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B-52 Bomber Crew Rations
Re: B-52 Bomber Crew Rations
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P3_Orion_EWO
- Posts: 19
- Joined: Tue Nov 08, 2011 11:54 am
- Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Re: B-52 Bomber Crew Rations
I flew Lockheed P-3 Orion long-range ASW and maritime patrol aircraft with the US Navy and US Navy Reserve between 1980 and 1999 and have several thousand crewmember flight hours in the type. During my 20 years of naval flying we never ever received any special pre-packaged flight rations.
Whenever we flew from Navy bases we were given the choice of getting a box lunch from the flight galley on the base or bringing our own food with us. All the enlisted Navy flight crew members (like me) were on what was called "commuted rations", which meant that we got paid a daily allowance for our meals instead of getting a "chow pass" that was good for eating at the galley (USN mess hall) for free. This was done because flight crewmembers would often be out flying during scheduled mealtimes and would not always be able to eat at the galley. Officers, whether they flew or not, were always provided with a cash meal allowance since officers' messes are operated on a cash basis like restaurants. The enlisted crewmen were normally charged something like $2 for a box lunch but the officers had to pay more, perhaps twice as much. When we were deployed outside the Continental United States box lunches were often (if not always - I can't remember) provided to enlisted crewmembers at no charge (for some reason the officers always had to pay for them). In such cases were were each authorized to get one box lunch for every four hours that we'd be in the air.
I'm a very "picky" eater so I only bought a few box lunches, mainly early on in my flying career and when I absolutely had no alternative. They were generally made up from whatever was leftover from the galley (Navy mess hall) that day or on the previous day. These box lunches came literally in a plain white cardboard box (I have a vague recollection that some bases may have had boxes that had the base name or insignia printed on them) and were made up in the flight galley, which was a section of the regular galley kitchen area where they prepared meals for flight crews. A typical Navy box lunch consisted of two sandwiches (typically ham and cheese, chicken salad, tuna, roast beef, or something like that), a couple of pieces of cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, carrot sticks and celery sticks, a couple of cookies or a brownie, a piece of fruit (orange, apple, or banana), a small can of juice (orange juice, grapefruit juice, apple juice, or pineapple juice), and an small carton of milk. These box lunches were not restricted to flight crew personnel and they were often distributed to maintenance personnel and watch-standers working in the hangars late at night for "midrats". This was a meal served around midnight.
During my first overseas deployment to NS Rota, Spain the 2nd pilot (2P) on my crew, VP-8 Crew 4, was LT "Goat" Lawson. He got that name because he would never buy his own box lunch but would rummage through the trash barrel at the back of the aircraft after the enlisted crew had finished eating and he would eat whatever he would find discarded in the trash. I once saw him pull an apple core out of a box lunch box that had been thrown in the trash barrel and eat it clean down to the stem!
Many, if not most of us, of us brought our own food on flights. Nobody really was a fan of the box lunches! On the P-3s we had a small electric convection oven in the galley. It had a rack for heating TV dinners or if you pulled the rack out you could use it to heat canned foods. Many of us brought canned beef stew, canned spaghetti, beans & franks (you could get "beanie weenies" on every base), or chili with us. Whenever I went flying I'd normally bring a can of Beefaroni or Spaghetti-Os and a can of baked beans, a big bag of Doritos corn chips, a big bag of red licorice, a can of EzCheese, a box of Crown Pilot crackers, a bag of beef jerky, and a case of CapriSun juice with me. In the training command one of our instructors once told us that the best way to avoid getting airsick was to "eat like a horse" every minute of the flight. That always stuck with me and that's what I did.
