Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  One weekend Foster invited J. C. Smith and me to his ready room, where he showed us film of U.S. planes dogfighting against a MiG-21. This really got our attention. It was footage from an American test range. Jim explained that he and his chief of projects, Marine major Don Keast, had been going to a forbidden zoo in the Nevada desert where these exotic animals were being tamed. The heavily restricted airspace had several names. Paradise Ranch. Groom Lake. Dreamland. Area 51.

  Naturally, we expressed interest in having a turn. In the spring of 1969, Foster worked channels to secure approval for the leadership of Topgun to go to Dreamland for a week and see it for ourselves. The project was so secret that when we flew from San Diego to Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, we weren’t allowed to tell our families anything about our destination, let alone what we would be doing.

  From Nellis we took a cab into the city, where, across from the Las Vegas Hilton, there was a small hotel that was run by the CIA. The barkeeper at the watering hole there, known as O’Brien’s, must have owned a security clearance. He had a professional’s knowing attitude and never asked questions as we unwound during our overnight stay. The next morning before sunrise we would be back in the taxicab to the air base for a flight to the safari park where the MiGs lived.

  It’s probably not wise for me to describe a lot of what I saw at Area 51. The way the base was laid out, it was hard to see much. You’d man your airplane in the hangar and they’d pull you out. The hangars and taxiways seemed to have been arranged to block your lines of sight in most directions. That was fine by me. Highly sensitive programs went on there that I don’t believe the public had an immediate need to know about. The CIA’s A-12 Oxcart program—better known by its Air Force name, the SR-71 Blackbird strategic reconnaissance aircraft—was one. Other classified activities went on there at night, which may account for why we never stayed over on our days to fly. We clocked out at closing time and were back to O’Brien’s by dusk.

  But what we learned during the day was just invaluable. While the TA-4 and F-86H did a fair impersonation of a MiG-17, and the F-5 could stand in for a MiG-21, there was no substitute for the real thing. When I first saw the 17 up close, my instant feeling was trepidation, as I would soon be flying it. Sitting on its stubby nose and leaning over the windscreen to look into the cockpit, I was impressed for better and worse. It was old, rough, simple, heavy, and beautiful in its way. The avionics were crude, lacking the power-boosted controls of U.S. aircraft. I gave the fuel gauge a double take. This bird carried only eighteen hundred pounds of fuel, less than one-eighth of what a Phantom’s tanks held.

  I got six or seven flights in the adversary plane. It was agile to be sure, but I still felt like I was flying a very fast anvil. My frequent opponent at Dreamland was one of Jim Foster’s crackerjacks at VX-4, Ron “Mugs” McKeown. He was a superb pilot. He concealed a considerable intellect behind his breezy self-confidence and ready willingness to do mischief. Tough, too. At the Naval Academy, he went undefeated for three years in the boxing ring. Mugs and I would spend most of a day flying head-to-head and swapping roles, Phantom for MiG. A former Air Force test pilot school graduate, Mugs was used to flying a lot of different aircraft. He was damn good in a MiG. The plane was so quick to run out of gas, even without using its afterburner, that you had to make your moves and score your points fast. You had to learn the rhythm of how to fight it. If you did, you could be dangerous.

  Another pilot at VX-4, Lieutenant Commander Foster “Tooter” Teague, claimed that no Navy pilot who flew against the MiG-17 beat it 1 vs. 1 the first time out. That may not have been true, but either way, Major Boyd was right that the Communist plane had its advantages. Of course, we knew that already. It turned out that Doc Townsend, who had preceded Hank Halleland as skipper of the Phantom RAG, had, unbeknownst to me, flown against the MiG-21 at Dreamland a few years before we started Topgun. Townsend’s work, though very highly classified, apparently had given the F-4 community its initial push to fly beyond prescribed boundaries in ACM. He seems to have passed down a lot of what he had learned to Sam Leeds at the RAG.

  There was no better way to validate our tactics than to try them out at Dreamland. Once the Air Force guys got used to seeing us, we were allowed to fly straight to the base that did not exist from Miramar. We’d taxi in before sunrise, park our airplanes, go to the hangar, and sometimes grab a combat nap. We were in the skies at first blush of dawn. We never filed a flight plan. One day I flew a brand-new F-4J out to evaluate it against MiGs. Fresh from the factory in St. Louis, that Phantom smelled like a new car. It had, among other things, an improved radar and fire-control system that we were anxious to try out.

