by Dan Pedersen
So during my time at VF(AW)-3, the old ways were outlawed. Dogfighting—officially known as air combat maneuvering (ACM)—was forbidden. In 1960, the year before I left for my next assignment, the Navy shuttered the last of the old schools that trained fighter pilots to dogfight, the Fleet Air Gunnery Unit at El Centro. From then on, air combat maneuvering was banned. If you were caught “hassling,” as we called dogfighting, your career could end.
The edict against dogfighting divided our squadron into three factions. Our senior leadership, whose experience ran counter to everything the Navy was now doing, had fought in two wars and had seen friends die. Having spent years away from their families on fleet deployments, they focused on being dads and husbands. At the end of their careers, they were content to mentor us nuggets on the ground, share their experiences, and teach us how to be leaders. They left the bulk of the flying to the younger guys.
In the second camp were the junior officers who bought into the new way. They never hassled, never pushed their Skyrays to the edge of the flight envelope.
The third group, a quiet group of young tigers, thought otherwise. I was one of them. And we decided to do something about it.
CHAPTER FOUR
FIGHT CLUB
Off San Clemente Island, California
1959
Do you remember the day when you first got the keys to your folks’ car? Or maybe you salvaged some wreck off a lot, put in some wrench time, and took it out to see what it could do? In the 1950s, car-crazy high school kids always seemed to know where the street races were happening. Southern California had plenty of abandoned military airfields. And runways make great drag strips. Kids would take their beloved rides out there on Friday nights and tear around the old runways. Decades after those racing strips had disappeared, an underground racing scene developed. It was portrayed very well in the film The Fast and the Furious. The underground races were never formally organized. Just a few whispers at lunch and we made a deal to meet at a certain time and place. The network spread the word, one kid at a time.
Well, we developed a similar sort of underground subculture with supersonic fighters. Off the California coast, about eighty miles west of San Diego, there’s a sector of restricted airspace that encompasses San Clemente Island. It’s a military reservation. Air controllers call it Whiskey 291. The U.S. Navy squadrons in Southern California use it for training exercises. That was our playground.
I first heard about the West Coast’s illicit dogfighting scene one night after hours in a San Diego bar. It might have been the Hotel del Coronado, or a Mexican restaurant where we knocked back tequila. It was certainly not at the North Island Officers’ Club, or in the ready room. Too many “ears” could make things difficult.
We were free to fly almost whenever we wanted. Our squadron had plenty of aircraft and our chain of command encouraged us to get stick time. Almost always we could find a valid reason to fly. Sometimes we’d check out a bird for a weekend to practice cross-country navigation. I’d go to Texas, or Oklahoma, or Arizona. Once, when one of my fellow nuggets, Don Hall, was getting married in Phoenix, I flew a Ford to be part of the wedding. I can’t imagine doing that in today’s Navy.
Here’s the thing: You learn by doing. Those of us who lived to fly learned our craft by flying a lot. We intercepted wayward airliners, and did our own troubleshooting when things went wrong with our birds. The men I most admired in the Navy were old-school fighter pilots. I wanted to be a throwback, ready to face adversity on my own wits. One look at the Eastern Bloc order of battle and it was clear that if World War III broke out, we were going to be heavily outnumbered. I imagined a zombie apocalypse with airplanes. We would pick off the first ones with our sniper rifles, our missiles. But behind them there would be more rushing at us. And a sniper rifle is the wrong weapon to have when they’re grabbing for your shirttails.
What would happen to us when our missiles were gone? Our Fords we flew had no gun. And we were no longer being taught how to win a dogfight. It felt like a big gap in our combat aviator toolbox.
One Friday afternoon after a long week standing on alert, I went to the maintenance shop and signed out a Ford. I had heard at the bar that Friday afternoons before cocktail hour was the best time to find our version of a street race.
I took off from North Island and headed west for Whiskey 291, the unwritten rules in mind. One of them established a “hard deck” at five thousand feet. This meant that the fight was over the moment you dipped below that altitude. It was a nod to safety. If you ran into trouble and entered a spin, you’d need that altitude to recover. Aside from that, it was the Wild West. You’d find somebody who was willing to fight, give each other a hand signal, and get it on. What happened in Whiskey 291 stayed in Whiskey 291, unless you met your opponent later and had the chance to talk over drinks. There were no debriefs. No reports. No paper trail at all.
By joining this “fight club,” we were keeping the flame alive for a certain way of being a fighter pilot. Three of the five junior officers from VF(AW)-3 whom I lived with on North Island loved this business, and in the months to come we would spend a lot of unofficial time hassling with other aircraft out over the Pacific. It was a whole lot of fun. It was also serious. We were preserving our birthright as naval aviators.
The first time I went out there, south of San Clemente, I was amazed at what I found. Marine A-4 Skyhawks, Air National Guard F-86L interceptors, Air Force F-100 Super Sabres, and lots of Navy guys flying F-8 Crusaders. There were even a few other Fords from North Island. The word had spread far beyond the Navy community, and the services mixed it up with fierce relish because they all were going through the same institutional evolution away from air combat that we in naval aviation were experiencing.
