Me & The Mighty T-33

My second assignment in the USAF was after the Vietnam War ended and many pilots were being kicked out. The Air Force offered me another option, one that I hadn’t heard of, a “rated supplement.” That’s code for “we don’t have a flying job for you but we’d like to keep you in until we do.” My non-flying job was as a weapons controller, a “scope dope” who controlled intercepts from a ground-based radar site. The site they chose for me was in Iceland, the perk of Iceland (among many) was that I’d also be able to continue flying…in the T-33.

The T-33 was “born” in 1948, a derivative of the P-80 fighter. In effect, the airplane was older than I was. It was heavy, 15,000 pounds which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the engine only put out 5,000 pounds of thrust. And…what an engine it was. When I first looked down the intake, I couldn’t see an engine. Normally, when one looks down the intake of a jet, you see a fan, part of the compression process. The Allison J33 engine on the T-33 didn’t have a fan like that, it had a bunch of tubes. Don’t quote me on this because I’m not quite sure, but compression happened with some sort of centrifugal force process, not the standard fan compression. In the intake was a plenum chamber filled with doo-dads, wires, cables, hoses, and tubes around the outside. but no fan. Something from a Disney ride, not a jet airplane. But, that’s what I flew. A couple of stories about me and this jet.

In a “normal” jet, the nose wheel is steerable on the ground by using the rudder pedals: engage the nose wheel steering button, push the right rudder pedal, the nose wheel turns right, push the left…well, you get it. The T-33 did NOT have nose wheel steering, rather the nose wheel was on a ‘caster’ like device, that is, the nose wheel was not steerable but would go in whatever direction it had been going. If you screwed up your ground taxiing, and we all did, the nose wheel would turn 90 degrees and the airplane wouldn’t move. The ONLY way out of this predicament was to bounce the airplane, yes, you read that correctly, bounce the airplane.

Here are the highlights of bouncing a T-33 out of a 90 degree nose wheel situation. Warn everyone around you; it is going to get noisy and windy. Make sure there is nothing too fragile directly behind you. Stand firmly and very solidly on the brakes. Push the throttle full forward to maximum power. Now there is a natural pause here because the Allison engine took what seemed like forever to get to maximum power. You will note that as you add full power, the nose will get lower and lower. While still standing firmly (very firmly) on the brakes, pull the power back to idle. You will note that the nose rises as the power ebbs. Push the throttle up to full power again. Than to idle. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. You are bouncing. Or at least the front of the jet is bouncing. Eventually, the upward motion of the nose will lift so high that the nose wheel will be off the ground. When that happens and you are at IDLE power, release the brakes, the airplane will begin to move forward, and the caster will work as it’s supposed to and the nose wheel will straighten out as the airplane is moving. You could always tell the new pilots when you saw an airplane bouncing on the ramp.

The other oddity (there were oh, so many) was minimum run landings. In a normal airplane, you slow down a little below normal approach speed, you touch down as close as possible to the beginning of the runway, you push the nose wheel to the runway, and you apply the brakes, hard. Some of that was true in the T-33 but there were three additional steps.
1. While still airborne, stow all loose items in the cockpit and zip up your flight suit pockets.
2. As soon as your nose wheel hits the runway, OPEN THE CANOPY. Yes. Open the canopy. The canopy was this massive contraption on a huge hydraulic pylon. When you landed, the speed was probably 100mph and opening the canopy was a HUGE speed brake. You slowed down very quickly.
3. When slowed to taxi speed, close your canopy. Tower controllers were always worried that something would fly out of the cockpit onto their runway.

That’s my T-bird story for the day. Come back some other time and I’ll tell you about my first flight in Iceland. Scary. The image above is from the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy center outside of D.C.