  I should say here that the captured MiGs weren’t supposed to be flown in dogfights. “ACM evaluation” was not the purpose of their Nevada residency. They had been obtained by the Air Force for “technical research.” The blue suits were measuring engine temperatures, high-and low-end airspeeds, doing all the stuff they did in testing at Edwards Air Force Base. Accordingly, the three-star general who was in charge of the Air Force units at Groom Lake allowed no dogfighting. There could be no such risky behavior on his watch. We saw it differently. There were tactics to prove up. So we bent a few rules. If the Air Force chose to skip our flight briefs or debriefs, which they did, who were we to insist upon wasting their time? We got ourselves on the schedule and did our own thing. I suppose this was the closest we ever came to resembling characters in the old TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep. Forgiveness is easier to request than permission.

  When Mugs met me at the hangar, enthused as he always was, he said he was scheduled to fight a MiG-17 and asked to borrow my airplane. It was still hot from my ferry flight, but I saw no reason to refuse him. He said something about wanting to test a new evasive maneuver when he flew that afternoon against one of the greats at VX-4, Tooter Teague, who had worked with Jim Foster in getting naval pilots’ access to the MiGs. It was foolproof, he said, though adding that the maneuver had never been tried in an F-4. It was cheeky of Mugs to announce this after talking me out of that hot rod. As he taxied to the fuel pit, topped off, and accelerated down the runway, I suspected I’d been had.

  Even if that was the case, I didn’t want to miss the show. Mugs McKeown and Tooter Teague going 1 vs. 1 was always worth seeing. Both men were top-tier test and evaluation guys. You never knew what you might see. So I checked out another Phantom belonging to VX-4 and joined them in the airspace over Area 51.

  Circling at a safe distance, with J. C. in the rear seat, I watched them merge and start a dogfight. Neither seemed to be getting an edge on the other and the tangle descended to lower and lower altitudes. Then Mugs tried his maneuver. He turned so sharply that his plane skidded and momentarily “departed controlled flight,” as we say. Regaining it, he flipped over, inverted, and entered a stall once again. This was graduate-level flying, PhD sort of stuff. I can’t do justice to the adventurous aerodynamics of it without moving my hands around a lot and using technical language.

  After the stall Mugs was not able to regain control. Tooter broke character as an enemy aggressor and was trying to give Mugs some help over the radio. Mugs said something like “I got it.” But he never saved his plane from its spinning descent toward the desert.

  As the F-4J tumbled below five thousand feet, the hard deck through which we were never supposed to descend, Tooter and I both yelled, “Mugs, get out!”

  Cool as a test pilot, he said, “I’m departing the airplane.”

  As if in slow motion, the Phantom arced toward the earth for the last time. Mugs or his RIO, Pete Gilleece, pulled the ejection handle.

  Foom-foom! Two small rockets went off, two seats followed, and—thank God—two parachutes opened in the sky. And two million dollars’ worth of factory-fresh Navy flying machine erupted in flames in the desert.

  As Mugs and Pete continued their nylon descent, they drifted directly toward the churning fireball. Fortunately, the desert whipped up a breeze that carri
ed them to a landing maybe two hundred feet from the flames. They felt a pretty toasty heat wave but walked away without a scratch.

  I wasn’t sure the same would be said of Topgun.

  After a mishap involving a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment, Uncle Sam required an investigation. And that worried me. Any report of the loss of a VF-121 plane at Topgun would imperil the program as it struggled to make its way. Since I had checked that Phantom out of Hangar One, we were responsible for it. Hank Halleland’s warning rang in my ears.

  When I landed and returned to the hangar, I made the call to Hank to break the news. I was surprised to find out that Jim Foster had reached my skipper first. Jim explained to him that it had been his pilot who carried out the maneuver while doing VX-4 business. Hank must have smiled as he said to Jim, “Okay. If that’s true, you just bought yourself an airplane.” With those words, the test-and-evaluation squadron took the hit and Topgun was off the hook.

