Workday? I can remember on at least two occasions putting in 36 hour workday. Busting my ass in the office trying to get end of month reports filled in and printed (pre-computer age. typewriter), then go flying for 8 hours, then after landing going back to the office to finish the reports.

During deployment, if we had a soviet sub in our op area, we would go into a “flap”. 24 hour surveillance on the target until they were out of the area. There was one instance in the late 70’s where we had 3 subs in the Greenland/Iceland/UK gap. We couldn’t cover all of them with the number of planes and crews we had, so the Skipper called AIRLANT and got permission to cut crew rest hours from the normal 15 hours between flights down to 9 hours. For the next two weeks you were either flying, getting ready to fly, or sleeping. We grabbed food where we could either in the hangar gedunk and inflight meals we prepared or if you were really energetic you hauled yourself to the mess hall, choked something down then went back to the barracks to sleep. It was one of the toughest periods in my career. But as bad as it was for the flight crews, the maintenance people had it even worse trying to keep all the P-3’s flying.

I always loved it when we were at sea but were allowed to work 1/2 days.

Sundays. Holidays. Sometimes even for a birthday.

Only having to work 12 hours was like a vacation.

Expanding on Ray’s comment; Every Christmas/New Year period a Russian would poke it’s nose up somewhere in the Pacific northwest and the squadrons at Whidbey would “Flap” for the better part of a month. Sucked to be in the “Alert” squadron.

As far a AF accomodations, I had occasion to visit one Airman’s quarters back in ’65. While our VR squadron at Tachikawa was in WWII Japanese Quonset Hut type, 8 to a room, the AF dude WAS in a friggen apartment, by himself.