Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (64 page)

Jack started calling the first site to the right. I said it was to the left, because I could see it below. “Right!” he said. “Left!” I said. “Right!” he said. “Look outside!” I said. Jack did and saw that we were inverted, so the signals from the left and right antennas were reversed. “OK, left,” he agreed.

I rolled in to line up the site but came in way too low. Later, some of the Thud drivers told me they thought I was going to mark the target with my aircraft. My rockets hit short, but as I pulled off there was a bright flash. I figured I must have hit the oxidizer van for the SA-2’s liquid-fuel motors. I called out the site, and the F-105 lead, Don Langwell, said that he had it. He went in, and Spruce 2, Van Heywood, came after him, firing rockets on the site.

We all broke the cardinal rule of “one pass, haul ass” to ensure the kill. I came back around for a second pass in front of Spruce 4, Art Brattkus (the F-100s were agile birds!), and went down in beside Spruce 3, Bob Bush, who was hitting AAA alongside of the Red River (Bob Bush would be KIA on a subsequent mission). On this pass I strafed the control van, and he went off the air. Each of the Thuds came around again, expending all their 20 mm ammunition. Jack was now calling out the second SAM site, but we had nothing left to hit it with. But we really blew away the site that we did hit.

We got out of there, rejoined, and refueled. There was a USO show with Bob Hope that day at Korat, and we made a flyover with the F-100 leading and two F-105s on each wing. A number of people down there knew that meant we had made a SAM kill and left the show early to celebrate.

After landing, we debriefed and went to the club. What a party! Jack drank martinis. After a while, he started holding them by the rim with his thumb and finger and began dropping them. The more he drank the more he dropped. The club was raising Cain as they were running out of glasses, so we taped a glass in his hand. After dinner he drank crème de menthe and went around sticking out his green tongue.

All six of us in Spruce Flight received the Distinguished Flying Cross for killing the first SAM site. Jack would fly twelve more missions with me before going stateside in February 1966 to get the ball rolling on what would become the Wild Weasel School at Nellis AFB. I stayed in Southeast Asia for a total of six months and received credit for two more SAM kills.

Unfortunately, on December 20, two days before Allen’s flight, the Weasels lost an F-100F. John Pitchford became a POW for seven years and Bob Trier went down fighting against North Vietnamese soldiers. Though it was agile and quick, serving well as a fast forward air control aircraft (FAC), the F-100F simply didn’t have the survivability or enough weapons carriage capability to duel with SAMs. More space was also required for the specialized SAM hunting equipment, so a replacement aircraft was needed.

Big, tough, and fast, the F-105 Thunderchief was the obvious choice. The Thud had also been involved in the killing side of Weaseling from the beginning, so the tactics were understood and could be easily adapted to the new airframe.

Designed by Alex Kartveli, who had the P-47 Thunderbolt and F-84 Thunderjet to his credit, the first YF-105 flew in 1955. Intended for low-altitude nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, the F-105 reflected the Air Force’s love affair with nuclear weapons. Utterly convinced that the next war would be in Europe and be nuclear, the USAF put most of its yearly budgets toward that scenario.

Required to air-refuel and reach Mach 2.0 with a nuclear bomb in the internal bay, the Thud incorporated several innovations. The distinctive, forward-swept intakes contained movable plugs, which altered the cross section and matched airflow to meet engine requirements. This meant developing a central air data computer (CADC) that automatically monitored the system and adjusted components accordingly. Contrary to the current philosophy of high-altitude interceptors and nonconventional warfare, Republic wisely retained a M-61 20 mm cannon and the four underwing hard points.

Aerodynamically, it was basically an engine with little wings attached. The 385-square-foot area gave a wing loading of about 130 pounds per square foot.
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Full-span leading-edge slats helped maneuverability at slower speeds, as did the Fowler trailing edge flaps. Another innovation was the precise milling of airframe sections to reduce gross weight, rather than the past practice of overengineering all the panels.

The cockpit represented ongoing American efforts to reduce the pilot’s workload, thereby leaving him free to concentrate on fighting. This was in marked contrast to Soviet cockpit designs that were indifferent to the pilot, to say the least.
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Arranged in a T-shaped console, the Airspeed Mach Indicator (AMI) and vertical velocity indicator (VVI) were placed alongside an attitude indicator. The radar scope and weapons panel were just below it, centrally located and easily accessible.