  Jim, to his eternal blessing, took the additional trouble of reporting the incident directly to Washington, instead of to Pacific Naval Air Forces headquarters. By reporting it to Rear Admiral Edward L. “Whitey” Feightner, the chief of naval fighter studies, he saved Vice Admiral William F. Bringle at AirPac from having to deal with it. (I promise you Bringle knew of the incident about fifteen minutes after it happened.) That double trick made our crashed bird VX-4’s loss and let everybody avoid a grilling from our West Coast headquarters. No one wanted to see Topgun shot down, for we had come so far in such a short time.

  Taking our leave of Dreamland that evening and flying back to Miramar in a VX-4 jet, J. C. and I drank well at the officers’ club. Topgun would see another day. Where do we get men of Jim Foster’s and Hank Halleland’s courage? They never seemed to forget that we were at war.

  The Air Force was slow to get wind of what we were doing with those precious captive toys at Area 51. We kept no written records of the dogfighting. Routine maintenance paperwork was our only paper trail. The reporting and debriefs were all done verbally after each flight, safely back at Miramar, within our tribe, over a beer or two in the trailer late at night, or at the officers’ club.

  Mel Holmes and I were invited to visit the Air Force Fighter Weapons School at Nellis to brief them on what we were doing at Miramar. I was curious to check in at their gun shop and learn more about the General Electric M61 Gatling gun pods they mounted to their Phantoms. (We decided not to use them.) Nothing the Air Force was doing entered the homegrown Topgun curriculum. Our cultures were so different, and that was reflected in our tactics. We did know that Colonel Lloyd “Boots” Boothby, a USAF pilot at Nellis, was as aggressive as we were, but had to hide it. He and some other good men, including Windy Schaller, one of the chief test pilots, were deeply frustrated with the rigidity.

  Topgun couldn’t avoid a rivalry with the U.S. Air Force. It wasn’t about politics to us. It was about flying and ideas. Sure, it bothered us to hear the Air Force claim it had created the first fighter weapons school. (If that was true in name, it wasn’t true in substance—or result.) It’s bad ideas that lose wars and get people killed.

  The most vocal advocate of the Air Force thinking at the time was Major John Boyd. In 1969 he was making a lot of speeches promoting his “energy-maneuverability” theory of air-to-air warfare. Simply put, it’s a mathematical formula that tries to reduce fighter aircraft performance to a single value based on the plane’s speed, thrust, aerodynamic drag, and weight. First put forward in 1964, it had reportedly been used by the Air Force to design new fighters such as the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon, outstanding planes, as we all know. When Topgun was getting launched, Holmes, Jerry Sawatzky, and I attended classified conferences to keep current, and we’d see Boyd at several of them. Eventually, after we were established, we were invited to make presentations of our own.

  In 1969, Mel and Ski gave a talk at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. John Boyd followed them, pitching his theory. There was some good debate, and Mel remembers Air Force officers starting to challenge their catechism. A particularly brave captain once questioned the Fluid Four concept by asking why a wingman with more tactical experience than his flight leader should be forbidden from taking a kill when he had it. That one ruffled some feathers. In the Q&A, though, Major Boyd made an infamous remark. He said that no U.S. pilot should ever dogfight a MiG, because his theory proved mathematically that since the enemy plane performed better throughout the flight envelope than the F-4, taking on a MiG was a good way to end up hanging from a parachute or a whole lot worse.

  The problem with any theory is the baggage of its assumptions. We thought Major Boyd was making some rather large ones and considered his analysis suspect as a result. In the base auditorium at Tyndall that day, Ski poked Mel in the ribs.

  “Why don’t you say something, Rattler.”

  Mel stood up and proposed to the Air Force officer that he was underrating a few things. Namely people. Mel said that while weapons might have parameters and airplanes theoretical values, no algorithm could predict much if it excluded the most important factor of all: the skill, heart, and drive of the pilot in the cockpit. The moment of truth was the Merge. It was then that you had your chance to take the measure of a man.

  “Sir,” Mel said, “I just don’t think you can know anything about another pilot before the first turn. And if you don’t know that, then you can’t say that a MiG-17 will win every time.”

  That needed saying.