On one of my first flights out of the training command with VP-8 I saw the other crewmen take some cans, pull the wrappers off, and stick them in the oven. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the food was hot and they'd eat it right out of the cans. On my next flight, a pilot trainer in the local area, I brought a can of Spaghetti-Os with me. At lunch time I pulled the label off and stuck the can in the oven just like I saw the other guys do. Twenty minutes later I went back, turned off the oven, and opened the door. Both ends of the can were dished out so that it looked like an oval instead of a cylinder. I grabbed the can with my Nomex gloves and pulled the "John Wayne" can opener that I had on my dog-tag chain out from under my flight suit collar and proceded to open the can. There was an enormous explosion followed by a sound like a screaming steam whistle. My face was instantly covered with boiling hot tomato sauce. A tall plume of tomato sauce steam shot out of the hole I had cut in the top of the can that initially reached as high as the fabric panels covering the top of the fuselage. The pilots called out on intercom, "what was that noise back there?" and I ran forward into the cockpit. The two pilots and flight engineer looked back at me, saw the tomato sauce all over my face, all three of them screamed "holy shit", and radioed the base to declare an emergency. They thought that there had been an explosion in the aft section of the aircraft and that I was bleeding to death! I said, "I'm OK, its just tomato sauce", and explained the situation to them. Everybody got a big laugh out of this but the back of the aircraft was a mess. There was tomato sauce everywhere. When I had observed the other experienced crewmen preparing their cans I had missed the fact that each one of them had punched a vent hole in the top. That particular aircraft, a VP-8 P-3B, went to the boneyard at Davis Monthan AFB in 1982 with a big orange stain in the fabric overhead panels in the galley area. The maintenance people were never able to get that stain out.
Getting back on topic, when crews were deployed operational outside of the Continental United States we'd be issued a "Cruise Box" filled with cooking equipment. Often the crew would start a "chow fund" into which you'd pay ten bucks or so per week. One crewman, usually the in-flight technician or ordnanceman (on my VP-8 crew it was the IFT), would volunteer to serve as cook and he'd guarantee that we'd eat on our flights. The meals served would depend upon the flight schedule. For example, if we were flying a 12 hour mission from 2 AM to 2 PM we'd get breakfast and lunch. The cooking equipment consisted of hot plates and pans and things like that. We'd be served pancakes, bacon and eggs, corned beef hash, waffles, sausages, hamburger helper, etc. All of the crew would be expected to help with the shopping and clean-up. This always worked well and actually gave us something to look forward to on a long flight. Even today I can remember the feeling of anticipation, after four hours or so on station watching the radar, when the IFT started distributing hot pancakes and sausages for breakfast on the aircraft. He'd start at the cockpit and work his was down the "tube".
The in-flight ration situation was a little different when we flew out of US Air Force bases. There, we always had a choice of getting frozen TV dinners or MREs. The frozen TV dinners were very basic commercial products. I think they were Swanson's. You could have roast beef, fried chicken, or turkey and the Air Force mess hall would throw in a piece of fruit and something to drink. MREs were always available, but I only became aware of this when I was flying counter-narcotics missions out of Howard AFB in Panama with VP-92 during the mid 1990s. I went to the flight kitchen, as the USAF called it, to pick up some food for the crew. The guy at the flight kitchen asked me if I wanted TV dinners or MREs. This was the first time I learned that MREs were an option at USAF bases. The guy at the flight kitchen told me that they usually didn't offer them, though they were always available, because they weren't popular! Me and one of the other guys on my regular crew, an active duty reservist (TAR) AO named Ron Clemments, used to get MREs for all our in-flight meals whenever we flew out of Air Force bases from then on. Nobody else wanted them and they used to act disgusted and kid us about them when we ate them. Although I'd had C-Rations while attending Naval Aircrew Candidate School at Pensacola, Florida during the spring of 1980 during a land-survival course at Egland AFB, this was the first time that I had ever heard or or tried an MRE.
