Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile (or World)!

The Oldsmobile company coined the term “not your father’s,” Oldsmobile” to describe the 1988 Olds Cutlass – for a new generation of buyers. The world was changing faster than car designs. Within a year, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War was nearly over. The downward slide resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation began.

I was exceptionally busy during the Cold War, flying missions on Russian submarines operating in the Atlantic Ocean. Technology was changing. Every year, a new update or sensor seems to be added to our aircraft. We went from ‘shooting’ a star using a celestial handbook to using a digital device.

I have many hours transiting the Pacific Ocean with a sextant traveling 300+ miles/hour. It would take more than a couple of minutes to calculate the approximate location of the navigational star and then the preliminary activities of getting the sextant ready to shoot. The entire operation is based on time, and sometimes there was not enough of it.

Technology allows faster processing and time savings. In the early ’70s, satellite navigation was being updated to another squadron in Hawaii while I was active. GPS followed quickly thereafter. My first flight to Tahiti involved the use of the Litton 72 Inertial Navigation System.

In 1976, we did a test flight out of Moffatt Field, CA, and landed with an error of less than a few feet. Our planned flight to Hawaii to pick up a bunch of NOAA scientists was put on hold when the LTN-72 unit would not turn on. We flew to Burbank (or somewhere nearby – my mind is a little fuzzy with the exact location) to trade in the old broken unit for a brand new LTN-72.

We plugged it in and immediately took off for Hawaii to collect our guests and head to Tahiti the next morning. Our mission was to sample the equatorial currents north and south of the equator. Starting at 10⁰N, we dropped bathythermograph sonobuoys every thirty miles until we went to 10⁰S. We did the same thing, returning to Hawaii four days later. The scientists claimed they were able to gain more information on one flight that had been collected over the past decades.

Our crew was the first of many flights to fly that mission. However, the remaining flights spent only two days in Tahiti. We had the technology and finally took a moment to use it wisely—to capture oceanographic data on a single mission. Technology changes faster than some of us can absorb it. What my father flew on enemy submarines during WWII was revolutionized in the summer of ’72 when the DIFAR sonobuoy was introduced.

Instead of listening to submarine sounds from an omnidirectional (a full 360⁰ spread of the ocean), we could slice into a specific direction from which the sounds came. This absolutely changed the game of submarine hunting in our favor. That was ‘70s and ‘80s. The aircraft (P3s) are no longer in service in the United States (some foreign countries still use these aircraft). The mission to find, localize, and be able to launch an attack (simulated) has not changed, but the technology has changed.

If my son or daughter were flying antisubmarine missions today, the mission parameters would be similar, but the tactics and mechanics involved would be way outside the box that I worked in just forty years ago. That is to be expected! Sometimes, technology changes for our good; other times, we spend money and training on something soon to be replaced.

One of my car’s best technology updates in recent years is the rear-view camera. This technology has extended the time between repairs and replacements. Tires, shocks, brakes, and many other automobile parts outlive their predecessors by many miles or years.

However, the same can be said for other things in our lives, but at what cost? Our food industry changed significantly in the mid-70s with ultra-processed foods, which is the beginning of today’s obesity epidemic. Who would have thought that making food taste better, look scrumptious, and last longer would be bad for the human body? Europe has banned over a thousand chemicals that are used in the United States daily in the food and personal care industries.

Sometimes, technology can fool us. We don’t know what we don’t know when a new software or gadget is released into our world. It takes time to fully understand the good and the bad.

Red O’Laughlin is a retired Naval Flight Officer with over 30 years of service. He is also an author, speaker, publisher, and live-streaming television host. RedOLaughlin.com