Oral History Interview with Pete Lanchak, October 7, 2005 Page: 5

                                
It's the type of radar, all it did, is have blips and you'd pick something up. We had
antennas on the wings and the nose and if you picked something up you'd get blip and
would go back and take a look at it. So then the squads broke up, Ray Lands was a close
buddy of mine, he was the one that activated the longest TBI here in Houston. His
squadron went to Ecuador. And then we had another squadron go over to Trinidad, so
the three of us were flying different routes of patrol. Well, then war was declared, so we
kept flying this time looking for...
MR. METZLER: Tell me what squadron, what wing, what air group? Give me a feel for
where you are in the organization.
MR. LANCHAK: I was in the 74t'.
MR. METZLER: Seventeenth?
MR. LANCHAK: No, I can't recall what it was. All I can recall is our insignia then had
a pirate's head and on our airplanes we had the bird that they have over there in Panama
supposed to be able to fish real well, just dive from the sky right on down into the water.
We had that bird as an insignia on the plane. I flew as a gunner all day. All we did was
look out the windows to see what we could see. War was declared so we flew some more
missions so they decided well, we're going go overseas but they didn't tell us where. So
they flew us from Guatemala and outfit Ray Land's crew from Ecuador. Three crews got

together into Florida. When we got to Florida we stayed overnight. Then they woke us
up one day and said we're leaving. When we left we had no planes, they wouldn't let us
take the planes out of the Caribbean. Here comes a civilian airplane, Pan Am with a
stewardess on board so all the crews got on there and flew us down to South America,
Belize, and the usual route over to Ascension Island over to Africa.

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