by Tom Clancy
The training of fighter pilots has always been dedicated to creating an individual capable of meeting an adversary in the sky who is flying an equally capable aircraft, and shooting him down. A pilot can’t hold back or be timid. There is no room for self-doubt. He must know his limitations, but he must always believe that the better man will survive, and that man is him. When Chuck Horner was in the program, its unofficial title was “Every Man a Tiger,” and the main emphasis, aside from flying and gunnery, was on the pilot’s attitude and self-confidence.
Chuck Horner has never been short of self-confidence.
Meanwhile, for a lieutenant student, the training was tough, the flying and instructions in the air demanding, and the debriefings brutal. Many nights Horner rolled into bed exhausted from pulling Gs in the air while trying to keep track of other fighters in a swirling dogfight over the desert. Yet often he fell asleep with the light still on, as Mary Jo stayed up to finish her homework. In the morning, she usually left for classes before he woke up.
★ A superior fighter pilot is made up of one part skill, one part attitude, one part aggression, and one part madness. You have to be more than a little insane to take on tasks that will likely kill a man unless he performs them perfectly and with luck. The good ones perform those tasks regularly and successfully . . . most of the time.
One day when Horner was going through gunnery school, he was involved in a one-on-one air-to-air simulated combat engagement with an instructor pilot, Major Country Robinson. Horner was in a single-seat F-100C, and Robinson was flying an F-100F with another student sandbagging—along for the ride—in the backseat.
When two fairly equal pilots in equal jets get into a fight starting from a neutral setup—meaning neither has an initial advantage in speed, altitude, or nose position—then one of two predictable outcomes will come about. Either one of the pilots will make a mistake, allowing the other to get behind his adversary and achieve a guns tracking position, and the game is over with a clear winner. Or each pilot will fly his jet to its maximum performance, conserve energy appropriately, and correctly maneuver on his own and in response to the maneuvers of his adversary. In this case, neither pilot will achieve a position to kill his adversary, and both aircraft will wind up in a nose-low death spiral. In ordinary practice combat, one of the pilots must call this off, usually when they pass some minimum altitude such as 10,000 feet above the ground.
On this day, young Second Lieutenant Horner was matched against the wily, experienced IP Robinson, meaning the IP expected to wait for a green mistake, kill him, and then put him through a tough debriefing, so he wouldn’t make the mistake again.
The problem was ego.
They flew out to the area north of Williams AFB, where they were based, turned away from each other, flew apart until nearly out of visual range, and turned back in, passing each other. “Fights on” was called, and they started the dance of death. Major Robinson was good, and he didn’t make a mistake. Since his jet was a two-seater, it was a little heavier than Horner’s, which made a slight difference in Horner’s favor. At the same time, Horner had learned his lessons well up to this point and was holding his own. The result: no one was gaining clear advantage. They twisted, turned, and rolled, nose up to gain smaller turning radius, diving to gain speed for maneuvering, using afterburner but sparingly (if either used too much, he’d exhaust his fuel and have to declare bingo and head for home, which meant the other pilot won). Finally they were canopy to canopy, each in a steep dive; for neither aircraft had enough airspeed to bring its nose back up without accelerating, which would place that aircraft ahead of the other—and it would lose. They passed 30,000 feet, then 20,000. The altimeter needles looked like stopwatches, they were unwinding so fast, and meanwhile the airspeed was approaching the minimum that allowed control of the aircraft.
Suddenly, the two-seat F-100F snapped uncontrollably and entered a flat spin, an unfortunate tendency of the two-seat F-100 at low speed. At that point, by the rules, Major Robinson should have made a “knock it off ” call. In any event, he had to get on with the business of recovering his aircraft before passing 10,000 feet, or else begin to seriously consider ejecting from his fighter. But he was good. He was able to work the recovery and still keep the fight going. He was not going to lose . . . not to any damn second lieutenant student.
During all of this time, Horner was able to extend away from Robinson’s jet and achieve sufficient airspeed to regain enough nose authority to bring his gun sight to bear on the spinning, falling instructor pilot’s jet. But his own aircraft was in a full stall, falling toward the ground at about the same rate as Major Robinson’s. No matter: he was on the radio calling, “Guns tracking kill,” and he knew his gunnery film would show the F-100F slowly turning in front of him, nose, tail, nose, tail, nose, tail.
Got him!
He’d beaten his better . . . who was in the fascinating position of being about to die if he didn’t take instant action. Horner had half a second advantage over his instructor, in that he could wait that long before he had to recover his jet. He put that half-second to the only possible use: he kept the pip of his gun sight on the other jet and felt the rush.
Finally, neither of them could stand it any longer; they broke off the mock combat and turned to recovering their aircraft—with each regaining control only a few feet above the yucca, palo verde, and mesquite, fractions of seconds before taking things too far and crashing.
