THE “C” IN AC& W

We all remember what the letters stood for but most AC& W squadron personnel were not directly involved with the Control part of the mission. I was lucky to work as an Intercept Control Technician for the last year that the 637^th operated as a manual site before conversion to SAGE. There were four of us on the ICT team and we each worked with our assigned controller. Our duties were to assist the intercept controller with calculations of angles of attack, coordinating vectors to target and target data. One of the other duties were to do the numbers for the fighters fuel/time remaining. To assist us in those calculations we had flight performance wheels which had all of the data needed to figure range for fuel remaining, turning radius, brake release to altitude figures, etc: early in my stint as an ICT we had F-86 L’s to control and later F104’s. We always thought the F-86’s were fast until the F104 with its stubby 6 foot wings and mach 2 flight capability showed up; but that is another story. For some reason I have held onto one of the F-86 performance wheels. See picture.

F-86 performance guides. One side for aircraft with tanks, other side clean.