For one two-week annual training period my crew participated in a NATO exercise staged out of the RAF base at Macrihanish, Scotland. The RAF people took very good care of their aircrews. We had in-flight meals that were prepared to order for us on the base. We literally could ask for anything we wanted. The meals were hand-packed in disposable foil-covered metal containers similar to deep pie plates that we could heat in the aircraft's oven. We were authorized two of these things per flight. I used to ask for steak and potatoes for every meal and they would make it for me. The only restriction the RAF guys put on us was that all the pilots could not have the same thing. This was to avoid the possibility of all the pilots coming down with food poisoning.
In summation, in 20 years of flying for the Navy I never saw any kind of special pre-packaged in-flight rations. The closest we came to this was getting MREs, on request, at Air Force bases. As an aside, I was trained on the P-3 by VP-30 at NAS Jacksonville, Florida during the summer of 1980. When I arrived there was a short delay in my class starting so I was sent down to the squadron's parachute loft for a couple of days to help them out and keep me busy. One day they had me filling survival kits for life vests and life rafts. Among the many items that we had to put into the survival kits was green plastic MRE-type bags filled with a couple of packages of Charms candies. I actually was sent out to a storage locker, which was filled with cases of these things, to bring some back to the squadron. Needless to say, I ate a lot of Charms candies that week and for some time afterwards. I think I still have one of these green packages full of Charms candies somewhere at home.
Whenever we flew from Navy bases we were given the choice of getting a box lunch from the flight galley on the base or bringing our own food with us. All the enlisted Navy flight crew members (like me) were on what was called "commuted rations", which meant that we got paid a daily allowance for our meals instead of getting a "chow pass" that was good for eating at the galley (USN mess hall) for free. This was done because flight crewmembers would often be out flying during scheduled mealtimes and would not always be able to eat at the galley. Officers, whether they flew or not, were always provided with a cash meal allowance since officers' messes are operated on a cash basis like restaurants. The enlisted crewmen were normally charged something like $2 for a box lunch but the officers had to pay more, perhaps twice as much. When we were deployed outside the Continental United States box lunches were often (if not always - I can't remember) provided to enlisted crewmembers at no charge (for some reason the officers always had to pay for them). In such cases were were each authorized to get one box lunch for every four hours that we'd be in the air.
I'm a very "picky" eater so I only bought a few box lunches, mainly early on in my flying career and when I absolutely had no alternative. They were generally made up from whatever was leftover from the galley (Navy mess hall) that day or on the previous day. These box lunches came literally in a plain white cardboard box (I have a vague recollection that some bases may have had boxes that had the base name or insignia printed on them) and were made up in the flight galley, which was a section of the regular galley kitchen area where they prepared meals for flight crews. A typical Navy box lunch consisted of two sandwiches (typically ham and cheese, chicken salad, tuna, roast beef, or something like that), a couple of pieces of cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, carrot sticks and celery sticks, a couple of cookies or a brownie, a piece of fruit (orange, apple, or banana), a small can of juice (orange juice, grapefruit juice, apple juice, or pineapple juice), and an small carton of milk. These box lunches were not restricted to flight crew personnel and they were often distributed to maintenance personnel and watch-standers working in the hangars late at night for "midrats". This was a meal served around midnight.
During my first overseas deployment to NS Rota, Spain the 2nd pilot (2P) on my crew, VP-8 Crew 4, was LT "Goat" Lawson. He got that name because he would never buy his own box lunch but would rummage through the trash barrel at the back of the aircraft after the enlisted crew had finished eating and he would eat whatever he would find discarded in the trash. I once saw him pull an apple core out of a box lunch box that had been thrown in the trash barrel and eat it clean down to the stem!
Many, if not most of us, of us brought our own food on flights. Nobody really was a fan of the box lunches! On the P-3s we had a small electric convection oven in the galley. It had a rack for heating TV dinners or if you pulled the rack out you could use it to heat canned foods. Many of us brought canned beef stew, canned spaghetti, beans & franks (you could get "beanie weenies" on every base), or chili with us. Whenever I went flying I'd normally bring a can of Beefaroni or Spaghetti-Os and a can of baked beans, a big bag of Doritos corn chips, a big bag of red licorice, a can of EzCheese, a box of Crown Pilot crackers, a bag of beef jerky, and a case of CapriSun juice with me. In the training command one of our instructors once told us that the best way to avoid getting airsick was to "eat like a horse" every minute of the flight. That always stuck with me and that's what I did.
