Iceberg Target Sighted. Focusing on an iceberg target off Newfoundland with an improvised bombsight, Lieutenant (jg) Thomas Francis Budinger, Coast Guard Reserve, notifies the pilot by phone to release a load of petroleum incendiary bomblets enclosed in a 1,000-pound bomb case under the wing of their Coast Guard UF-2G amphibian plane. Hampered by fog patches prevalent in the Grand Banks, and the use of bombs that sometimes scattered like buckshot when detonated from bomb cases, the Ice Patrol bomb test crew had to develop techniques to make concentrated hits on icebergs. LTJG Budinger, an
Iceberg Target Sighted. Focusing on an iceberg target off Newfoundland with an improvised bombsight, Lieutenant (jg) Thomas Francis Budinger, Coast Guard Reserve, notifies the pilot by phone to release a load of petroleum incendiary bomblets enclosed in a 1,000-pound bomb case under the wing of their Coast Guard UF-2G amphibian plane. Hampered by fog patches prevalent in the Grand Banks, and the use of bombs that sometimes scattered like buckshot when detonated from bomb cases, the Ice Patrol bomb test crew had to develop techniques to make concentrated hits on icebergs. LTJG Budinger, an aerologist and oceanographer, developed an ingenious, simple bombsight employing horizontal lines which enabled making a direct hit each time it was used. Using a standard operational type Coast Guard aircraft, the crew dropped bombs effectively from an altitude of 800 ft., speed 120 knots. The bombing technique found best was to use a fuse setting which detonated the bomb cases and released the bombs 50ft. above the bergs. Twenty cluster bombs of thermate and petroleum types weighing approximately 1,000 lbs. a load, were used in the Iceberg Destruction Tests made in June as a sidelight research project of the 1959 International Ice Patrol. LTJG Budinger, 26, is Project Officer for Radar Iceberg Detection, another sidelight research feather of the 1959 Ice Patrol. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Francis Joseph Budinger of 849 Willow Road, Winnetka, Ill. A graduate of Loyola Academy, Chicago, of Regis College, Denver (Magna Cum Laude), and of the University of Washington in Seattle, he joined the coast Guard Reserve in 1957.
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Keywords: 17-a2-187, 26-, coast, guard, history, job, rdss, rg
