TBT-

This one comes with a few memories…

Lajes

Cafe Acores, George the Crook, Fast Eddies, Matteus Rose, goat cheese and fresh bread, beautiful filigree silver and gold jewelry…

Oh yeah, and winds that would blow your ass sideways…  There was a C-130 ‘parked’ on the side of the hill behind the hangars thanks to one helluva crosswind and being too heavy to go around.  If memory serves, the entire crew survived though!

One of the scariest landings I ever lived through, approaching from the seaward side, we ‘developed’ a 3000+fpm rate of descent at about three hundred feet, full power, stall warning, figuring we were going to hit the cliff… updraft and a greaser landing… And about half the crew had to go change underwear (me included)…

USAF SOP was to call in from FL300 and get a wind check, if it was too high, they kept on truckin for Torrejon…

Where is it???

Hint- Middle of the Atlantic Ocean…

Praia da Vitória, Portugal  Better known to the military folks as Lajes!

Comments

TBT- — 11 Comments

    • whoops, didn’t see the actual location at the bottom of your post. i was close!

  1. Azores islands. Our crew RO1N’d there and we went out and had the best steak dinner I’ve ever had. And it only cost $6.00 per person 1980’s dollars(we left a huge tip). Seems that the Brunswick squadrons had the Lajes/Rota deployments locked up. The Jax squadrons got the Iceland/Bermuda/Sigonella rotation. So, anytime one of our planes just happened to be close to Lajes, they would develop some malfunction that would require landing there to be dutifully checked out by the flight engineer. Normally took just long enough for the rest of the crew to high tail it over to the class 6 store and fill the duty truck with wine. The plane always seemed to have a much higher gross take off weight when leaving the island.

  2. I hadn’t seen that one before; thought at first you were talking about Adak or some such place, but knew it was an island.

    Sounds like, ahem, fun. 🙂

  3. Laura- You were! 🙂

    Ray- LOL, yeah, on the money! I did Kef, Bermuda and Sig… sigh… Got a few ‘dets’ on Lajes and Rota though.

    Rev- It has TREES… Not Adak…LOL

    NC- That they did!

    WSF- I’d say more ‘interesting’ than beautiful! Old/rundown in a lot of places. It’s hard for them to get anything other than via ship.

  4. Sorry for responding late, but I was going to say Azores, you gave it away with Cafe Acores and middle of the Atlantic.