Oakman, AL — A retired Air Force veteran decides to take his wife and son to visit the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Nothing unusual about that. When they pulled into the parking lot, the sign on the attendant’s booth told them the fee was $15. Larry Gulledge, of Oakman, thought that was pretty unusual for parking. But then, he and his wife had lived in Washington, D.C., before they settled in Walker County, and they knew that even ordinary things could be pretty pricey, up there. And the museum itself — or more specifically, an annex of it called the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center — offered free admission, so it all kind of balanced out.
To say that the range of displays was remarkable is an understatement. The museum houses the Space Shuttle Discovery, the Air France Concorde, the gondola of Double Eagle II, the balloon that made the first trans-Atlantic flight, and the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. There are also several jets from the Vietnam era on view, and these were of special interest to Larry because his job had been to repair them.
Sure enough, he turned a corner and saw the distinctive shape of a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a secret reconnaissance aircraft that was the successor to the famed U-2.
But the next exhibit in line was where the memorable part of the Gulledges’ visit started: it was a Republic F-105D Thunderchief.
”That’s the same type of plane I worked on,” Larry told his wife, Jonah. ”Then he got quiet for a while,” she remembers, “and then he said, ‘You’ve got to take my picture!’ I mean, how many times do you hear a guy say that?”
What had made the moment especially photo-worthy was that Larry noticed the number on the Thunderchief’s tail fin. From keeping careful maintenance records back then, he recognized the number 00445 and realized it was a plane he had actually done repair work on. ”When I saw that,” he recalls now, back home, “one phrase kept going through my mind: ‘absolutely uncanny.’ It was one of those ‘OMG!’ moments, for sure.”
When he was in the Air Force, Gulledge was stationed at Korat Royal Air Force Base, Thailand, with the 421st Tactical Fighter Squadron. His specialty was repairing the planes’ electronics and weapon systems, known technically as avionics.
Oakman, AL vet has close encounter with fighter jet he repaired