Mel Holmes, who later became one of my Original Bros at Topgun, served at North Island in a utility squadron just a few hangars down from my compound at the same time I was there. Mel loved to hassle out at Whiskey 291. Though I didn’t know him at the time, I’d like to think we went head-to-head out there.
I learned the ropes that first time out. Pick your opponent, roll up alongside, and give the signal—the signal being the “bird.” A smile and wave, and a forty-five-degree break in opposite directions. A break means we rolled the wings and turned one way. The guy to the left broke forty-five degrees left. The guy on the right broke forty-five degrees right. We’d extend out away from each other for several seconds until we were a few miles distant, then we began the fight.
We turned into each other, pushing throttles forward in what to the uninitiated looked like an aerial game of chicken in Mach 1 fighters. Approaching head-to-head or close to it, two fighters inevitably passed each other close aboard. We called this the Merge. Closing somewhere north of a combined thousand miles an hour meant the Merge is over in mere seconds. Before a collision, we’d break away, showing our first, best move. That was when the hassle began.
There was no script for what happened after the Merge. We reacted to each other, flying our aircraft as best we could. We learned that power is king. Power gives you the ability to climb above a fight to reenter it with even more energy in a diving attack. Power means you can push your bird in a tighter and tighter turn and maintain your airspeed longer.
The Ford had tons of power. It was nimble, quick, and a hard target. It was an adrenaline rush to push to the edge of its performance envelope. Usually just a full turn or two was enough to determine who was going to win. The hassles rarely lasted more than five minutes. But that’s an eternity in aerial combat, a world where split seconds make the difference between victory and defeat.
When we had enough and were ready to admit defeat—maybe our opponent gained position at six o’clock and never let go—we waggled our wings, pulled up alongside our opponent, and flew wing to wing. Sometimes we smiled unseen behind our oxygen masks and waved. Nice fight, brother. Sometimes we just eyeballed each other, pissed off that somebody had gotten the better of us. Invariably somebody o
ut there was a little better than I was, but each time I went out, win or lose, I improved.
These fights required real physical endurance. The hard maneuvering threw you around inside the cockpit and put heavy G forces on your body. That first day left me almost intoxicated with exhaustion. I felt more alive in that world than anywhere else. The rush is that powerful.
Afterward, I decided I’d go out and hassle at Whiskey 291 every chance I could. I wanted to learn, and the best way to learn was by running up against a pilot with more experience than you. If you lost, you lived to learn again. But some of our guys would rather die than lose. They were the ones I looked for. We’d push our birds to the absolute utmost, and sometimes beyond.
If the planes were different models, it sometimes came down to what airframe had more power and agility. Both pilots would pull the stick into their stomachs, draining power to tighten their turns as they tried to gain an edge on their opponent. The most aggressive pilots would “pull well into the buffet,” as we said. A fighter on the verge of a stall falls out of controlled flight for a moment, then recovers. You can feel it in the seat of your pants and in the stick. Then the entire aircraft shakes. If you keep pulling and don’t ease up, the fighter will stall, snap-roll inverted, and begin falling. It’s easy for your opponent to whip around and eat your lunch. The best pilots know exactly how far to pull into the buffet and keep the plane from stalling. In the air, tiny advantages make a difference.
More than once, I watched two planes battling it out in the vertical, going straight up after each other like rockets, burners lit. They’d reach the edge of their respective flight envelope and enter an inverted spin. You could tell it had happened when the engine’s smoke trail started streaming over the plane’s belly and beyond the nose as the plane sank earthward, tail first, wings no longer gripping the sky. Those were dangerous moments, but with enough altitude for seven or eight revolutions, you could pull out of it.
I learned the basics of air combat in those hassles. Never lose sight of your opponent: “Lose sight, lose the fight.” Never go vertical unless you can own it, meaning you have enough pure engine power to blast skyward and leave your opponent unable to follow you and hammer you from behind. Turning fights are like back-alley brawls. When similar aircraft engage like that, the difference is pilot skill and aggressiveness. The winner usually is the one with the most guts to push his aircraft to its aerodynamic limit.
To win, you had to feel the aircraft, know exactly where you were based on visual cues with the horizon or the ground. Maybe you take a quick look at your fuel gauge, or glance at the altimeter once or twice. But that was it. This kind of flying requires your eyeballs out of the cockpit as much as possible. If you glance down in the middle of a scrap at a pivotal moment, you’re liable to lose your target in the split second it takes your brain to process and your eyes to refocus on the switch from instruments to blue sky.
Every pilot had his own bag of tricks. We learned by watching other guys beat us with them. Others we picked up in late-night shop talk in the Coronado bars. Unusual maneuvers, little ways to extract just a bit more performance from your aircraft and other jewels, were shared and discussed. The knowledge—and liquor—flowed with equal speed in those sessions.
