A navy story you haven't heard before

I was thinking today about my navy time. In the early days I worked on planes, troubleshot and changed out a lot of radios and navigation equipment. The radios weighed about 30 pounds because they were partially transistorized and partly miniature vacuum tubes. Lifting and hauling 30 pounds on my shoulder doesn’t sound like much, but add that to three big ladders to get to the flight deck and you have a fairly long haul. I was young and I did it well. There were still older planes with the old ARC-27 radios that were all large vacuum tubes and weighed about 50 pounds that other guys had to haul up those ladders. That was bad enough, but those old planes had their radio and navigation equipment in the back of and under the aircraft skin so those guys had to remove a dozen screws or so to get to them. Even worse, aircraft screws were aluminum and the soft aluminum would strip out easily. Then you had to get an easy-out to drill them out before you could get to the radios. It was a regular nightmare to do so.

Some equipment was so big, like memory drums (Which would spin up like hard drives in computers these days, but they were as big as a beer keg and weighed well over 100 pounds, a catapult shot could and would destroy them, just like dropping your computer from a three story building while it was running), memory drums, computer indicator drawers and  radar magnetrons were so heavy you had to arrange for an aircraft elevator to get it to the flight deck and if the equipment was not repaired properly you had to go through the whole process all over again. That happened a lot and the folks who controlled the aircraft elevators were usually busy transferring aircraft and not much interested in helping the avionics guys lift their equipment.

My first 4 and a half years were a lot better than the last 6 years.