Issue 10: Tech from the Military

14 | ORIGINS
Well also it turns out that
the place I was stationed at
was considered “remote isolated.”
This meant there was
probably only 300 personnel
there. There was actually 600
total, but 300 of them were
Danish people who lived in
Greenland. So it was remote
isolated which meant no
women. It was isolated. As a
matter of fact, there were actually
no roads in Greenland.
The longest road in Greenland
was on our base, which
went from the base down
to the fjord. When the ships
came in during the summertime,
they’d resupply us.
It also turned out that on this base, it was an ICO
(which stands for “International Civil Organization”).
Their job was to transfer all the flight plans
for all the airplanes that flew over the North Atlantic.
This was every plane that flew to Europe
through the North Atlantic because that’s how
they get there in the shortest way.
But you weren’t flying in cargo. What did you
have to do?
I was the man from ICO, which meant I stood in
a room about 20 feet by 20 feet, probably 400
square feet that had about 20 teletype machines.
Every teletype machine was tied to a certain air
space area in the United States and in Europe. My
job was to take flight plans leaving the United
States or Europe on teletape tape, take it from
one machine, and go over and feed it into the
machine where the plane was going. So that,
back then, was how they transferred the flight
plans and patterns of planes flying across the
ocean. I took them from one teletype machine
and put it in the next correct teletype machine.
An example would be like leaving New York Kennedy
in the United States and flying to Heathro,
London in England. And I would have to do that.
All airplane traffic came through that room for
the whole northern part of the world really.
DADEROT/NATIONAL ELECTRONICS MUSEUM | CC0 1.0
Did this ever cause difficulties?
Every once and a while a plane was lost. They
couldn’t find a plane. For that, we had an air
rescue operation. Unfortunately, because of my
work schedule, I was never able to go on it. You
could volunteer to go on these rescue missions
to find out where these planes went. A lot of
times it was just that the information got lost,
because, you know, it was just teletype machines.
I also had to type things on these ticket tapes.
Sometimes, the flight plans would come over the
teletype but wouldn’t come out as a hard copy
and I would have to retype it to send it on. Of
course I could already type pretty fast, but I ended
up able to type probably 140 to 160 words
per minute on a teletype machine. Because that’s
all I did all day; that’s all I did for my 8 hour shift.
What did you do when you weren’t typing or
moving teletapes?
So I was in Greenland, I actually liked it there. I
was out of the 600 total personnel on base there
was only six of us that did not drink. Everybody
else was inebriated the whole year tour there. So
there was only six of us who also happened to be
the six in the chapel program, which I ended up
getting an award for from the Air Force. I got a
special award for being in Greenland and being
in the chapel, probably because I wasn’t drunk.
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