Melville Air Station - Labrador, Canada
641st AC&W Squadron/U.S.A.F./C.A.F
Comments Page

Welcome to Melville  Air Station!  We hope you took the website "tour" already of the 641st Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, and would now like to add comments of your own.  This page is to provide a place to post comments from vistors to this website.  If you haven't taken the "tour" yet, you can do so now by clicking on either radar sweep, or you can simply view this page.  If you would like to add comments,  please e-mail me and I will add them for you.  Before you leave, don't forget to bookmark this site!  Enjoy, and please stop again to visit!

(The following comments are from Larry Estelle, one of the "earliest" people stationed at the 641st (11/53-12/54), as a radar maintenance troop:)
"When I first arrived at the 641st the radar consisted of a CPS-5 and a height finder (I can't remember the nomenclature). The CPS-6B was in the process of being installed. It was a big system with multiple antenna's. It was a search and height finder system so when it became operational the other two systems were dismantled. Interesting that there was a radio station there during your tour. No such thing when I was there.

One interesting thing is how I got assigned there. After completing the radar maintenance school at Keesler Air Force base, I was sent to the headquarters squadron at St. Johns, Newfoundland along with to other maintenance people. Obviously, they couldn't use us in that squadron so they had us flip coins with the odd man going to Goose Bay and the other two got assigned to the radar station at St. Johns. Well, you can guess who the odd man was.

One other interesting thing happened during the winter of 1953/1954. The water line froze up so bad they couldn't get water to the base. So we spent most of the winter having water trucked up from the main base. This meant things like only one shower a week, we weren't required to shave regularly, the mess hall and boilers got first crack at the water, and we drank water from Lister Bags hanging in the corridors. When we first ran out of water we melted snow for the boilers. I do remember that it took an awful lot of snow to keep those boilers going."

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