  The best I can recall, Major Boyd didn’t really engage. He replied by restating his claim. “Thank you for that view, Lieutenant, but you can’t fight MiGs in an F-4. We’ll lose wars that way.”

  We would see about that.

  John Boyd was intelligent, patriotic, and good at a great many things. From this exchange, we concluded that one of them was deriving big ideas that aspired to universality but did not reckon with the human heart. In aerial combat, technical factors were important. Some of them could be modeled. But no model could tell the whole story. Major Boyd was not wrong. His theory was simply incomplete. He also completely misjudged the F-4. We were no slouches at the science, either. With Cobra Ruliffson’s technical acuity and hard work, we had fused hard data with equally hard experience. It ended up showing exactly how a Phantom could smoke a MiG, almost every time.

  The energy-maneuverability theory had little to say about tactics or the people who made them work. The pilot is the key part of the equation, though as a variable it cannot be quantified. Out at Miramar, as students and instructors bent the jet and flew beyond the limits, we were trying to turn the man in the cockpit into a weapon. As adversary pilots, Mel, Ski, Cobra, Nash, and I were enjoying the role, flying, debriefing, and adjusting from the enemy point of view. Day after day and flight after flight, we were helping our students meet the challenge. We were making them part of the equation.

  Men surely are weapons, and, as I said, ideas matter. I’d venture to say that any engagement pitting Major Boyd and any of his handpicked three against Mel, Jim, Nash, and Sawatzky would have had an instructive outcome. (And okay, I guess I have to say it: I could have filled in for any of them to equal result.) Adherence to strict rules and restrictions meant almost certain defeat against well-trained pilots fighting under no such restrictions. And this is why we say Topgun never existed before the Navy set up at Miramar. No schoolhouse that required adherence to fixed ideas, reduced airplanes to numbers, or considered its instructors as “priests” could ever be Topgun in our book. The final tallies over Vietnam would eventually tell the tale.

  While Topgun’s forays to Area 51 were never discussed at Miramar (the handful of us who were cleared to go treated the classification seriously), those flights were incredibly valuable. Our experiences there went straight into our 0430 briefings, and from there were used to refine the Topgun syllabus. We learned some important thing about the MiGs, and for that we were in debt to our friends at VX-4.

  Slowly but surely, we were gaining confide
nce that when our junior officers went back to the war, they would be the dogfighters—and teachers—that their country needed in a desperate hour.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PROOF OF CONCEPT

  Miramar

  1969

  Topgun’s students became crisp, smart, quick, deadly, and confident. They knew the performance envelopes of their airplanes and missiles, maneuvered quickly to exploit them, and handled all the switch interfaces in the cockpit efficiently. They demonstrated their ability to fly the Egg tactics to perfection and use the high yo-yo out of a two-plane Loose Deuce formation to fillet and fry aggressor pilots almost every time out. Their final exam was a special treat: an unrestricted Sparrow and Sidewinder shoot against live maneuvering targets.

  Steve Smith was in charge of our BQM-34 Firebee drone live-fire exercises, generously provided to us by Jim Foster’s squadron up the road at Point Mugu. These remote-controlled jet-powered gunnery targets, built by the Ryan Aeronautical Company, had been around since the 1950s. Unlike towed targets and the more common drones, which did not maneuver, the BQM-34s were flown by an operator on the ground. They were capable of more than six hundred knots and could fly up to sixty thousand feet. In the hands of a Phantom instructor like Steve-O, well, that twenty-two-foot-long target had a fair chance of giving even a good pilot fits. While it didn’t have the power to soar vertically, it was plenty maneuverable, capable of sharp twists and break turns. Though we were a little worried about the possibility of accidents flying such a hot rod from the ground in a live-fire exercise, we figured the risk was worth it. Topgun’s students needed this experience against a thinking opponent before we sent them back to war. At the Pacific Air Missile Test Range, some of our young guys were so good that they destroyed the wildly evading drones, then shot some more missiles to pick off the falling parts. After a success like that, the confidence soared and they were on final approach to graduation day in early April. As it approached, we had another surprise in store for them—a flight out to Area 51 to take a turn against a real live MiG as I related in the previous chapter. For students, it was a crowning moment in their young careers.