How an old friend ended his career in the USMC

[Fondueset]

The Ejection Site

A web site dedicated to ejection seats....

[BatRay]

Originally Posted by Fondueset

Since we're talking vintage birds - how about the F104 - DOWNward firing ejection seat!!
F106s hail from back around the time the SR71 was the YF12A interceptor. I remember seeing F101s during the cherry festival here - also B57s and even an Avro Vulcan one day out over leelanau county - that was weird.

SR-71, now that is a hell of an aircraft.

[Bill McIntyre]

Originally Posted by BatRay

SR-71, now that is a hell of an aircraft.

It sure is. I recall seeing one doing touch and go landings at Kadena AFB on Okinawa, and it disappeared into the blue sky on every "go."

Another interesting thing is how leaky it is. The Air Force is so much tidier and fastidious than the Navy and Marine Corps, so I was surprised when I taxied by a couple of SR-71s at an AFB and they were both standing in puddles of jet fuel. It turns out that they route the fuel right under the skin of the aircraft to cool the skin at very high speeds, but if its not hot enough, the metal shrinks and opens up the seams a bit, so it seeps fuel sitting on the deck.

Or at least that's what I was told.

[Fondueset]

That's true Bill - the SR71 didn't tighten up till it got hot. Kelly Johnson was chief designer - same guy also designed the P38 Lightning, F104 Starfighter, U2/TR1 and many others. Quite the career and very leading edge. The Sr71 started life as the YF12a Strategic interceptor - It was armed with nuclear tipped air to air missiles in bays in the fuselage .

[BatRay]

Yeah, the Blackbird was designed to rattle a bit due to heat expansion. I hadn't heard about it leaking fuel that way, but it makes sense. Seriously though, what an amazing plane. They flew from New York to London in less than two hours, including a slow-down to refuel, over 1000 missiles launched against them with no hits, horizontal flight of 85,068 feet and speed of 2,193 miles per hour in sustained flight, and designed with a slide rule! I feel deprived that they are no longer in service.

[Bill McIntyre]

I flew the RF-4B, the photo recon version of the Phantom, in Vietnam, but of course that was tactical reconnaissance rather than strategic by the SR-71. While it was fun to be down there at 100 feet and 500 knots some times, I always thought it would be cool to be up there over 80 grand thumbing my nose at everyone.

When I was a flight instructor in a Navy squadron in Texas, our operations officer was a Navy Lt Cdr who had just returned from a tour in the intel section of Commander in Chief Pacific HQ in Hawaii. He said that on one clear and cloudless day, they sent an SR-71 straight up the spine of North Vietnam and it completed most of their outstanding photo requirements without getting a detectable reaction from the NVA. And then it turned out over the Tonkin Gulf over our fleet and they didn't see it either.

[BatRay]

Amazing, amazing stuff. The SR-71 could take accurate pictures of a license plate from 80,000 feet. The standard evasive maneuver was simply to accelerate, and none were ever shot down. It must have been really cool to see them in action, Bill.

[Bill McIntyre]

Well, I never saw them in action unless seeing that one doing touch and go landings at Kadena counts as action. Other than that my only sightings were taxiing by them on the ground, and that was very seldom.

[Bill McIntyre]

Originally Posted by BatRay

The SR-71 could take accurate pictures of a license plate from 80,000 feet.

I don't know about license plates, but on low level runs in North Vietnam I got photos of guys feeding the guns that were shooting at me, and even a couple of smoke rings at the end of barrels sticking out of bushes.

Of course I couldn't see that until I looked at the photos later- I was too busy trying to stay on my flight line and keep from running into the ground.

The SR-71 had speed and altitude, but all we had going for us was speed. We weren't exactly out of range, but we hoped to go by so fast that they didn't have time to react. The standard tactic for other aircraft is to jinx, but a photo aircraft can't jinx because it has to hold the camera steady, which means keeping wings level at least while over the target run.

Another reason we needed to go at least a bit fast is that the F-4 had a bad habit of leaving a trail of black smoke that was visible for miles, even when you couldn't see the aircraft that was leaving the trail. But if you went into minimum afterburner, that did away with the smoke so that they couldn't see you coming so easily.

[BatRay]

Now all the Blackbirds do is sit in museums, so however limited your contact was, it's more than people get to see these days.

How low were you flying? Did you have any form of defense?

[Bill McIntyre]

Originally Posted by BatRay

How low were you flying? Did you have any form of defense?

Over targets in South Vietnam where we didn't have to worry about AAA or missiles, we tended to fly at nice comfortable altitudes from 5000 to 10000 feet, depending on the focal length of the lens and what coverage we were supposed to get.

