The National Lake Eutrophication Survey 1971-1973

The following is to the best of my recollection. I haven't even
changed the name of a buddy I was with during these events. I may be
wrong about some of the statistics, like the number of divorces and
number of hot babes in the restaurants, but I'm close. Almost none of
this is an exageration from what I remember, although it might be
flawed in some of the fine detail. I only hope that most of the
people who participated in this activity will find the humor in my
telling it and won't take offense. If any of you pilots out there
find that I've said anything wrong here, the I will be happy to
recant. This is a multi part story and I'm not telling this to ****
anyone off, I'm just trying to make some notes on what I think I saw
and the way I interpreted it.

This is MY recollection and it may be incorrect. It's not intended to
offend or degrade anyone's name, profession or contribution to this
great project. You were all heros in many ways and you all worked
your butts off to make this mission happen. You were also all rewared
by the United States Environmental Protection Agency's highest honor,
the Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement. So, I want to take
nothing away from you or your honor. All of us flew in adverse
conditions, many hundreds of times to benefit our nation on this
project. If I have insulted anyone by telling this true story then I
am sorry and I will be happy to stand corrected. We all flew in
marginal conditions and bent the rules to make the job work. It is
what is expected of a pilot, all of us.

Bill Phillips


Part One


In 1971 Richard Millhouse Nixon was the President of the United States
of America. He was a person who was steeped in the bull **** of
Washington and a crook to boot. He was so deceitful that his nickname
was "Tricky Dicky." He was serving his first term in office and was
up for reelection in 1972. Well, I went farther than that calling him
Tricky Dicky and concocted a little quip that I wrote on **** house
walls. We young guys ( I was 22) hated this war monger and wanted his
ass out of the White House because he was in the pockets of big
industry and they were the ones who were driving the war in Viet Nam.
There was no reason to be in Viet Nam other than to support war
industry in this country. We had a lot of old bombs and bullets we
needed to use up and the War Machine which was Big Industry needed
lucrative contracts to replace them. It was a rip roarin' time for
the economy. War always is.

Anyway the little quip I wrote on bathroom walls was this:

Don't pull the Dick out,
In the middle of the screw!
Vote for Nixon in "72"

I loved this. I wrote this everywhere, then drew a swastika next to
it. My buddies were coming home in droves to be buried in cemeteries
around my home valley. I had enlisted in the Air Farce and taken all
the exams for OTS then flight training school and was scheduled to go
to Lackland AFB to start training in July 1971. Then something really
goofy happened. I was at the induction center ONE day after I
graduated from college. Yes, I was on a bus the next morning at
06-hundred hours headed for Phoenix for my physical. They asked me if
I had any major dislocating joints and I had to tell them that my
shoulder popped out of socket sometimes. I didn't think anything
about it, because I could always get it back in. But, I got the red
stamp and they kicked me out of the induction center. This ****ed me
off to no avail, but I was screwed. Should have kept my big ****ing
mouth shut. No flight school, no Air Farce, no nuttin'…"get yo' white
ass on that thar bus and go home white boy," some black sergeant
screamed at me.

Well, that was that. I was screwed. I went back home and started
looking for a job. I couldn't find one because anyone who knew
anything in those days would have known that someone with a B.S. in
physics was about as employable as an 8th grade graduate or someone
with another useless degree like one in Polly Sci or Philosophy. So,
being born a poor Black, Chinese, Jewish Scott, with no money, I
needed a job and I needed one fast. I had $220 in the bank, my
parents were poor and couldn't do anything to help me if they wanted
to. So, I got a job in the Physics Dept. at UNLV teaching labs that
summer for $1500 bucks (my salary for all summer). That fall as a
teaching assistant, I went back to grad school, not because I liked
school, but because I was so ****ing poor that was the only way I
could eat. I taught intro physics courses to the wantabee doctors at
the freshman level to stay alive. I doubled up on the course work and
finished almost all the classes I needed for my master's degree in
astrophysics by the spring of 1972. That was when the fun began.