Nonconventional ordnance included B28, B43-1, and B61 nuclear weapons. All conventional general-purpose bombs, air-to-ground missiles like the radio-controlled Bullpup, and cluster bombs were in the arsenal. The M61 Vulcan cannon had a 1,100-round magazine allowing ten seconds of firing, and air-to-air Sidewinders could be carried on dual launchers. Specialized anti-radiation missiles, such as the AGM-45 Shrike and the AGM-78 Standard ARM, combined with CBU-24s or rockets, were used for Wild Weasel work.

With the introduction of the APR-25 and the inclusion of a highly skilled EWO, five modified F-105Fs landed at Korat air base in May 1966 to fight the SAMs. The early Weasels went out as hunter-killers, paired with the single-seat F-105D. Their presence was felt immediately: in 1965 it took eighteen SAMs to bring down an aircraft, while by 1968 more than a hundred were needed. The USAF ordered eighty-six additional F-105 conversions, putting the Wild Weasel III program in full swing.

As Hanoi began losing the air war and sent the NVAF into China to reconstitute, the air defense system grew proportionately. This would become a trend in future conflicts as American airpower surpassed all others, forcing enemy reliance on anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles for defense. But for now, armed with a mix of conventional bombs, anti-radiation missiles, and a surplus of guts, the Weasels were part of every Air Force package that struck North Vietnam.

WHILE ROCK WAS
racing around the Red River killing SAMs, the newly arrived 8th Tactical Fighter Wing Commander had a problem. Colonel Robin Olds had arrived at Ubon air base in September 1966. The “Wolfpack,” as it was known, had lost eighteen jets and twenty-two pilots during the last year. Renowned for his tactical ability, greatly respected for loyalty to his men and his utter intolerance for rear echelon sensitivities, Olds was exactly what the wing needed. His problem, besides the combat losses, was the increasing threat of MiG-21 fighters over North Vietnam.

Derived from lessons learned during the Korean War, Mikoyan-Gurevich designed a new single-seat, single-engine point defense fighter. Like most Soviet designs, the Fishbed was a copy of something else; in this case, it was the American Convair YF-102. Built to counter B-47 and B-52 bombers, the prototype flew in February 1955. Of note were the distinctive delta wings and bottle-shaped fuselage. Aerodynamically, this was an
area-ruled
design, an approach that reduced the aircraft cross section where the wing met the body. The wasplike shape that this produced decreased transonic drag, so the jet could sustain supersonic flight. This was a prime concern for a point defense fighter needing to get high and fast very quickly.

By the Vietnam War it was powered by a R-13-300 afterburning engine rated at 14,300 pounds of thrust. Weighing only 19,000 pounds fully loaded, the jet could climb at 21,000 to 40,000 feet per minute, depending on the variant. For comparison, the F-105D was about 35,000 pounds fully loaded, yet could climb at 38,000 feet per minute in full afterburner. But the MiG had definite advantages: it had lower wing loading than the American jets and, being unburdened with bombs or ECM pods, it had a lower thrust-to-weight ratio. Due to its small size the MiG was also extremely difficult to see. Its engine didn’t smoke much, and it was armed with AA-2 Atoll missiles.

The Soviet missile was copied from a Navy AIM-9B Sidewinder acquired by the Chinese during the first Taiwan Strait crisis.
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Both were infrared homing missiles, known as “heat seekers,” that tracked hot carbon dioxide emitted from a jet’s exhaust. Later improvements would lock onto hot metal engine parts and even heat caused by skin friction at high speeds. But for now, using a combination of detectors that provided steering guidance to the fins, the missile was best fired straight up the tailpipe into hot exhaust.
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The first cadre of VPAF MiG pilots were well-educated, regular serving officers, and most had some experience fighting the French. Hanoi trained its own pilots on MiG-15s and YAK-8s, then sent them off to China or the Soviet Union for a MiG conversion course. The physical standards were high due to the unaugmented flight controls on Soviet aircraft, but the Vietnamese, like the Chinese and Koreans before them, suffered from the lack of a technical background. The syllabus was still very Russian and taught by rote; independent action and creative thinking were not encouraged, and ideological devotion was the single most important factor in picking a pilot candidate.

