A wild ride from the edge of space

October 16, 2006
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

Along deeply shaded streets of south Del Rio, under old oaks and pecans that nearly obscure the sky, lives a quiet gentleman who invested his youth in soaring through as much of that firmament as could be penetrated.

The graceful trees in Col. Vic Milam’s yard were mere saplings when he rose to the aeronautical demands of a nation struggling for superiority of arms, wealth and personal freedoms over the world domination schemes of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Midwestern boy became a young man on a mission as Milam embarked early on a flying career that would take him to heights only poorly understood – never achieved – as he grew up in Arkansas City, Kansas. His pilot’s license, acquired before he graduated from high school, was the first step toward a 24-year career in the United States Air Force.

Milam, now 75, enlisted at 19, and trained in the T-6 “Texan,” the “pilot maker” and grandfather of the sleek T-6 “Texan II” now serving in the same capacity for all students in Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training at Laughlin Air Force Base. Next came his mastery of the F-84 “Thunderjet,” and then gunnery school at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz.

Milam briefly flew the “Thunderjet” for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Turner Air Force Base, near Albany, Ga., then volunteered to fly a derivative of the Martin B-57 “Canberra,” a British-designed bomber answering needs in the Korean War.

The RB-57D “Long-Winged Reconnaissance Aircraft” had a permanently closed bomb bay, replaced fore of the nose wheel by a camera bay and windows to the earth below. In this aircraft, destruction of the enemy had been replaced by spying on what America’s foes were up to.

Early in 1956, the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing moved from Georgia to Laughlin Air Force Base, and Milam came along, only to find that the RB57-D was being “phased out” by SAC. In 1958, Milam married Louene Bochart, daughter of a Loma Alta ranching family. The couple now celebrates their 47th year together.

But while still flying the RB57-D, Milam completed flying missions from Laughlin to the Pacific Proving Grounds where atomic bomb testing pounded islands and atolls in the Marshall Islands, a troublesome chapter in the career of many pilots. While the U.S. government strove to learn more about how to build bigger and “better” atomic bombs, scientists also wanted to know about the fallout.

Above the Marshalls, at Eniwetok Atoll (now spelled Enewetak), Milam flew into clouds of radioactive detritus that rose like mushrooms to dwarf Jack’s mythical beanstalk. “They could go as high as 60,000 feet sometimes,” Milam said, “and they’d be colored – red, green, brown, gray – depending on the colors of the coral sucked up into the explosion.”

Another plane circumnavigated the cloud, its pilot directing Milam where to fly with his sampling ports open, allowing filters to catch debris, gases and dust for later analysis. When he returned to home base at Eniwetok, still wearing a lead vest donned on takeoff, his entire plane was considered “hot,” bathed in radioactivity. And it was assumed the pilot was, too. A front-end loader, driven by men in safety suits, approached the cockpit, and lifted a platform for Milam to grasp.

Then he was lowered, stripped of his presumably contaminated suit, and sent to the showers until a technician with a Geiger counter was satisfied that his Roentgen level – a measure of radioactivity – was acceptable. “Lieutenant, go take another shower – you’re still hot,” he was told.

In 1959, Vic and Louene Milam took a three-year tour at Yokota Air Base, Japan, but it was no hiatus from the high-flying birds. Most of the time in Japan, Vic was on TDY (temporary duty assignments) in Taiwan, providing logistical support for the new U-2 “Dragon Lady” reconnaissance plane. Louene remained at Yokota for the months Vic was gone. “It was just what we did a lot in those days,” she chuckled.

Late in 1962, the Milams returned to Laughlin where Vic was “checked out” in the U-2 the following year. Then, the 4080th Wing moved again, to Davis Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., and again Vic and Louene tagged along.

There, returning from another air sampling mission in 1968, Vic nearly lost his life when the auto pilot on his “Dragon Lady” went berserk, a too-frequent occurrence on the high-altitude plane.

At 60,000 feet, 11.3 miles above the earth, the U-2 went out of control. Knowing that blood in veins and arteries would boil if his pressure suit failed on ejection, Milam worked to right the aircraft’s position. “I fought it down to 40,000 feet,” Milam recalled, and then I had to bail out.” His ejection seat mechanism, designed to separate the seat from the pilot and chute, once clear of the plane, failed.

Milam’s seat simply rose slightly above him, tangled in his risers, and hovered overhead, just out of reach for the entire trip. “You’re hanging there in that harness, and you don’t have much of a way to reach above,” Milam said, remembering mostly futile attempts to reach and disentangle the heavy seat.

He was finally able to grip it just enough to shove it aside from the vertical plane of his body on impact. “Otherwise, it would have gone right through me,” said Milam. His only injury in the episode was a compression fracture to his back, sustained on the initial ejection from the crippled plane, but even that aggravates him today.

