last one of our crewmen to put his baggage on the vehicle tried to close the rear doors, cracking the windshield, of course. ‘Don’t know how the Edwards crew explained the cracked windshield when they turned in the vehicle. All of this stuff went very easily into the large open area in the aircraft aft fuselage (“47 section“) behind the aft main gear. All of it was strapped down very well and presented no problem at all for the BUFF. I could have brought back a lot more, but I was a bit shy to appear to be moving my entire household in the BUFF. We sold the California house a couple of months later, Alice and the boys drove to North Carolina to join me, and the rest of my stuff was moved in the conventional manner by van.
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