Air Force Career
Kennedy was commissioned through the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps program at the University of Kentucky on 31 August 1955. After completing Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma, Kennedy entered helicopter training and completed it in March 1957. His first assignment was at Oxnard Air Force Base, California, from March 1957 to March 1959, flying Sikorsky SH-19B search and rescue helicopters, after which he completed Weapons Controller training and was assigned to the 4640th Support Squadron at Norton Air Force Base, California, from December 1960 to August 1962.
He was next assigned to the 963rd Airborne Early Warning and Control Squadron, 552nd AEWC Wing at McClellan Air Force Base, California, as a pilot flying EC-121 Warning Stars. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was assigned to its 966th AEWC Squadron based at McCoy Air Force Base, Florida, flying specially-modified EC-121Qs on Gold Digger missions (tracking Lockheed U-2 surveillance flights) and monitoring Cuban airspace.
In April 1965, still part of the airborne early warning force, Kennedy, now a captain and aircraft commander, was one of several crews of the 552nd AEWCW to be sent to Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon, South Vietnam, as part of the Big Eye Task Force.
Upon completion of his temporary duty in Vietnam, Kennedy completed upgrade training to the HH-3E rescue helicopter at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, and became a pilot with the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service (ARRS).
Read more about this topic: Leland T. Kennedy
Famous quotes containing the words air, force and/or career:
“That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.”
—Elizabeth Gould Davis (b. 1910)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)