|
|
|
The Roadrunners Internationale mourn the final flight of Col. Jacob Kratt, Jr. of Spokane, Washington. 3 February 1925 - 28 April 2019
In 1951, the US Air Force had accepted the F-84 as a first-line combat aircraft. Because of the urgency of the Korean War, there was no time to ship F-84s by an aircraft carrier. Jake Kratt and others led mass flights of F-84s across the Pacific Ocean to Korea, using the sextant. Kratt, later a CIA U-2 pilot in Detachment A, shot down 2 MiGs and a Yak-3 while flying the F-84 in Korea.
The Roadrunners remember Jake for his flying for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1955, Jake Kratt, Bruce Grant, Glen Dunaway, and Hervey Stockman, now flying for the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, met John Raines from CIA security at the Brown Derby in a hotel on Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles. From there, they went to the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank where they boarded a C-54 for their first flight to Area 51 in Nevada where they met Marty Knutson, Wilburn Rose, and Carl Overstreet already in place as U-2 Detachment A.
On 14 April 1956, Flying west over the Mississippi River at the Tennessee border, Jake Kratt's U-2 experience a flame out. Six hundred miles later, he experienced another, becoming the pilot of the first off-test site flameout landing at Kirtland AFB near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Kratt's U-2 flight covered over 900 miles, including more than 300 by gliding.
Deployed to England ad Detachment A, On 2 July 1956, Jake Kratt flew Mission 2009 over Eastern Europe, heading south from Wiesbaden across Austria into Hungary. Kratt flew past Budapest and turned south flying along the Yugoslav border. The route extended across Bulgaria to the Black Sea back to Wiesbaden, making it a 7-hour sortie.
 |
 |
 |