Managing Editor
Following two years of high-profile military service at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C., I was hoping that my next duty assignment for the U.S. Air Force would be somewhat less intense in the fall of 1981.
![]() |
An F-15E Eagle aircraft from the 555th Squadron sits on the tarmac while awaiting a training mission in 1983 at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. COURTESY PHOTO |
With a 2 ½-mile long runway, at the time of my arrival, Luke was third behind Cape Canaveral and Edwards AFB in California as a potential U.S. Space Shuttle landing site. Each time U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy flew home to his California ranch, Air Force One would land at Luke so they could visit with Nancy’s mother and stepfather, who lived nearby in Scottsdale, Arizona. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater would fly his Cessna aircraft home to Arizona from Washington, D.C. and would land at Luke.
Within weeks after I arrived at Luke for duty, my commanding officer informed me that I would be part of a base response team that mobilized quickly in the event of an emergency. Just three days later, I joined a team of airmen aboard an old Huey helicopter responding to the crash of F-4 pilot in the desert on a training flight. My job was to interact with any reporters who arrived at the crash site and to safeguard any classified information in case it was exposed during the crash. I sat on a bench in the helicopter, which had no doors and secured myself to the bench with a rope instead of a seat belt.
As the helicopter hovered in a circle above the crash site, I wanted to throw up as the only thing preventing me from falling out of the open door was a flimsy piece of rope. We landed and all that was left of the F-4 was contained in a 10-foot black smoking hole in the sand. The pilot had ejected before the aircraft crashed, but the ejection seat landed upside down and he was dead upon impact.
While I settled in at Luke, my primary job was to write for the weekly base newspaper. But I did have other duties such as serving as a flightline guide for tourists and groups known as “tailspotters,” who would take photographs of aircraft tail numbers as a hobby. These groups were required to apply to visit the base months in advance and couldn’t stop by randomly as they wished.
Another of my duties was to serve as the Public Affairs Command Post representative one weekend a month. Back in the days before cell phones, I was handed a beeper and notified of emergency situations. One Saturday morning in May 1983, I was recalled to the base for a commercial airliner in distress.
Taking off from Fresno, California with 81 passengers and crew members on board, a Republic Airlines DC-9 aircraft enroute to Phoenix was forced to make an emergency landing at Luke because of a fuel problem. The aircraft’s fuel gauge read full in Fresno, but it was faulty, and the DC-9 only had less than five gallons of jet fuel or about 30 seconds of time in the air remaining when granted permission to land at our base.
I notified the base commander of the incident, and he directed that the Luke Officer’s Club be made available for the passengers. He arranged for an Air Force bus to transport them to their awaiting families at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. My job was to brief reporters about the incident at the base’s front gate after I made sure the passengers knew what was happening and helped them contact their families to let them know they were safe.
During my time at Luke, I never got to see a Space Shuttle landing there, but one afternoon, I did watch as a “Super Guppy” aircraft landed to refuel in September 1984 while carrying the Space Shuttle Discovery across the U.S. on a trip back to Cape Canaveral in Florida. I also was able to see a SR-71 Blackbird aircraft when it landed for refueling on its way to Beale AFB in California.
Luke’s mission also changed while I was stationed there. The Air Force transitioned Luke’s fleet of F-4s to the Air Guard and began training F-16 pilots at the base. A contingent of Saudi Arabian pilots and aircrews also trained on the F-15 at Luke as did Italian, British and German pilots on the Tornado aircraft.
On several occasions, I was offered an incentive flight as a passenger on an F-15 aircraft, but I always turned those down. I had previously written articles for the base paper about incentive flight recipients and had always noticed a large plastic trash can filled with water near where the F-15s landed. I had asked what that was for and learned that the amount of G-forces recipients experience, and their lack of flight time result in severe vomiting afterward. The trash can is there to splash away what incentive ride recipients throw up when landing. <