Clearly each of them had failed to exercise good judgment, each had violated the rules that guided training, and each should have figured out a way to achieve a simulated kill before approaching the extreme they reached. But neither did any of these. They were both so deeply involved in the fight that everything else was secondary. They were both training with the intensity combat requires, except in combat no one would be so foolish as to allow the enemy to tie him up in such a tight-turning battle. They fell into that trap because they were flying nearly equal jets, and fighting with the same level of proficiency. In the end, it was simply a contest of wills, and neither flinched until the very last second.
That ability to push on to the margin and not crash is what a fighter pilot seeks. Sadly, the ability to judge the ultimate “knock it off ” point escapes some pilots, and they die, or else they pad that point to allow for their own inadequacies, and find themselves constantly defeated.
Wise, old pilots look for an early, easy kill, relying on experience and knowledge; and they don’t play fair. They pick a weak one from the pack they’re fighting, go for a quick kill, and then blow through the fight. The young pilot fails to recognize the weak ones, so he moves in close and turns and burns. He is strong and quick, however, so he can get away with it. When a pilot’s old, he tires faster, and he avoids the pain of lots of sustained Gs. He can still pull them—but why, if he can succeed with less effort and more brains?
★ At the end of the training, Horner received his first operational assignment: he’d be flying F-100Ds with the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, RAF Lakenheath, England. His faith had paid off. Suddenly the Air Force needed fighter pilots again. He and his entire class had dodged the fate so many previous gunnery school graduates had suffered, condemnation to B-47s. They were going to join the fighter community worldwide.
Before he left the States, there was a short stint at Nellis AFB in Nevada for top-off training. There, Horner checked out in the F-100D, got training dropping live bombs, did day and night air-to-air refueling off a KB-29 tanker, fired a live AIM-9B heat-seeking missile, and planned and flew realistic combat missions.
Since the F-100D had a better nuclear bombing system than the F-100C they had trained in at Williams before coming to Nellis, and since the primary mission of the 48th TFW was to sit on alert with a nuclear weapon targeted for the evil empire, there was a great deal of emphasis on delivering nuclear weapons (their secondary mission was conventional weapons delivery). The training for that involved flying a single ship in at low level—between 50 a
nd 1,000 feet above the ground—while navigating and making turn points and accurate timing at 360 knots. A pilot would arrive at an initial point at a specified time, accelerate to 480 knots, and by means of very accurate visual navigation, he’d arrive at a precomputed offset point (upwind) from a target. From there, he’d start an afterburner Immelmann,6 so that at a precomputed angle (just over ninety degrees—almost straight up), a gyro would release a 2,000-pound nuclear shape (in training, filled with concrete). After release, he’d bring the nose below the horizon on his back, roll wings level upright, and make a high-speed escape away from the blast of the nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, the bomb was climbing to 30,000 feet. There it would run out of speed, swap ends, and fall to the ground. The time of flight of the weapon gave him the time needed to escape the blast.
Since it was not easy to do all this accurately, an instructor pilot would usually orbit the target to document release time and to score the hit: you can see the dust fly when 2,000 pounds of concrete going warp nine hits the desert. The SAC generals called this method of delivery “over the shoulder,” but the pilots, who had no love for the nuclear tasking (if all you and your adversary are doing is deterring each other, you are both being stupid), had another name for it. They called it “Idiot Loops.”
SQUADRONS AND WINGS
For all the impressive technology of its multirole aircraft, equipment, and weapons, for all the freedom of the environment in which it operates, the U.S. Air Force is structurally only a few degrees away from feudal. It is an organization of knights and squires. The knights are those who are rated (to fly), while the squires are all the others—the vast majority of the force—who keep the planes in the air and the bases running. In the air, only the knights—the rated—fight the enemy. Though the majority of the rated are officers,7 rated enlisted members include flight engineers, load masters, gunners, and parachute jumpers—PJs, rescue men. PJs were among those most decorated during the Vietnam War.
The elitism of the rated is a given. The knights of the sky, by virtue of their position, are offered automatic respect (which they can, of course, forfeit). In practical terms, that means that the enlisted troops like to see their officers behaving like heroes; it increases their own stature as the people who keep the heroes in the air. On the other hand, officers who don’t behave like proper knights of the sky get into big trouble: there are a million moving parts under the skin of an aircraft, and only the enlisted force knows what is working and what might get the pilot killed. Wise officers make sure their relationship with the enlisted force is respectful—both ways.
By contrast, the enlisted do most of the fighting and dying in traditional armies, and rank is all-important. In these organizations, nothing is left to chance, communication tends to be top-down, and command means telling a crowd of enlisted guys with loaded weapons who didn’t ask to be there in the first place to go forth and charge up the hill, when even the most dense among them can figure out that about half of them are going to get killed or wounded.
