Crew 10

The entire reason de entendre for the existence of VP aviation was to deliver an
aircraft and crew “on station” to accomplish the assigned mission. The flight
crews were on the pointy end of that idea.
VP-1 Crew 10 was a good, no, excellent example. The leader, or PPC (patrol
plane commander) was Lcdr. M.E. ‘Foots’ Huston, who was also the squadron
‘ops boss’ or operations officer.

Huston knew what he wanted and, more importantly, how to get it. He put together a primo crew of capable guys and christened his crew “The Hallmark Crew – when you care enough to send the very best”. No banal off-station messages from Crew 10, rather “mission accomplished – Hallmark sends”. It annoyed the C.O. mightily.
Huston picked Lt. Guy Higgins as his TACCO. Higgins was always one step ahead of the game, probably why Huston chose him. He also picked AW1 R.T. Symes as his Sensor One operator. No better AW in the fleet but Symes could never make chief. Can’t make chief – naturally the Navy made him a warrant officer!

Think it was humid in Okinawa? The aircraft’s water separators could not remove all the moisture in the air – here the cabin fogs up during preflight. Lt. Higgins is ‘assisting’ AW1 Symes and AW3 Gluntz in their preflight.

The prime mission of the P-3 was to hunt down and destroy enemy submarines. But the Pacific was not a hot bed of submarine activity so we usually conducted surface search and reconnaissance.

The smoke light and white ‘feather’ from the periscope’s wake indicate another successful ‘finex’ by the Hallmark Crew.

Keeping an eye on the Soviet navy was another task of VP-1. Is that a Krivak?

AT3 Mitchell performed radio operator duties much more efficiently than it appears in this photo.

As the P-3 could and did execute missions of 10-12 hours in length, it was necessary to staff the flight deck with one flight engineer, a senior enlisted (ADJ1 Browning), and three pilots to allow for rotation of the flight crew for sufficient rest.

The ever alert Ltjg Rob Freeman served as PP2P.

Ltjg Eschenfelder, here doing his best impersonation of an airline pilot in Hong Kong, served as PP3P. Note the FLIR pod on the wing station. Forward Looking Infrared was a new concept/technology at the time. It didn’t work so well then. Today it is a standard sensor.

Ltjg Jack Lautenschlager, the squadron’s Air Intelligence Officer, proves “Naval intelligence” is not an oxymoron.

One of the plums of serving in the Ops Boss’ crew was the opportunity for a ‘good deal’, should a special event come along. And it did. We were tasked to fly a staff member of the Wing to Singapore for conferencing with the local officials. And we were told to keep a low profile. Huston assigned his own crew to the mission. We stepped off the airplane in our civvies and were whisked by the US Embassy staff to the Marco Polo Hotel, a luxury hotel on Tanglin Circus. The next day was a day off, allowing for exploration of Singapore, a recently independent and wealthy Southeast Asian state.