TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- Russell “Russ” Lathrop was 9 years old when aviation lifted his feet off the ground — literally and figuratively — in the middle of the Great Depression.
His next-door neighbor in the southern Oklahoma town of Ardmore was Ben Scott. He was a mechanic and aviator who flew out of the local sod-runway airport in the fabric-wrapped, wooden airplanes of the day. Russ would get excited anytime Mrs. Scott would ride to the airport to fetch her husband and ask him to tag along.
In the barnstorming early days of aviation, the young boy was fascinated by the chug-chug and roar of engines sputtering to life, the pungent aroma from belching plumes of smoke and the sight of daring pilots wrestling wings to leave the earth.
Mr. Scott brought Russ with him on special flights. Flying near Roswell, N.M., he switched the controls to Russ’s side. He let him fly and float on the air. Meanwhile, Mr. Scott grabbed his accordion to accompany the flight home.
“He’d try his best to get me lost,” Mr. Lathrop said. “He tried to test me. I didn’t realize he was teaching me.”
By high school, he had a job at John Heasty Flying Service. He poured oil in the engines of Waco and Rearwin planes. He cleaned windshields. He cranked wooden propellers to help spark their engines before flight.
Along the way, he met an aviator named Wiley Post. Mr. Scott later earned a place in the Oklahoma Aviation Hall of Fame.
Drafted in late 1944 to help fight World War II, Mr. Lathrop served in the Navy as an aircraft maintainer and electrician’s mate. After his service ended, he was hired in 1947 as a junior aircraft electrician at Tinker Air Force Base.
It was there that his 42-year professional aviation career began in earnest. Now 90 years old, Mr. Lathrop retired in 1988 as an aircraft logistics specialist with the C/KC-135 System Program Management Office in the C/KC-135 Division of the Directorate of Materiel Management, Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center.
His retirement plaque said his “legacy” to the Air Force was the operational success of the C/KC-135 weapon system. His major work included B-52s, also. He had worked on aerial refueling aircraft since the late 1940s when B-29 bombers were converted to some of the Air Force’s first refueling tankers.
Mr. Lathrop’s knowledge, leadership and skills were in high demand throughout his career.
With his experience in the Navy and graduation in mechanics from the Tulsa Spartan School of Aeronautics, he was only 25 when he accepted his first supervisor job. He oversaw as many as 25 employees, all of them older than him.
He later traveled widely on Tinker’s behalf in the maintenance track, especially as a go-to troubleshooter to determine the cause of random plane malfunctions. He was sent to Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz., to determine why all four engine air induction systems blew off of a plane in flight. Delivering the verdicts weren’t always easy.
“The malfunction was the result of operator error rather than a malfunctioning supercharger, so sometimes those trips were not popular to make,” Mr. Lathrop told the OC-ALC History Office in 1988.
He performed electrical work when the VC-54C “Sacred Cow” was ending its service life and heading to a museum. The first dedicated presidential plane flew President Franklin D. Roosevelt only once – to the Yalta Conference in 1945 – but President Harry Truman used it extensively.
In 1956, Mr. Lathrop became a field maintenance liaison. Visiting bases that flew the planes that Tinker maintained, he would investigate aircraft problems they were having, primarily with the B-47 and KC-97. With that knowledge, procedures at Tinker were changed to ensure that the customers’ plane troubles didn’t recur.
He was assigned to Washington, D.C., in 1957 for work on the start of Project Speckled Trout, a mission still in place today. The task was to help modify a KC-135 – the ninth of its model ever made – for use by Air Force legend Gen. Curtis LeMay, then-vice chief of staff, other top brass, distinguished civilians and U.S. elected leadership. The job included installing about 30 passenger seats and special radio equipment.
Mr. Lathrop said, “they also wanted to get some of the powers that be and some of the congressmen and senators out from behind their desks and get them acquainted with jet travel. After all, whoever heard of flying across the United States in four hours? You could do that in a 135.”
Mr. Lathrop’s maintenance and modification work helped Speckled Trout set several aviation records. With LeMay aboard, its first KC-135 set a world record in 1957 for a nonstop, nonrefueled flight from Westover AFB, Mass., to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Mr. Lathrop’s next postings included Barksdale AFB, La., and Ellsworth AFB, S.D. He was Tinker’s maintenance representative for KC-135s and B-52s stationed there. He stayed at Ellsworth for over five years, managing more than 5,000 modifications on B-52s.
Mr. Lathrop returned to Tinker and veered into KC-135 logistics and program management. His work supported every type of C-135 aircraft, from airborne command posts to tactical deployment and control variations.
For about the last 10 years of his career, Mr. Lathrop was a founding member of a Strategic Air Command group with global influence. The Aerial Refueling Systems Advisory Group consisted of aerial refueling experts from multiple services and later included representatives from allies, such as the United Kingdom and Australia. The group, covering 20 nations today, advances and standardizes aerial refueling among its members.
The Oklahoma City resident said he believes the OC-ALC could do any job and no one could do it better. “We did a lot of ‘impossible’ jobs,” he said.
“I would like to think that I have always worked for the best standards,” Mr. Lathrop said. “I am proud to say that in my years of production and mechanical work I have never turned out a job that I wouldn’t fly myself, and I tried to instill that same thought in the people who worked for me.
“In aviation, we should always do our work in such a way that we would entrust it with our own lives.”