In the Air Force, the transaction is far different when an officer strolls out to his jet and chats for a moment with his crew chief—a person who selected the Air Force in order to grow his (or her) technical expertise. The officer asks, “How is the jet?” and the enlisted man (or woman) answers, “The jet’s ready to go. Good luck. Let me help you strap in. Go get one for me.” Much is implied in this exchange. The crew chief knows that the officer, who is about to go risk his life for his nation, for his unit, and even for him or her, has entrusted his very life with his crew chief ’s talent and ability to take responsibility. The officer will die if his chief has forgotten to connect a fuel line or rig an ejection seat properly.
The mutual dependence between the rated and the enlisted in the Air Force is profound.
★ When Horner arrived at Lakenheath in the 1960s, this is how a squadron and a wing were set up.
In flight, the basic fighting element consists of two ships, but most fighter flights are made up of two elements—four ships. Two elements are more than enough aircraft for the flight leader to keep track of and manage. In a flight of four, the most experienced pilot is usually the flight lead, number one, and he usually flies in front, with number two on one side and number three on the other; number four flies on number three’s wing opposite the flight leader. If you hold up your left hand, the middle finger is number one; the index finger is number two, a wingman; the ring finger is number three, the element lead; and the little finger is number four, another wingman.
The flight leader plans the mission, determines the goals to be achieved, briefs the flight, navigates, dictates the tactics, and in general works all the details.
The element lead, or deputy flight lead, backs him up and takes charge if for some reason the lead is unable to maintain the lead (if he loses his radio, crashes, aborts, or is shot down). He also keeps track of navigation, in case the leader gets lost; clears the sky behind numbers one and two aircraft; keeps track of his own wingman, to make sure he is doing his job; and thinks about what he would be doing better if he was the leader.
Number three and number one run the flight and make the decisions about how to attack, what formations to use, and whether or not to penetrate bad weather. It is their job to get the mission done and bring the wingmen home alive.
The wingmen, number two and number four, are the greenest flyers. They are expected to keep their mouths shut unless they are low on fuel, have an emergency, or see an enemy aircraft approaching the flight (especially from behind it)—but only after no one else has called it out.
Though watching over four aircraft is near the limit of any single leader’s abilities, air-to-ground missions will sometimes contain up to sixteen aircraft. This is usually not a problem, as long as nothing goes amiss in the preplanned mission. However, if an enemy fighter somehow works into the middle of a sixteen-ship flight, it will be a chaotic mess, with airplanes all over the place trying to kill the enemy, stay alive, and regain order.
In determining who is to be the flight leader, rank in itself is not an issue. However, since flight leaders are usually the experienced pilots, they are more often than not captains and majors, or—higher still—lieutenant colonels, such as the squadron commander and the ops officer. In Vietnam, however, when the Air Force frequently used nonfighter pilots, the flight leader was often a young lieutenant with sixty to ninety missions under his belt leading around majors and lieutenant colonels who had come from bombers and thus weren’t credible in fighters. (This was one of the many U.S. failures in Vietnam that resulted from the rotation policies: a pilot came home after 100 missions in the North or after a year in the South, and other pilots were rotated in for their chance at combat . . . whether or not they had been trained in fighters, or even—for that matter—in conventional war.)
All young jocks aspire to make leader. Most of the time, they do it by working their way up a complex training regime: first, check rides as element lead, then a few rides with an instructor on the wing as practice lead, and finally a flight-lead check ride. That system isn’t always possible, however. At Lakenheath, for example, there was no established flight-lead check-out program. Instead, the squadron flight commander, operations officer, standardization and evaluation pilot, instructor pilot, or the commander flew with a pilot a few times, looked at his check rides, then just published orders making him a flight leader.
★ There are four flights in each squadron, with about six pilots in each flight. The primary work force of the squadron are the line pilots—that is, the combat-ready pilots. Flight commanders are always line pilots, while instructor pilots, functional test pilots, and standardization and evaluation pilots may or may not be; the ops officer and squadron commander are overhead pilots. The command chain runs from line pilots through the flight commander, who is the line pilot’s first line supervisor, to the squadron commander (but the squadron operations officer has a great deal to say about each pilot’s life, and he usually becomes the next
squadron commander) up to the wing director of operations, and finally to the wing commander.
Flight commanders shepherd the five pilots assigned to them. They work with the ops officer’s shop to schedule missions for their assigned pilots; they tell them when they are going on alert; what sorties they will fly and when, and when they will go on temporary duty (TDY) to places such as Wheelus or to Germany as a forward air controller (FAC);8 and, most important, they write their pilots’ Officer Efficiency Reports (OER). That is to say, they chew their asses and pat them on the back.