Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  I parked by the hangar after showing my orders a second time at the guard station. I reached across the bench seat, grabbed my fore-and-aft cap along with the manila envelope containing my orders, and went to check in at the admin office.

  The officer of the day greeted me warmly with a “Welcome aboard” and a handshake. He took me to meet the squadron’s executive officer, Commander Eugene Valencia.

  Meeting the exec was a formal call, part of the ritual when a new guy came aboard. I was led to his office, stepped inside, and introduced myself.

  Round-faced, solidly built, with slightly thinning hair, my new XO happened to be the third-highest U.S. Navy ace of World War II, one of the great legends of our community. In one engagement over the Japanese home islands in April 1945, he shot down six enemy planes. He finished the war with twenty-three flags on the side of his F6F Hellcat.

  I was a raw ensign fighting to hide a broken heart. The man introducing himself to me held the Navy Cross and six Distinguished Flying Crosses. I was in awe. Yet Commander Valencia was anything but arrogant. He greeted me and set me at ease with his relaxed, unassuming nature. It was hard to believe that a man with so many accomplishments could be so grounded and approachable.

  From the XO’s office, the officer of the day led me to the hangar. He explained that the squadron stood on twenty-four-hour alert as a component of the North American Air Defense Command. VF(AW)-3 was the only U.S. Navy fighter squadron assigned to protect America’s shores. We were the anomalies—naval aviators under direct U.S. Air Force control. At any moment of the day or night, two crews stood ready to scramble and be airborne within five minutes. More crews waited in the ready room on ten-minute alert. Should the order be given, they would run to the aircraft waiting in front of the hangar and launch down Runway 18 in a mad dash.

  It was the height of the Cold War. The great threat to the American homeland wasn’t intercontinental ballistic missiles; it was Soviet nuclear-armed bombers. In case of World War III, our job was to get to the incoming Red Air Force bombers before they could hit Southern California.

  The Navy gave us the best equipment, the most advanced electronics—and the best crews. Every year there was a competition to see which outfit was the best squadron protecting American airspace. Every year, a two-star Air Force general came to North Island to bestow that award—it always went to the lone Navy unit in the mix. It was a tremendous point of pride for the Navy, and for VF(AW)-3.

  I was allowed to poke my head into the ready room for just a short minute that afternoon. The crews were lounging there in their flight suits, waiting for the Klaxon to sound. The officer of the day said, “Why don’t you go get your flight gear and put it in your new locker.” He pointed out a bank of them in the main hangar. When I found my assigned locker, I opened it up to find that it was full of somebody else’s stuff.

  “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said.

  The officer of the day looked stricken. “Sorry about that. We forgot to clear it out.”

  Clear it out?

  “That locker belonged to the lieutenant j.g. you’re replacing. He was killed a little while back. Accident. Go ahead and throw everything away. The rest of his effects already went to his family.”

  I walked back to the locker and stared at the items inside with a new perspective. A ratty old T-shirt hung on one hook. A few other knickknacks and toiletries sat on the shelf. Then I noticed something unusual. A pair of eyes were staring back at me. I reached in and pulled off the top shelf a tiny stuffed mouse. It was about two inches tall, with big eyes, soft gray fur, and a tail. The toy seemed out of place in a fighter pilot’s locker.

  Was it a gift to his child, never delivered because of that last, fatal flight? Was it a gift from his child to him? If it was a lucky talisman that served as a reminder of who waited for him back home, I hated to think it had failed him.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to know. Talk about an attitude adjustment. My problems seemed trivial, selfish, compared to the death of the mouse’s owner.

  I trashed the shirt and toiletries. But as the mouse hovered over the can, I held it there and regarded it again. Who am I to throw away another man’s mouse?

  I took the little guy back to my flight bag and made him a nest deep inside. As I stowed my gear in the reclaimed locker, his cartoon eyes stared up at me from beside my helmet. I set my Ray-Bans on the shelf, closed the locker, and headed off to get a room assignment in the bachelor officers’ quarters. After I unpacked, I went to the ready room to meet the squadron.

