The White Falcon - 30.10.1970, Blaðsíða 1
THE WHITE FALCON
Vol. XIII, No. 49
U.S. Naval Station, Keflavik, Iceland
October 30, 1970
Jules Verne hut reads the sky's palm
(Photo by AN Robin L. Wagner)
Patrol Squadrons 49 and 56 will swap stations
next week as the 49ers depart for their home base
at Patuxent River, Md., and the first VP-56 planes
from Pax River start arriving here.
The exchange will be official next Friday, No-
vember 6, when VP-56 skipper Cdr. Melvin Meltzer
relieves 49's Cdr. Robert W. Wisdom. Cdr. StevenE.
Kish is the executive officer for VP-56.
The 56ers, who sport dragons on their planes,
are no newcomers to the antisubmarine warfare busi-
ness. They were the first squadron in the Navy to
fly the P-3C, the newest and most advanced anti-
submarine plane.
The squadron's history goes back more than 20
years when it was commissioned Patrol Squadron 900
as part of the naval reserve program. After two
name changes it was designated VP-56 in 1953.
The squadron won the Battle Efficiency Pennant
for patrol squadrons in July 1961 and was awarded
the Capt. Isabell ASW Trophy for excellence in anti-
submarine warfare that same year.
The squadron received several well done's and a
(See DRAGONS, Page 5)
Woodpeckers fly home;
Pax Dragons roar in
rocket rising out of the land-
scape.
The strange building, a small
but critical division of the
Fleet Weather Facility, houses
the radar and
recording equip-
ment necessary
to collect data
on upper atmos-
phere wind ve-
locity and di-
rection, tem-
perature, and
humidity. RA-
WINSONDE means
radar, wind,
sounding and ra-
diosonde.
The radar
tracking equip-
ment, covered
by the odd sha-
ped dome with
portholes,picks
up the signals
emitted by a
weather balloon launched from the
base every six hours. The balloon
carries a small battery-powered
transmitter called a radiosonde
that sends meterological data to
the seven Navy weathermen and
their Icelandic counterparts who
man Bldg. 187 around-the-clock.
A typical weather balloon is
filled with helium and blows up
to about six feet in diameter be-
fore it is ready to be released.
The balloon liftoffs are staged
from Bldg. T-50 located across
the field from RAWINSONDE.
Because of the change in air
pressurefrom sea level to the up-
per atmosphere, the balloon may
have expanded to 100 feet in di-
ameter by the time it has climb-
ed to 100,000 feet. It's skin
will have stretched so tight that
the rubber shell will be no fat-
ter than one-one hundredth the
thickness of a paycheck.
When the balloon finally
(See JULES, Page 3)
On a base spotted with quonset
huts and marked by a lack of dis-
tinctive architecture, the RAW-
INSONDE Building, near the Youth
Center, looks like a Jules Verne