Sometimes we ignored the hard deck. That’s when it truly became a game played on guts, the two of us twisting and turning in a roller-coaster maneuver we called the “rolling scissors.” I’d see my opponent coming in behind me, looking to make a high-speed pass. To counter, I’d pull up and roll inverted. The attacker would pass right below my canopy, and so I’d lower the nose and roll back toward him in a dive. This made my pursuer my target—though a fleeting one. I would have a tiny window to take a high-deflection shot at him as he pulled hard into me, then he had the chance to barrel roll and pursue me as I went past. Each time we crossed paths—that was the scissors. Picture the flight paths intersecting like the X of a pair of scissors, chopping away at the sky. Two evenly matched pilots could do this over and over. Often we dropped below five thousand feet and stayed after each other until we were on top of the whitecaps. Real combat has no hard deck.
In this way we preserved our perishable skill sets and kept alive the fading art of the dogfight. The rest of the Navy was letting it slip away in the early 1960s. I flew whenever I could. Holidays were great times to hassle, because the married guys were home with their families and the pace of activity on base relaxed. I was still trying to get over Mary Beth, so I’d climb in a Ford and go look for a good fight.
Some of the best pilots flew the Navy’s Vought F-8 Crusader. In later years, the F-8 would be called “the last of the gunfighters” because it carried four 20mm cannon and five hundred shells. The F-8 community had learned to dogfight in the Fleet Air Gunnery Unit, which disbanded in 1960. They were indeed the last of their breed. And boy, were they good.
We could outclimb the F-8, but they could reach 1,200 mph in burner, while we could only get to just above Mach 1—740 mph. The Crusader, in the hands of a good pilot, was a world-beater. With a Skyray, we needed a turning contest. That big bat wing gave us the edge here, and we could turn inside the heavier F-8. Drag ’em down to the hard deck (or below) and turn and fight. That was our win. The best F-8 guys knew better, and they stayed in the Crusader’s envelope, using their speed and power, where they could dictate the terms of the fight.
Fighting against different types of planes was useful. It taught me more than fighting against the same type of plane I was piloting. In later years at Topgun we would call it “dissimilar air combat training.” But back in the late 1950s, we didn’t have a name for it. We just intuited it based on experience. Each fight with a different type of aircraft, each with its own advantages and weaknesses, taught us how to exploit our edge and minimize theirs. How did we learn? By losing. Failure is a teacher. Be honest with yourself, extract the lessons, and you’ll never make that error again. I spent many long flights back to North Island replaying what I did wrong, so that on my next bout in the interservice fight club, I’d bring the heat and win. When we founded Topgun, this part of the experience in Whiskey 291 became a very important component of our culture.
A few days before Christmas in 1958, it was a quiet time at the squadron. Most everyone had gone home. I had been going home on weekends. I was eager to have news about Mary Beth. On one visit I saw her after a Whittier College football game. She was with her new beau. I waved at her, trying to hide my sadness. As she offered a furtive wave, I noticed tears in her eyes. After that, I went home less frequently and spent my weekends flying.
One day down at maintenance control, I checked out a Ford and took off out over the ocean. It was a crisp winter morning, without a cloud in the sky. Once I got to altitude, I could see for almost two hundred miles. The view was simply breathtaking.
Instead of heading out to San Clemente, I turned north toward Los Angeles and my folks’ home. I hadn’t gone far when a pair of contrails caught my attention off to my right. They were vertical contrails, in the restricted airspace around Edwards Air Force Base.
Somebody is getting it on.
I couldn’t resist. I banked my Skyray east to see who was hassling. I came upon an F-8 locked in a wild duel with an Air National Guard F-86. As I closed, I could see from the markings that the Crusader belonged to a squadron based at Miramar. Those guys were damn good. To my surprise, though, the F-86 pilot was eating the F-8’s lunch. As I closed in, the Crusader quit. The two planes linked up, and the F-8 waggled his wings and broke for home.
I slid alongside the Sabre. I’m your Huckleberry.
The National Guard pilot studied me and my Ford. He nodded. I nodded. He flipped me the bird—the magic signal—and I flipped it back.
Game on.
We broke forty-five degrees and separated to a distance of about seven miles. Before turning back for the Merge, I checked my altitude. Twenty-seven thousand feet. Part of me wondered if this was too risky. On such a clear day, surely peop
le below could see what we were doing. What if someone called Edwards, reporting us?
No time to worry. I checked those concerns as I wheeled around and barreled straight for the F-86 with the pride of my service on the line. It was time to avenge my Crusader brother.
The Sabre and I hit the Merge at more than a thousand miles an hour, and I broke hard to start the fight that suited the F4D best: a horizontal turning battle.
I made a one-eighty and saw him already in the horizontal, turning for me. Wings vertical, we watched each other from out of the tops of our canopies. A full three-sixty later, he had gained a good angle on me, closing on my tail. I started to sweat. I turned as sharply as I could, and the plane began to buffet, losing speed. By the second revolution, the Air National Guard pilot was pinned to my six.
In a real combat situation, tracer rounds would have been streaking past my windscreen. I had to do something fast, so I lit the afterburner and went vertical. No way could a Korean War–vintage aircraft hang with me there.
I rocketed straight up, trading energy for altitude. When I got up above him, I could trade it back. I came down on him in a subsonic dive and made a pass. He juked out of the way and rolled into a dive after me.