  Ties off. Formality forgotten, one of my new squadron mates greeted me with a grin and said, “Welcome to the best squadron in the United States Air Force!” Mom had told me to go make the best life I could. Carry on. Move forward. Easy things to say. Yet here I was, surrounded by men driven by the same passion for flight that burned in me. They were achievers, hard chargers, type A. The kind of men whose respect, once earned, offered meaning never found anywhere else. These men were among the best pilots in the Navy, and here they were opening a place for me in their circle. That night, I found my tribe, the men who would teach me to be a fighter pilot.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE NAVY WAY

  North Island

  June 1958

  The buzz of the Klaxon sent us scrambling. Unidentified aircraft inbound. Pilots drinking coffee and playing acey deucey in the ready room were always waiting for this moment. I was on “alert five” status, ready to be airborne, in case of a contingency, within five minutes. The Klaxon started us sprinting to the flight line. We climbed into our cockpits, taxied to Runway 18, and did a rolling takeoff with an unrestricted climb.

  The aircraft we called the Ford was officially known as the Douglas F4D Skyray. It was a tailless aerodynamic marvel created by legendary designer Ed Heinemann. It looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie with its missile-shaped nose and rakish bat wing. It was so hot that to earn cockpit time in this beast, each pilot in VF(AW)-3 first had to fly three hundred hours in the older F3D Skyknight interceptor. The trick in that single-seater was to learn to handle the radar and speed procedures by yourself.

  I could feel the Pratt & Whitney J57 engine surging as I checked the instruments. At 140 knots, I rotated to climb attitude about thirty degrees, while sucking up the landing gear and turning to the assigned vector to find my target. Everything in the green. The Skyray streaked for the heavens like a homesick angel.

  Continuing to pull back on the stick, I reclined until my nose had moved from thirty degrees to sixty. Almost straight up now, I accelerated with the afterburner pushing the aircraft to the perfect climb speed. I passed ten thousand feet in fifty-five seconds. The stars lay dead ahead.

  Two minutes and thirty-six seconds later, I was at fifty thousand feet. On a clear day, from this vantage point nine miles above the Pacific, I could see the Sierra Nevada to the north, far past Los Angeles. To the east the Colorado River snaked around Yuma, Arizona.

  The target was somewhere out there in the night, ahead and below me. The Mount Laguna radar station and the Manual Air Direction Center at Norton Air Force Base coached me toward it until I detected the target with my own sensors. The Skyray had a secret airborne radar installed in the nose. It was a circular cathode ray tube screen with a hood attached to it. To see it in daylight, the pilot leaned forward and put his eyes into the hood to watch the radar beam sweep left to right. If that seems like a dangerous way to fly, you get used to it. Westinghouse built a turn and bank indicator, an attitude gyro, into the screen. We could fly the aircraft with our eyes on the radar scope. The radar controls were just aft of the throttle, so we’d fly with our right hand on the stick and run the radar with our left.

  Thanks to our burner, we could reach a target in mere minutes. Our powerful radar could spot the enemy long before we could see them visually. The target pulsed onto my radar screen and I started the lock-on procedure. The screen displayed a small circle. Our job was to ease it over the targe
t dot. That done, we were ready to fire when the target was in range. We could fire dozens of unguided 2.7-inch rockets to hit our target.

  The Skyray rolled out of the Douglas Aircraft factory at El Segundo with four cannons and sixty-five shells per gun. With the advent of unguided rockets and heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, the Navy deemed the guns so much needless weight. They were removed, and their ports faired over. Welcome to the dawn of Push Button Warfare.

  In these peacetime intercepts, we always needed to establish visual sight of the target to figure out what it was. I dropped down on the target to discover on this night, like almost every other intercept, that our bogey was a wayward airliner. I flew along with it for a few minutes, wondering if the passengers inside could see me out there off their wing. My nav lights were switched off, so I would have just been a ghostly outline to anyone who happened to be peering out their porthole window.

  No threat to the country on this night. Mission accomplished; time to return to North Island. That afterburner sucked almost three thousand pounds of fuel—461 gallons—just to get to fifty thousand feet. We were fast, could scale the stars at Buck Rogers rates, but the Skyray did not have a lot of endurance, even with two external fuel tanks slung under the wings. She was a sprinter, built to counter a threat we hoped we would never face.