Over North Vietnam, we still might be fairly high, but as fast as we could go, but often we were down low, sometimes as low as 50 feet, but more often more like 200 to 500 feet. The ground goes by pretty fast as those altitudes, and a few degrees of pitch change can cause a big altitude change very rapidly when going fast.

The most challenging flying in some ways was what the squadron did every night right after dark and again right before dawn. We had to take an infrared map from the coast to the Laotian border, from 10 miles north of Da Nang to 5 miles south. It took three aircraft flying for over 2 hours each to cover it. We were supposed to get overlapping flight lines from 1000 feet above ground level, and the ground goes up and down a lot between the coast and the Laotian border.

So we would cross the coast using our radar in a mapping mode to get on our proper flight line, then switch to terrain following mode and fly up and down over the mountains in the dark to Laos while maintaining a true track of 270 degrees. At 1000 feet altitude, the infrared sensor covered a strip about one nautical mile wide. Lets say we started on line one. After we got to Laos, we would try to make a four mile turn and them come back out on line five by maintaining a true track over the ground of 090. (We had an inertial navigation system, so that gave us a readout of true track). When we got to the coast we would see how we actually did, then go back in line two, back out line six, etc.

It was a weird combination of demanding and boring. Nothing exciting was going on and no one was likely to shoot at us since we had our running lights off, but it took a lot of concentration to keep flying up and down over those mountains in the black. When you crossed a ridge, it gave you a big dive signal, and it was hard at first to go 30 degrees nose down and trust the radar to tell you when to start pulling the nose up.

If you are wondering why the hell we did that, the purpose was to pick up camp fires, truck exhausts, and other heat signatures. I'm surprised that we only lost one aircraft that flew into a mountain on that mission. I was glad that I had a lot of practice out here in the California desert flying at mountains in broad daylight and 70 miles of visibility, looking at the ridge and the radar and telling it to tell me to climb before I chickened out visually.

We had no armament. People make too big a deal of that through. You can't very well shoot at targets on the ground or at other aircraft while taking photos, so armament would have just been wasted.

Someone tell me when to quit with the sea stories. Once you give an old pilot an excuse to tell stories, someone has to shoot him to make him stop.

BTW, my son was a Marine F-18 pilot for 11 years and flew off the USS Eisenhower over Iraq and Bosnia. He has more up-to-date and better stories than I do.

[Fondueset]

I think you've got a few airplane geeks here, Bill - so roll on

[Erik]

Originally Posted by Fondueset

I think you've got a few airplane geeks here, Bill - so roll on

+1! As you were!

[ILDiver]

I was reading DB and got an IM that brought to mind an Air Force story. The two things made me recall this thread, so I'll share it here. And others come to mind.

A squadron was doing training exercises and the pilots were wearing their survival vests. This "butter bar" was wearing his for the first time. He took the PRC-90 out and was "testing" it. Life Support got a call that the pilots survival radio was not working. No one could figure out why he would have it out to test. So two L.S. people go out to the plane and the girl asked what the issue was. Straight faced and dead serious the Lieutenant say, I took the radio out to make sure it works. It's in O.F.F. mode and I'm getting nothing. She could not believe it. She thought he was playing a joke. He was serious.

Another one. About a month after being at Tyndall, straight out of Tech School, there is a knock at the back door. It's a guy that I was in tech school with, he was at another squadron on the base. He asked if we had any "flight line". I looked at him and said WHAT!? A Tech sergeant kinda freaked out and pushed by me and said "let me look, but I think we are out....yeah, it's on backorder". He sent him to the First Squadron, they sent him to the 83rd, they sent him to the fab shop, they sent him to the drone building. Finally he went back and told his boss that no one had any. The boss opened the door and pointed to the flight line (aircraft parking area) and said "there is a ton of it right there!" My co-workers then tried to get me with "PropWash" and "High Speed Missile Wax".

One more. As life support we had a lot of critters and snakes in the area and actually kept dead dangerous creatures at Wing L.S. for training to show the pilots. A fellow L.S. guy got a promotion and moved to Wing L.S. He wanted to impress his new boss and cleaned up the office. His boss never cleaned his coffee cup, something about the residue adding flavor?? Well, the next morning the Master Sergeant comes in to find his mug spotless and was not happy. The "new" guy hates snakes, even the dead training snakes. So the Master Sergeant takes a coral snake and puts it into the the Techs mug as payback. The tech picks up his mug and carries it to the kitchen, picks up the coffee pot and almost pours the coffee on the dead snake. He freaked! Jumped back, dropped a full pot of coffee on the tile floor.

My fellow L.S. guys love their jokes. During SAR exercises, putting a guy that passes out on a 1-man raft and pushing him out into the bay, or handcuffing him to a tree...