Columbus Air Force Base only had two hours notice before the space shuttle Atlantis, mounted atop a modified Boeing 747, landed on its runway.
Richard “Sonic” Johnson, CAFB’s director of public affairs at the time, remembers practicing endlessly for the potential pit stop beforehand, unsure whether the shuttle would actually come.
All of it – the runway, the 14,000 pounds of fuel, the coordinated scramble of personnel and equipment – came together seamlessly, he said.
“You practice and practice and practice, and it never happens,” Johnson told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “You’re like, ‘Oh whatever. It’s coming. It’s not coming. (Then) holy s***, it’s coming!’ We have to get all of our planes out of the way and on the ground. We had every fuel truck we had to bring fuel up. It was just watching Columbus Air Force Base at its best.”
That July day was the 12th time the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft landed at CAFB since the shuttle program was introduced in 1981 and the fifth time it carried the Atlantis. It also proved to be the last, with the program retired by 2011.
Now, as NASA’s Artemis II carries astronauts on lunar flyby for the first time in more than 50 years, residents are revisiting Columbus’ own connections to space.
The stop at CAFB was part of the shuttle’s cross-country journey from Edwards Air Force Base in California to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
When poor weather prevents a landing in Florida, the shuttle is rerouted to California and then ferried back east on top of the carrier aircraft, a weather-dependent journey that can only occur during daylight, in calm weather and at an altitude of only 15,000 feet.
Because of the weight of the shuttle and the fuel needed to carry it, the aircraft required a runway long enough to accommodate it.
“The more fuel you put on an airplane, the more runway it needs to take off,” Johnson said.
While the base was on alert for the shuttle to land – along with the “whole southern part of the country that has a runway” to support it – Johnson still wasn’t sure it would.
“We weren’t a primary location,” he said. “We were an alternate. They were supposed to go somewhere else.”
But by the time the NASA Pathfinder aircraft, a jet sent about 15 minutes ahead of the shuttle to ensure safe weather conditions, made its way to the CAFB runway, all of the practice was about to pay off.
Even CAFB’s 12,000-foot center runway was nearly too little for the carrier.
“The pilot, when he got there, … he said, he used the entire (runway),” he said. “He rotated the airplane right at the very end of the runway to get it off the runway. He said it was a white-knuckle take off.”
The aircraft carried the Atlantis into CAFB four times before, in October 1989, March 1990, April 1991 and May 1994. Other shuttles made stops in Columbus as well, including the Columbia (November 1993, May 1992 and June 1991), the Endeavour (March 1995 and May 1991) and the Discovery (February 1992 and September 1991).
‘It was like it was barely moving’
Out on the 15th hole of the Green Oaks Golf Club, resident Paar Colvin was focused on his swing in 2009 when he heard the roar of an aircraft that was noticeably different from the usual hum of fighter jets he heard over the base.
“It was something a lot more powerful than that,” he said. “And then all of a sudden, over the tree line … it was going, I guess, on its final approach for the landing, so it literally looked like it was 200 feet above my head.”
Intrigued, Colvin gathered some friends and rode out to the north side of the base to see the shuttle on the tarmac.
“It was really cool,” he said. “I had never seen anything like that before.”
Colvin wasn’t the only one. By the time the Pathfinder made its way to Columbus, hundreds of people, The Dispatch reported at the time, had made their way to the base to try and catch a glimpse of the shuttle during its two-hour stop.
Johnson remembers a pilot pulling him aside after the landing to ask about the crowd, several members of which were tailgating as they waited for the landing.
“The whole road was lined with people,” he said. “They landed and they go, ‘Dude you did this in two hours?’”
While he didn’t make it out to the base that day, resident Tom Whitaker remembers looking up at the sky to watch the shuttle as it descended.
“I got to watch it fly around Columbus,” he said. “It was just gorgeous. It was like it was just floating. It was like it was barely moving.”
But Whitaker, a former manager for the Sanderson Plumbing plant in Columbus, had his own connection to the shuttle flying overhead. Sanderson operated the former Beneke manufacturing line, which designed and built toilet seats used for the Space Shuttle Program, between 40 to 50, he said.
“Sanderson developed the first soft (toilet) seat ever made,” he said. “That was developed in Columbus, … and that same technology was part of the reason, I think, that we got the space shuttle because we were able to design a soft firm seat for the space shuttle. It helped in the sealing when you sat on it because they were all vacuum assisted toilets.”
Whitaker still has one of the seat models, a keepsake of the connection Columbus shares with the shuttle program.
“It was interesting to listen to the engineers talk about how it’s designed based upon the posteriors of the astronauts,” he remembers.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