I went to work at the EPA lab (on campus) on a Monday sometime in June
1972. They stuck me on some laser particulate sensor that they
couldn't calibrate. It was an air pollution device to detect
visibility. Now, as I was saying, I was just a poo Black, Jewish,
Chinaman whose ancestors came from Nova Scotia or Scotland and they
saved every nickel so we never traveled farther than Cortez Colorado
in my entire life. On Tuesday I went to work and my boss says to me,
"can you be ready to leave for New York in two hours?" I just about
fainted. I ran home which was about 5 minutes away and packed
everything I could find. Everything I owned fit in one suitcase (did
I mention that I was dirt poor). I got my boss to come and pick me up
and I was on an airliner, a DC-8 headed for Newark an hour later.
From there I flew north to Rome (or Utica), New York (Griffis AFB) and
joined a team of crazy son's a bitches with three Huey helicopters, a
Hughes 269 and a single engine Otter on Amphibious floats.

Well, since I had a commercial airplane license, my boss figured me a
natural to join up with this scruffy team of card carrying crazies on
the National Lake Eutrophication Survey (NLES). The real deal was
this: Nixon was so scared about environmental issues and his lack of
addressing them, someone in his staff concocted this three year survey
to make the President look visible on environmental issues. They
impounded three UH-1H Army Huey's (one with bullet holes all over it),
they painted them white and put the big EPA flower (insignia) on the
side of them. Then they figured a way to fly the **** out of them for
three years to every state in the union sampling fresh water lakes
4-times each year at each location.

They started with lakes in the New England states and that's why I met
up with them in upstate New York. They had just started the survey
there at lake Utica or Oneida or something like that. They had to
sample each lake in the spring, summer, autumn and winter. Then we'd
move on to a different sector of the U.S. the next year. The third
year we ended up in the West...Tahoe, Crater lake, Seattle area, what
a ball.

For you pencil necked science geeks out there, we landed on the lake
on floats and dropped a probe. That probe measured dissolved oxygen
(DO), turbidity (visibility), conductivity (salt content) and
temperature with depth. We'd drop the probe until we got below the
inversion layer and the DO went to zero. We pumped up samples and put
them into polyethylene bottles along with an iodine stain called
"Lugol." Those were sent to the field lab trailer that evening for
algae species identification by the biologists. Some were sent back
to Vegas for more complex analysis that was all done by O'ring Seals
who was the water chemist for the entire project.

We essentially went from Air Farce base to Air farce base because we
got cheap food, had BX privileges and we got all the fuel there real
cheap…or for free, hell I don't know. We started at a U-2 base in
Rome New York (Griffis) and worked our way all across the country from
AFB to AFB. I saw the U-2 launch out of Griffis many times. For a
kid, this project was a boon.

We never slept on the AFB's. We always stayed in town in a motel or
hotel. When we were in Oshkosh, Wi for instance we stayed at the
Pioneer Inn on lake Winnebago . Every evening we'd land the Hueys on
the green grassy knoll in front of the place right on the lake. At
Lake Geneva where the Playboy club is, we stayed close, but I can't
remember where. I know that we bought all our Jet-A there and had
lunch there...many times.

A typical day went like this: Get up 04-hundred. Drive 5 miles to
Westover AFB in Mass. Be in the cockpit at 05-hundred. Spool up and
depart from Springfield and scud-run through the pass to Albany, NY
then turn north to New Hampshire and sample lakes all day until we
crapped out about noon. The Amphibious Otter would bring a new crew
in to take the helicopter for the rest of the day and we'd fly that
piece of **** (we called it the leapin' goose) back to base. Then we
were off. So, it was about a 10 hour day for two crews on each Huey.
That was six man-days, or flight days we got each day in the summers.
Winters didn't work that way, but for a good 9 months out of the year
it worked like that.

The Leapin' Goose was a colossal piece of crap. It was fine
mechanically but it had this yaw to it that would even make the Pope
puke. If you didn't set right under the wing, you were one sick mutha
by the time you got home. I flew it a lot since I was airplane
rated. The cockpit seemed fine to me and didn't make me sick. But
when I flew it NOBODY got sick. I crammed the **** out of the power
on it to do that. Most of the pilots were working for an asshole and
he made them run it way below normal power settings to try and
conserve the engine, the fuel, the whatever. When I flew that piece
of ****, I held 85% power all the time. It seemed to take this to
keep the tail from wagging if I had a full load of people. I could
write for hours about the illiterate pricks who were in command of
this operation from the flight end of things and the crap they put the
professional pilots through, but then I'd get ****ed and it would ruin
my story.

