*First appeared in Air Force Times, fall 2000
This week* we celebrate the 46th anniversary of the Cessna T-37, which first flew on 12 October, 1954. Nearly 1300 “Tweets” were manufactured before the production line closed in 1977: this number includes the trainer, attack (A-37) and Forward Air Control, or FAC (OA-37) versions.
The Tweet began its USAF service as a primary jet trainer in 1957, and is only now* being replaced by the T-6 Texan II, a Raytheon-built turboprop. Like every other Air Force pilot trained during the last four decades, I flew the T-37 in pilot school.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote some very moving words about pilots falling permanently in love with their first fighter plane. I would quote them here but they don’t apply: the T-37 is not a fighter plane, and no student ever fell in love with the Tweet.
I remember stepping out to the T-37B for the first time. The airplane looked stubby and phlegmatic as it squatted on the broiling West Texas ramp. After my instructor and I finished a quick walkaround (there wasn’t much to look at), we climbed in and started the two bird-whistles that passed for the Tweet’s engines—designed, our instructors told us, to convert jet fuel directly into noise. Every Air Force pilot I’ve met has a little dip on his hearing chart from exposure to the shriek of those J-69 engines.
I don’t remember feeling comfortable in the airplane during those early rides. The clamshell canopy was much more efficient at focusing the sun’s heat in the cockpit than the air-conditioning was at dispersing it. Some deranged engineer had scattered the instruments randomly all over the dashboard. I couldn’t hear anything clearly through the helmet’s earphones, and couldn’t breathe through the oxygen mask unless I stopped flying to think about it. The instructor’s garbled, shouted instructions—although kindly intended—caused me to flinch and further distracted me from the business at hand. Sweat ran into my eyes, soaked through my flight suit and caused my death grip on the stick and throttles to slip.
The heat had another disastrous side effect: no sooner had the instructor taken the controls to demonstrate acrobatics than I was fumbling for the barf bag tucked into the leg pocket of my flight suit. I hit the bag, at least; some of my classmates did not. It was this unglamorous aspect of primary jet training that gave the Training Command T-37s their characteristic reek: sweat, jet fuel, and vomit.
Some washed out of training at that point, but most of us went on to master the Tweet and eventually moved up to fly the sleek and glamorous T-38 Talon. Now there was a jet! It was fast—supersonic!—and agile, and it looked like a fighter.** We all had our pictures taken standing next to our sexy T-38s, and never looked back at the drab, smelly little Tweets.
But Fate and the rated officer assignment system can be fickle, and so it was that after pilot training I found myself flying one of the few aircraft in the Air Force inventory even less glamorous than the T-37B.
The O-2A Skymaster, or “Duck” to its pilots, was the military version of the push-pull Cessna 337, painted green and loaded with radios and rocket pods. It had done outstanding service in Southeast Asia as a FAC aircraft, but by the early 1980s our O-2s were tired and prone to failure, sometimes catastrophically. The commander of Tactical Air Command put his staff to work to find us a safe and economical replacement.
We began to hear rumors, but before we could bring ourselves to believe them, our “new” airplanes began to arrive: Tweets! And these weren’t the supercharged attack version, either: just regular hand-me-down T-37Bs from the Training Command, painted green.
We loved them.
Compared to the O-2, our new Tweets were fast. Early in the conversion, two lieutenants came back from a mission shrieking with laughter: an A-10 had been forced to ask them to slow down as they led him to a target! No matter that the Tweet had been diving at near redline, and the A-10 had been climbing, staggering under a full ordnance load: we were faster.
No longer did our ramp sound like a WWI flying ace movie: it howled with the noise of real jets.
We were Tweet pilots—and proud of it.
**The now-venerable T-38 is being replaced by the Boeing T-7A Red Hawk