THIS IS AACS
by Frank Ellis
AACS, Army Airways Communications System, has a mission - to guide aircraft cargo carrier, fighters, and bombers - to every corner of the world, by radio means.

To do this, the AACS operates communications facilities around the world along one hundred thousand miles of airways. It is a service organization dedicated to safer flying, and to this end, transmits information concerning the movement of aircraft, provides navigational aides, collects and disseminates weather data, and protects aircraft during the entire length of their flights.

AACS men have played a vital role in every campaign of the war, moving with the first wave of combat troops, or as soon as the beachhead was gained.

The Detachment here at Tulln is the largest station in Austria under the able supervision of Capt. Green, Lt. Bennett, and Lt. Starks.

The boys in the Control Tower, Bowen, Poth, Edmonds, Ritchye, and Chazzanoff have a responsible job. They operate from to dusk giving pilots landing and take-off instructions and general information concerning the field conditions. Always on the alert for emergency landings such as aircraft low on fuel, injured men aboard or aircraft disabled in combat. Control Tower operators in India and the far reaches of the Pacific often had to stave off enemy snipers and at the same time handle aircraft in the traffic pattern.

The air to ground radio communcications positions is right in the Radio Room. Air-to-ground (A/G) radio operators, Thwain, Kaplan and Glendenning provide weather observations to aircraft and are also on the alert for aircraft distress signals. They also clear aircraft to the Tower Control Zone.

The point-to-point radio operators in the Radio Room work with code and are all high speed CW (continuous wave) operators with an average code speed of 30 wpm or better. A typical radio net is the Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Tulln circuit here at this station. An aircraft (A/C) leaving Tulln for Budapest will be preceded by a message telling of the crew, amount of fuel, ETA (estimated time of arrival) at Budapest and so on. After the aircraft has reached its destination, another message is sent, this time from Budapest, stating the A/C's safe arrival. If an A/C is overdue, a Request News message is sent out by the station concerned. Frumkin, MacDonald, and Korenic are a few of the older ops. Peck, Conway, Aberitz, and Frohman are newly arrived from Salzburg and Linz.

Messages received at this station are turned in by the operators to the Message Center for distribution to their final addresses. Bonness, Niergarth, Kavanaugh and Bethe are cryptographic specialists. The Radio Maintenance men lwork in maintenance shacks in and around the Base. Their job is to keep radio transmitters and receivers serviceable. Johnson, Rush, Kunkel, Lyons, Swain and Tidwell are specialist in their specific fields.

When an aircraft leaves Rome and estimates to arrive at Tulln, he flies on either an AACS Radio Beacon or Radio Range. This enables him to reach his distention by use of cockpit navigation instruments. However, an A/C sometimes loses his bearing and, by a radioing an AACS station on A/G and with the help of D/F (Direction Finding), AACS will give his exact position and enable the pilot to continue on his course.

This just a general picture of AACS facilities. Imagine the work these various jobs entail! Every man in AACS is a highly trained skilled operator or maintenance man in his specific job with months of training in Techinical Schools in the States and months of experience out in the field.

The AACS Station, except Tower Tower, is in operation twenty-fours a day, seven days a week. Even with the redeployment situation rapidly taking many critical men, AACS had carried on providing skillful services for safer flying to the hot pilots of ATC (Air Transport Command) and EATS (European Air Transport Service).


Back to Revisited Tulln Tales menu