There were normally 21 people on the team. There were only two of us
who were not married, Jeff Van Ee and me. We were just little then,
you know, like real young. Jeff was an engineer and he and I sort of
"hung" together. We were thrown in with these guys who had just come
from Viet Nam, were ****ed, and actually sort of scary to Jeff and I.
What happened was the most unbelievable thing I ever saw. We would
move to a new place for the first time and fly the missions. At night
the pilots, mechanics, other engineers and scientists would find out
where all the pussy hung out and they'd chase them. The first visit
to a new place wasn't all that revealing because it was just
reconnaissance. The local girls would find out about us and the team
would find the best watering holes. As I said, we started this in the
spring. In the summer on our second pass though a place all hell
would break loose. They treated us like astronauts. We could do no
wrong. We started landing the helicopters at the motels when the
second shift team would come home and we'd spool up from the motel in
the morning. Those big ships and all the noise made us heroes. We
soon became sex objects by all the horny and single women in each
region.

At lunch we'd simply land at a drive in. We'd spool down, then get
out with all this florescent orange floatation gear all over us, wires
hanging from our headsets, helmets, etc. I'd walk up to the ordering
window and say, "Can I have a hamburger and a malt...o go?" The young
women went nuts.

I am going to say this once and it's the absolute truth. Jeff and I
were not into chasing the women. Yes, in three years, some things
happened...more toward the end when we got a couple more years of
adulthood under our belts. But we were both pretty straight. And we
were the only single guys that I can remember being on the team (there
might have been more but I dont' think so). I might be wrong about
this too, but if I recall correctly, there were 19 divorces among the
other team members over the term of the project. Jeff and I were just
pencil necked science geeks. God...youth is wasted on the wrong
people. If I had it to do over, I would have made Trojan rubber
company rich.

This was the typical winter mission op:

In the morning about 07-hundred we'd all go to breakfast in the motel
restaurant, all 21 to 25 of us (we always had a few visiting guys).
Now, the deal was to bring whomever you slept with, over that night,
to breakfast with you so the whole gang could see them. But, the poor
girl you were with had no idea that everybody in that café was part of
the helicopter team. We all dressed differently and we were of all
ages. It was impossible to tell. We looked like tourists to any of
them. We were tourists! But, what you saw was the most incredible
thing I ever saw, and that was: Married men coming to breakfast with
absolute foxy women they'd just spent the night with. It was
hilarious in many ways. Many times there was no one else in the damn
place but crew, not a SINGLE person. There were times when in a
restaurant, WE were having breakfast, and it was populated by 15
women, all of whom had spent the entire night with whomever they were
with there at breakfast. It was the biggest joke we had and no one
ever ratted out anyone. I'll go to my grave with the names of the
guys I saw pulling this.

To me, raised by a dad and a mom who loved one another and would have
never cheated no matter what, I had never even thought that grown,
"married" men would act this way. But, they did. It was part of a
maturation process to see this.

Part II of this is the first of a few parts on the flying that we did.

If you liked this, I'll continue. If you don't like it then I may
just forget it. You tell me. But, this is real life stuff. If you
want to read it I'll write more. It's your choice RAH.

I've already written a lot of the flying stuff and I can just cut and
paste it. But, I really don't want any guff from anyone over any of
it. It all happened. It's my memory of it and it might not be
completely accurate in a court of law. But it's to the best of my
recollection.

I'm going to use some other (real) names in it if I post it, because
these pilots were instrumental in me learning to be a good
PROFESSIONAL pilot. If you all feel that I'm a piece of **** (you
know the drill, haven't built anything, don't know anything, blaa blaa
blaa) and you don't want to read any of this, then tell me and I won't
waste my time. I'll just put it in a book I'm writing sell it someday
and make money off it.

It's your choice RAH. I can back all of it. It's all true and it's
only a miniscule event in the history of my flying career. If you
jealous people who have never built anything and never flown hard
missions can't sit through it because you are invious, then tell me
now before I post it.


BWB