On one of my first flights out of the training command with VP-8 I saw the other crewmen take some cans, pull the wrappers off, and stick them in the oven. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the food was hot and they'd eat it right out of the cans. On my next flight, a pilot trainer in the local area, I brought a can of Spaghetti-Os with me. At lunch time I pulled the label off and stuck the can in the oven just like I saw the other guys do. Twenty minutes later I went back, turned off the oven, and opened the door. Both ends of the can were dished out so that it looked like an oval instead of a cylinder. I grabbed the can with my Nomex gloves and pulled the "John Wayne" can opener that I had on my dog-tag chain out from under my flight suit collar and proceded to open the can. There was an enormous explosion followed by a sound like a screaming steam whistle. My face was instantly covered with boiling hot tomato sauce. A tall plume of tomato sauce steam shot out of the hole I had cut in the top of the can that initially reached as high as the fabric panels covering the top of the fuselage. The pilots called out on intercom, "what was that noise back there?" and I ran forward into the cockpit. The two pilots and flight engineer looked back at me, saw the tomato sauce all over my face, all three of them screamed "holy shit", and radioed the base to declare an emergency. They thought that there had been an explosion in the aft section of the aircraft and that I was bleeding to death! I said, "I'm OK, its just tomato sauce", and explained the situation to them. Everybody got a big laugh out of this but the back of the aircraft was a mess. There was tomato sauce everywhere. When I had observed the other experienced crewmen preparing their cans I had missed the fact that each one of them had punched a vent hole in the top. That particular aircraft, a VP-8 P-3B, went to the boneyard at Davis Monthan AFB in 1982 with a big orange stain in the fabric overhead panels in the galley area. The maintenance people were never able to get that stain out.
Getting back on topic, when crews were deployed operational outside of the Continental United States we'd be issued a "Cruise Box" filled with cooking equipment. Often the crew would start a "chow fund" into which you'd pay ten bucks or so per week. One crewman, usually the in-flight technician or ordnanceman (on my VP-8 crew it was the IFT), would volunteer to serve as cook and he'd guarantee that we'd eat on our flights. The meals served would depend upon the flight schedule. For example, if we were flying a 12 hour mission from 2 AM to 2 PM we'd get breakfast and lunch. The cooking equipment consisted of hot plates and pans and things like that. We'd be served pancakes, bacon and eggs, corned beef hash, waffles, sausages, hamburger helper, etc. All of the crew would be expected to help with the shopping and clean-up. This always worked well and actually gave us something to look forward to on a long flight. Even today I can remember the feeling of anticipation, after four hours or so on station watching the radar, when the IFT started distributing hot pancakes and sausages for breakfast on the aircraft. He'd start at the cockpit and work his was down the "tube".
The in-flight ration situation was a little different when we flew out of US Air Force bases. There, we always had a choice of getting frozen TV dinners or MREs. The frozen TV dinners were very basic commercial products. I think they were Swanson's. You could have roast beef, fried chicken, or turkey and the Air Force mess hall would throw in a piece of fruit and something to drink. MREs were always available, but I only became aware of this when I was flying counter-narcotics missions out of Howard AFB in Panama with VP-92 during the mid 1990s. I went to the flight kitchen, as the USAF called it, to pick up some food for the crew. The guy at the flight kitchen asked me if I wanted TV dinners or MREs. This was the first time I learned that MREs were an option at USAF bases. The guy at the flight kitchen told me that they usually didn't offer them, though they were always available, because they weren't popular! Me and one of the other guys on my regular crew, an active duty reservist (TAR) AO named Ron Clemments, used to get MREs for all our in-flight meals whenever we flew out of Air Force bases from then on. Nobody else wanted them and they used to act disgusted and kid us about them when we ate them. Although I'd had C-Rations while attending Naval Aircrew Candidate School at Pensacola, Florida during the spring of 1980 during a land-survival course at Egland AFB, this was the first time that I had ever heard or or tried an MRE.