The struggle earned Milam membership in the infamous “Caterpillar Club,” an oblique reference to the silk used in manufacturing parachutes then. His bailout is attested in a certificate he still keeps in a thick scrapbook.

The long-range capability of single-engine, single-seat U-2 aircraft fostered TDY assignments around the globe for Milam and his peers in the cockpit. Eight months at Bien Hoa, Vietnam were filled with reconnaissance missions above North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Though never shot at, as far as he knows, the assignment nevertheless made Milam nervous.

“Because of the climate over Southeast Asia, we’d pull contrails over there, and that was ‘abort’ criteria,” Milam said, adding that the U-2s never aborted a mission there for that reason. “We were pretty safe from most enemy aircraft because of our altitude – as long as that one motor kept turning.”

Then, too, was the agony of hearing combat-driven radio traffic close to the fighting. “We’d sit up there, high and dry, and just listen to the drama below, like ‘Get out! Get out!,’ and think, ‘Damn, I hope he’s going to be O.K.”

An Alaska assignment included more air sampling

Seen as evangelists for the devil, the growing Communist bloc of countries continued to spread in the early 1960s to within 90 miles of U.S. shores.

Cuba.

In 1963, on the heels of the 1962 showdown between President John F. Kennedy and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Milam filled logbooks with hundreds of hours, conducting photographic documentation and monitoring of missile site dismantling. His seven-and-one-half-hour flights from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., to Havana began with a “light breakfast” at home, usually a simple roll or muffin, but no liquids.

Milam always purposefully dehydrated himself, beginning the night before a flight, eschewing the traditional breakfast of steak-and-eggs. “But I’d always eat ‘em when I got back,” he chuckled. Milam’s refusal of liquids only exacerbated the dehydration that came with flight. “You’d always lose some weight just because of perspiration,” he recalled.

The products of hard-nosed diplomacy had to be verified, and Milam said the threat of surface-to-air missile launches at the U-2s diminished significantly.

“They understood that they had better never fire on us again, or we were going to sink their island,” Milam said, displaying the stern determination that doubtless characterized the cautious stand-down from the brink of war with the Soviet Union.

Later, in the early 1970s, Milam shifted his flying skills to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. “That used to be super-secret,” Milam smiled, “but now I can tell you. I used to have to say that I worked for ‘the other user’ [of U-2 reconnaissance].” Assignments for the CIA stemmed from his duty at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., and in Taiwan.

The very characteristics that spelled success for the U-2 as America’s premier spy plane gave it the reputation as the most difficult to fly aircraft in the nation’s huge inventory of airborne vehicles. It was – and is – a very sophisticated, ultra –lightweight, single-engine powered glider, as graceful and efficient soaring at 70,000 feet as it is ungainly and groundcrew-dependent when it lands.

The five models of U-2s that showed up in Milam’s logbook had wingspans ranging from 82 to 106 feet, 35-to-40 percent greater than the length of the fuselage. “And your wings were both ‘wet,’” said Milam, explaining, “All your fuel is in those wings.”

So, the wings that both fueled and supported the U-2 at high altitude, where air density is perilously thin, doubled as gas tanks, and, when partially depleted, the fuel sloshed around at ground level. And the fuselage, with only fore-and-aft wheels in a line with the axis of the fuselage, meant the wings flopped from side-to-side without immediate support.

When Milam’s U-2 came racing in for a landing, the pilot could barely see the runway. On touchdown, the runway was largely obscured by the long upward-tilted nose, so he relied on instructions from occupants in “a souped-up Chevy Camaro” racing alongside during each landing, radioing wheel heights above the runway, preferred speeds, amount of runway left, centering on the runway.

When the aircraft finally rolled to a stop, crews rushed to the wingtips, trying to catch them before the remaining unspent fuel shifted the weight, dropping one wingtip to the ground. Below each wing, a heavy, sickle-shaped steel “pogo,” with caster-like wheels was installed in a flanged receptacle for the purpose. The result was a stabilized U-2 that could be moved on the ground as necessary.

During Milam’s long missions – whether enroute to or from air sampling or photographic reconnaissance – he thrilled to the views. Like most U-2 pilots, even the most reserved and businesslike, Milam still gushes recalling the panoramas available to most people only in photographs taken by high-flying pilots and space explorers.

“My favorite pastime, when there wasn’t work to do, was to sightsee. I am a sightseer! When you look upward at 70,000 feet, the sky is black. Looking down the sky turns dark blue near the horizon, and there’s a slight curvature of the earth. And then, below, the earth is all in sunlight.”

Milam logged about 1,400 hours in the U-2 “Dragon Lady,” and still remembers her fondly, with characteristic modesty and understatement.

“I’m proud to be a part of the history in that airplane. Every now and then, I look up and see contrails and think it’d be nice to be up there again. But it’s work! Not near as much fun as it was when I was doing it. Too many regulations!”