When I discovered my father’s sea chest in an ostensibly secure area of our garage, I found myself knee deep in memorabilia from his days as a U.S. naval aviator. Among the artifacts, I found a set of gold Navy wings, leather patches, and a 1,000-hour lapel pin from Lockheed. I knew my father spent a lot of time stationed in Canada—but doing what? My only clues had been his 1950s leather flight jacket and a picture on the fireplace mantel of him in dress uniform, standing in front of a squadron emblem “AEWRON ELEVEN.” At the bottom of the chest, I found small boxes of Ansochrome color slides that were as crisp and bright as they were when they were shot in January 1957.
I was moved by the image of the 23-year-old lieutenant in his navy blues, standing in front of a multi-engine, royal- blue aircraft with strange bulges above and below the fuselage—a modified Lockheed Super Constellation (later the U.S. Navy WV-2 Warning Star), a reconnaissance and early-warning radar-intelligence aircraft of Airborne Early Warning Squadron (AEWRON) 11 (VW-11).
When Commander J. J. Richardson reported to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, in July 1955, he became the first commanding officer of VW-11, one of three squadrons that would comprise the Atlantic Early Warning Wing. In May 1956—the first time an airborne early- warning unit of its size (135 officers and 600 enlisted) would operate for an extended period outside the Continental United States—VW-11 deployed to Argentia and immediately commenced flight operations. Its mission was to provide an airborne early-warning barrier to protect the East Coast of the United States against a possible surprise attack and to meet the Navy’s commitment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin Atlantic barrier operations by 1 July 1956. Except for a few Navy picket ships, extended radar coverage off the East Coast was nearly nonexistent, and crews of VW-11 took their assignment with a sense of urgency. Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, Lockheed’s chief engineer, said at the time, “These flying radar stations can provide as much as three to five hours warning of an enemy attack against this country—something we never had before. That’s the next best thing to a telephone warning from the enemy himself.”
The Warning Stars soon began takeoffs on a schedule so precise that Argentia base personnel could set their watches against the roar of the four 3,250-horsepower Wright engines. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a skyward procession of Warning Stars probed the vast reaches of the north Atlantic, manning the Atlantic barrier from Newfoundland to the Azores. The Barrier was formidable—some 2,000 miles long, 100 miles high, and 500 miles wide—and the WV-2s normally patrolled for 12-15 hours—occasionally longer.
The 600-gallon wing-tip tanks and, later, the 1,000-gallon fuselage tank, provided 8,770 gallons of fuel and a 24- hour endurance. The crews numbered from 26 to 31, including a pilot, copilot, two navigators, two flight engineers, two combat information center officers, two radiomen, one flight orderly, one radar technician, two electronic countermeasures operators, and five to six radarmen. The nearly six tons of electronics gear were also impressive for the day.
By the time the distant early-warning line became operational on 1 August 1957, the 13 Warning Stars of VW-11 had already logged 165 flights at more than 3,114 hours. Two months later, the Soviet Sputnik satellite launch accelerated this already intense pace, despite some of the worst flying conditions in the world: takeoffs in winds up to 106 miles per hour, and return landings with 34-miles-per-hour crosswinds. Once on the ground, there were often delays—because of the extreme cold, frozen hangar doors sometimes had to be thawed with blow torches.
At the end of 1957, fears of a missile gap replaced fears of a bomber gap. VW-11 flew for four more years on the Newfoundland-Azores barrier before receiving new orders to Keflavik, Iceland, to begin flying a barrier even farther east, the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap, in the improved and newly designated Warning Star. The squadron patrolled that barrier until 26 August 1965, when Captain L. W. Bunce, commanding officer of VW-11, flew the last Atlantic barrier mission for the last operational barrier squadron.
Two months later the Atlantic extension of the distant early-warning line was officially dissolved, and VW-11 was decommissioned with a record of 80,000 accident-free hours of flying the barrier—a record attributable to the bravery and skill of the crews and maintenance personnel, together with the rock-solid performance of the enduring Lockheed Warning Star.