Halcyon Days V

Once upon a time, when I was a preteen, I lived with my mother and stepfather in the Philippine Islands. He was assigned as the Assistant Public Works Officer at Naval Air Station Sangley Point, which was on a small peninsula located on the south side of Manila Bay adjacent to the town of Cavite. The runway had been built in early 1945, following the retaking of the area from the Japanese in World War II. It wasn't a very big air station, with almost 50% being the runway, taxiway, and parking areas...

Cdr T.L. Bigley USNR-TAR

In addition to having a runway, Sangley provided a base for Navy seaplanes that patrolled the area.

Cdr T.L. Bigley USNR-TAR 

Sangley provided tow-target services to ships and airplanes of the Seventh Fleet operating near Manila Bay.

 T.H.Thomason

Another valuable service was providing temporary parking at Sangley's west end for the air group of a carrier when it visited Manila Bay for R&R. This freed up the carrier's deck and hangar for maintenance and cleaning, in addition to providing more room for maintenance on the airplanes themselves, albeit al fresco in most cases.

Cdr G.W. Gregory Jr.

(When we first arrived at Sangley, there were many French Corsairs parked in the west end, having been ferried in from Vietnam following the fall of Dien Bien Phu in early 1954. A French aircraft carrier eventually showed up to take them away.)

Navy aircraft carriers would also offload airplanes at Sangley that were too badly damaged for repair aboard. These would come in by lighter for temporary storage until a ship came by that was headed back to the states.

I spent many happy hours watching the Cougars, Skyraiders, Banshees, etc. taking off and landing since the runway was only a few hundred feet from our house and no one seemed to care if I sat in the grass 50 feet or so off the taxiway. One memorable occasion was when Princeton parked many of its VS-21 S2Fs at Sangley in early 1956 for a week.

I made friends with one of the pilots and got to sit in an S2F with my mother.

Equally memorable was that I got to fly an S2F, a Turbo Firecat conversion with turboprop engines, almost 40 years later courtesy of the great folks at Conair. (See http://www.cascadeaerospace.com/products/Turbo%20Firecat/)

You probably haven't heard of NAS Sangley Point. While my stepfather was stationed there, NAS Cubi Point at Subic Bay was established and Sangley became a Naval Station in accordance with a treaty with the Philippines that stipulated there would only be one Naval Air Station, per se. It continued to be an active and important U.S. Navy base until it was turned over to the Philippine government in 1971.

Although I had been enamored with airplanes since I could remember, the two years at NAS Sangley between 1954 and 1956 (and one of the great airplane movies, The Bridges at Toko-Ri) convinced me that I wanted to be a Naval aviator, even if it did mean dying in a ditch in Korea. That, alas, was not to be because of my poor eyesight but I did the best I could under the circumstances.