  I headed back for North Island and eased into the pattern, passing over the Hotel del Coronado, always checking out the pool as I paralleled the beach. On final approach, the Skyray demanded full attention. Unlike the T-bird, which was a beautifully balanced and stable bird, the Ford was twitchy, nervous, and laterally unstable. That instability gave it tremendous maneuverability and roll rate, but it was not for a novice pilot. They were tricky to land on carriers. Nuggets had to fly in an older interceptor before getting the keys to the Ford.

  You couldn’t see very well when you were coming in hot, thirty degrees nose up. The Skyray landed so nose-high that Ed Heinemann designed a retractable tail skid with a small wheel embedded in it. When we extended the landing gear, the skid lowered and locked into place. If you landed properly, the skid would be the first part of the aircraft to contact the runway, followed by the main wheels, then the nose wheel.

  I spotted the approach lights near the end of the runway. They stood on tall wooden poles like streetlights on steroids. I was wary of them. They could disorient you, especially on foggy nights. I put the nose on the centerline, scanned the instrument panel, and eased off the throttle. The Ford descended toward the runway on a ground-controlled radar approach on glide path, on centerline, until touchdown.

  Two months into my time with VF(AW)-3, I received a call at home in the middle of the night ordering me back to North Island. I was living with several of the other pilots in a rental house on Coronado, so I was close by. At the compound I discovered that a lieutenant j.g. friend had flown into one of those approach lights in dense fog, after getting disoriented on final. His F4D exploded and killed him instantly. The skipper made me the assistant accident investigating officer; it fell to me to go with the squadron commander and a chaplain to break the news to his wife.

  After that terrible doorway moment on her front porch, I returned to the field to spend the morning helping to clear the wreckage off the runway. That was the worst and hardest duty I ever had in my twenty-nine-year career. Part of the task required finding my friends’ remains. We spent hours collecting pieces, and I thought about his newly widowed wife and their children.

  His death left me ultra-careful as I made those night approaches, especially in bad weather. After dark, thick fog usually moved in from the bay and North Island. It made for very difficult, near-zero-visibility landings. Sometimes the fog proved so thick that we diverted to the naval air station at El Centro or another local strip. The fog is what got my friend. In his final seconds, it disoriented him and he clipped one of those stanchions. It was both a tragedy and cautionary tale.

  These Skyrays were the wave of the future. If we did our jobs right, we’d never even see the Soviet bomber we blew out of the sky. In the months to come, beyond-visual-range attacks would become the order of the day, thanks to the advent of two key pieces of technology: the Sidewinder and Sparrow air-to-air missiles. These were the first generation of guided weapons. The Sidewinder, officially known as the AIM-9, used infrared sensors to track and destroy a target. The longer-ranged Sparrow relied on radar guidance.

  In September 1958, our allies in the Taiwanese Air Force took the Sidewinder to war. They mounted them on their vintage F-86 Sabres. Through the end of that summer, the Taiwanese had been fighting a bitter air war against the Red Chinese Air Force, which was equipped with the newer Soviet-built MiG-17 Fresco.

  The Taiwanese pilots scored history’s first guided missile kill on September 24. The Sidewinder came as a complete shock to the Communists. Before the fight ended, the new missile helped them knock down about ten MiG-17s. The fight validated the enormous investment in missile technology we were making all through the 1950s. Of course, combat creates totally unanticipated moments. On that day, one of the Sidewinders failed to explode after spearing a MiG-17’s wing. The Chinese pilot returned to base with his prize stuck in his aircraft, and within weeks the Russians were reverse-engineering our ultra-secret technological marvel. A few years later, in Vietnam, we would face those Russian-made Sidewinder knockoffs—we called them AA-2 Atolls.

  After the Sidewinder’s inaugural success in combat, the Department of Defense, Air Force, and Navy moved quickly toward long-range guided missile technology. The day of the Red Baron’s swirling dogfights over the Western Front in World War I seemed a thing of the past. No longer did you have to close within a few hundred feet to score a kill. Pilots could shoot an enemy plane out of the sky long before getting into dogfight range. The Navy and Air Force agreed with the DoD whiz kids, who decided the day of close-range air combat was over. The new fighters would have multiple pylons for missiles, but no internal gun. Why waste space and weight for such an anachronism?

