Air missions can last 12 hours or more, and a Coronet Oak C-130 will be flown about 300 hours during a rotation. On the maintenance floor, 12-hour work days are not uncommon. Despite the hours, commanders reported no problem finding volunteers. The reward for hard work comes during off-duty time, airmen said. Panama City with its high-rises and many inexpensive restaurants is a crossroads of Latin culture.
Charter boats offer scuba diving in the Pacific.
Golf, fishing and boating are popular pastimes. You can drive 50 miles across the North American continent to Balboa on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama and return to the Pacific shore in two hours. But the air operations are the big attraction. The rainy season lingered in December as a C-130 from Peterson AFB, Colo., lifted away from Howard with a mixed crew of reservists and guardsmen and turned gradually out to sea, away from a slumbering Panama City, on a heading for the landfall of Ecuador, on a resupply mission to Peru. Although the C-130 belonged to the 302nd Airlift Wing, the pilot was Capt.