For one two-week annual training period my crew participated in a NATO exercise staged out of the RAF base at Macrihanish, Scotland. The RAF people took very good care of their aircrews. We had in-flight meals that were prepared to order for us on the base. We literally could ask for anything we wanted. The meals were hand-packed in disposable foil-covered metal containers similar to deep pie plates that we could heat in the aircraft's oven. We were authorized two of these things per flight. I used to ask for steak and potatoes for every meal and they would make it for me. The only restriction the RAF guys put on us was that all the pilots could not have the same thing. This was to avoid the possibility of all the pilots coming down with food poisoning.
In summation, in 20 years of flying for the Navy I never saw any kind of special pre-packaged in-flight rations. The closest we came to this was getting MREs, on request, at Air Force bases. As an aside, I was trained on the P-3 by VP-30 at NAS Jacksonville, Florida during the summer of 1980. When I arrived there was a short delay in my class starting so I was sent down to the squadron's parachute loft for a couple of days to help them out and keep me busy. One day they had me filling survival kits for life vests and life rafts. Among the many items that we had to put into the survival kits was green plastic MRE-type bags filled with a couple of packages of Charms candies. I actually was sent out to a storage locker, which was filled with cases of these things, to bring some back to the squadron. Needless to say, I ate a lot of Charms candies that week and for some time afterwards. I think I still have one of these green packages full of Charms candies somewhere at home.
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P3_Orion_EWO
- Posts: 19
- Joined: Tue Nov 08, 2011 11:54 am
- Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Re: B-52 Bomber Crew Rations
One more thing. I went on board an RAF Nimrod once during a joint ASW training exercise. The RAF crew had been given fresh strawberries and cream for their lunch. Needless to say, all us USN guys were very impressed.
Re: B-52 Bomber Crew Rations
biscuits brown wrote:Just found out the Shackleton MR3 DID have a proper galley, sleeping bunks and larger fuselage. It was for 18 -20 hr ASW patrols, so it was much heavier than earlier Shackletons. It needed JATO rockets to take off.Treesuit wrote:BB,
Fascinating. The Shackleton looks more like a modified B-24 for ASW duty. I can't imagine anybody having a heater/stove for hot food on that!But now that I see the NIMROD aircraft it's feasible to think that somebody might have a hot plate in a small galley to get something warm for a long flight. The thought of US P-3A Orion aircraft come to mind doing the same duty over the Pacific. Long flights do get a bit boring.
Oh and BB, Did anybody in the MoD ever think of the idea of self heating meals back then much like the US.
This schematic of the crew galley and sleeping quarters of a Nimrod MR2 has recently been declassified though..
IPA = India Pale Ale. A gold coloured beer, between 4 - 6%
It also turns out the Sunderland flying boat had a galley with a two burner Primus Stove and oven, paraffin/kerosene powered.
"Wardroom,centre table two bunks,the galley,compared with other aircraft quite spacious,worktable fore and aft,twin primus stoves with oven,wash basin and plenty of stowage space."
Source : http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-331471.html
All the best
Richard
South Wales UK
Richard
South Wales UK
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rationtin440
- Posts: 1170
- Joined: Wed Jan 20, 2010 10:53 am
- Location: occupied territories, new england
Re: B-52 Bomber Crew Rations
Everyone, thanks so much for all of this information! I guess I never realized how relatively lucky we Army national guard folks were, even eating the "leftovers" MCIs before we finally got MREs. What some of those aircrews would have had to--- and did have to---endure whether during peacetime, cold war deterrence missions, or WWIII, I guess I have nothing to complain about!