The program could take as long as five years and was generally accomplished on MiG-21U and L-29 trainers. VPAF pilots, like the Soviets, were heavily dependent on ground-controlled intercept (GCI) control, and it was used from takeoff to landing. A controller would dictate airspeeds, headings, weapons to be used, and even how many dogfights a pilot was allowed. Again, this did not leave room for tactical innovation and initiative. Still, when cornered and forced to fight on their own, most MiG pilots gave a good account of themselves.

They typically flew in flights of four, like the Americans, but only had eight to ten aircraft per squadron and maintained typical operational readiness rates below 30 percent.
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This was alleviated somewhat by the advantage of fighting over their own country. Like the British during the Battle of Britain, the MiGs could wait until the most favorable time to launch and attack any incoming strike packages. English-speakers monitored radio chatter, thus forcing U.S. pilots to construct elaborate code words, which the Vietnamese also mostly deciphered. A favored tactic was to wait until a “Bingo” call was heard (meaning an aircraft had reached a fuel level requiring it to return to base), then launch the MiGs knowing the Americans didn’t have much gas left for fighting.

Hanoi had also worked out the basics of an integrated air defense system. This overlapping network used SAMs to keep attackers at a distance and disrupt strike packages that got too close. While defending themselves against the missiles, aircraft were often forced lower and could then be engaged by Triple-A. Whatever lived through this was then attacked by MiGs and then reattacked by SAMs on the way back out. Such a defense system was hardly invulnerable: fighter cover by F-4s could handle the VPAF, while jamming was tremendously useful in blinding the early-warning and GCI radars. But it turned out that jamming had unintended consequences. The QRC-160 pod carried by the F-105 was a noise jammer that cluttered up a radar scope to the point where information was flawed and, one hoped, the targets were obscured. Unfortunately the North Vietnamese figured this out and used the noise strobes to locate the jamming aircraft, and the strike aircraft, for the MiGs.

Killing MiGs was the objective behind Operation Bolo, which was Colonel Olds’s plan. He would simply emulate the call signs, formations, predictable routes, and times of a Thud strike package with his Phantoms. When the MiGs appeared,
they
would be the ones ambushed. The McDonnell-Douglas F-4C was ideal for the mission: powerful and versatile, it could easily outperform the MiG when only configured for air-to-air combat. Like the Sidewinder, the Phantom began as a Navy project and was originally designated the F-110A Specter. The enormous tail was partially constructed using a unique, lightweight honeycomb structure, while the upward-canting tips and downward-drooping stabilators compensated for instability. A distinctive “dogtooth” notch was added on each side of the fuselage to improve high-angle-of-attack maneuvering. Installing a stability augmentation system also made the F-4 very maneuverable for its time.

The Phantom I was the McDonnell FH-1, so the new fighter was called the Phantom II.
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The USAF began ordering them but called it the F-4C; the folding wings remained, but wider wheels were added and an Air Force air refueling receptacle replaced the Navy probe. Despite its strengths, there were problems, mainly with armament. Intended as a long-range interceptor for fleet defense, the Phantom’s air-to-air missiles reflected this. They would do fine if launched from straight and level flight against non-maneuvering bombers but were severely degraded in any type of turning fight. A cannon could’ve nicely covered this gap, but due to the Pentagon’s certainty that dogfighting was passé, the F-4 was fielded without one, since it was conceived in the bomber-centric, nuclear-obsessed decade before Vietnam.

The AIM-7 Sparrow was envisioned as the principal ordnance to be carried by the Phantom. Unlike the within-visual-range, heat-seeking Sidewinder, the Sparrow was a beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile. It could be fired at targets up to 20 miles away because it was guided by radar, in this case the APG-50 fire control system. Using semi-active radar homing (SARH), the aircraft’s radar illuminates the target, and then the missile seeker receives the reflected signal and makes steering corrections. The biggest drawback to SARH is that the fire control radar must provide guidance throughout the entire missile time of flight and this can place significant maneuvering limits on the attacking aircraft.