  In my squadron, the senior leadership came of age in the World War II and Korean War era. Their combat experience looked a lot more like the Red Baron’s day than our Buck Rogers dot wars on a radar screen. Nobody influenced me more than our executive officer, ace Eugene “Geno” Valencia, who took several of us young pilots under his wing and mentored us. In after-hours bull sessions at the famous air station I Bar, or the base officers’ club, he would sometimes open up and talk about fighting the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific. As a young nugget, I relished the stories. In 1957, Geno had taken me to a big gathering of naval aviators in Rosarito Beach, Baja California, Mexico. It was known as the Tailhook Convention. As Geno’s aide-de-camp, I carried the briefcase full of scotch. I heard sea stories and hangar tales that set my hair on end from some of the Navy’s greatest aviation legends. Another time, Geno took some of us junior officers to an American Fighter Aces convention. I had devoured the memoirs of the World War II aces, looking for lessons I could apply to my career. We met some of America’s best fighter pilots, and we absorbed everything they told us. All of them had fought Zeroes and MiGs. We wanted to be them!

  They told us how, during the Pacific War, they learned to avoid getting into a turning dogfight with more-maneuverable Japanese fighters. Trying to turn with the more agile Japanese planes would get your tail shot off. So they took their shot and flew away—“One pass, haul ass” was the axiom. They learned to work together in pairs, cooperating to make sure that an enemy couldn’t latch on to a pilot’s tail. The other American pilot was always ready to turn toward his partner and stick his guns in the enemy’s face.

  My flight leader, Bill Armstrong, explained to me that in Korea, the opposite was the case. The tactics of World War II would get a pilot killed going up against a Communist MiG-15. Those jets were faster and flew higher than anything the Navy had, including the hot F9F Panther I had flown in training. Given the MiG’s speed advantage, the horizontal plane became the Panther’s playg
round. It could out-turn the MiG-15. So in just six years, we changed tactics altogether. “One pass, haul ass” went away and U.S. fighter pilots found their advantage in the sharp-turning dogfight.

  In the missile age, it was all changing again. At least that’s what the Navy believed. We would simply be directed by ground control to a point in the sky, lock our little circle on the dot, and let loose with a missile. No more seat-of-the-pants maneuvering in sharply turning fights. Technology promised a revolution.

  Classically, the fighter jocks flew in many roles. We flew close to bomber formations, covering them en route to a target. We intercepted enemy bombers, tangling with their own fighter escort. We carried out sweeps in search of anything in the air to shoot down. We even carried out bombing missions ourselves, supporting troops by dropping napalm along the front lines. Fighters were jacks-of-all-trades, with the primary job of driving the enemy from the skies so our own planes could operate without interference. Each of these missions involved close-in dogfighting. The Navy concluded that long-distance radar interception would make all of these tactics obsolete. A flight of missile-armed fighters would stand off and destroy targets without ever needing to engage at close range. Just watch that cathode ray tube, secure the lock, and release the missiles. The bombing mission would be handed over to dedicated attack squadrons.

  In our tight-knit group, some of us didn’t like where the Navy was heading. The old ways had developed for a reason. Had air warfare really changed? It turned out, there was another factor at play here. It had everything to do with budgets. Through the mid-1950s, training for the kind of Korean War dogfighting we’d experienced proved both expensive and dangerous. Blasting off the runway and going climbing to fifty thousand feet at the edge of the sound barrier put a great deal of stress on an airframe. So, for reasons of safety, every plane came with a designated service life. The defense contractor guaranteed the airframe could withstand a certain number of flight hours before needing to be replaced. Somewhere in the Pentagon, some bean counter concluded that the heavy G loads of dogfight training wore out aircraft at least five times faster than simple intercept flights did. And dogfight training cost lives. Men made mistakes in those twisting, turning mock duels. They exceeded the limits, and died in unrecoverable spins or midair collisions. The loss of expensive aircraft could be (painfully) overcome, but the loss of well-trained pilots who took years to learn the ropes was a double blow.