Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  I closed by saying, “There is an urgency here beyond anything we have ever done. We hold lives in our hands.” These words still fill me with conviction today.

  Our students had little time to settle in before we got to work. The first week was mostly lectures. Before the sun was up, at 0430 on the day after they arrived, we started the classroom work with a daily briefing. We reviewed the sad state of affairs on Yankee Station, talked about how we meant to change it. Our study of the after-action reports revealed one thing that all of us knew pretty well. Dogfights were over in a hurry. The critical moment was the Merge, when two jets passed a few hundred yards apart. The enemy’s next move after that point told you a lot. Is he aggressive? Does he turn toward you sharply, confidently, put the pressure on you? Or does he hesitate for a critical second and a half and let you make the next move? The smart fighter pilot leads with his strength—his first best move. Because it’s probably all going to be over in less than a minute. The elapsed time from Merge to kill was thirty to forty-five seconds. Everything you knew had to come together in that vanishing moment of life or death.

  We flew a couple of times to let our students shake off the rust. There wasn’t much of it to shake. Flying two-seat TA-4 Skyhawks as “aggressors,” in the role of the enemy, we learned quickly that these were no beginners. They climbed the learning curve quickly. I respected their abilities, as I did with all my opponents.

  The pace of the program accelerated once we began flying a lot. After the first week or so, we ran two or three training sorties every day. With instructors playing the role of aggressors, we would put the students in different scenarios, flying all the basic permutations—1 vs. 1, 2 vs. 1, 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 2, 4 vs. 2, 4 vs. 4, and 2 vs. 4.

  A dogfight is a true physical ordeal. When a fighter aircraft is flown hard, it shakes you like a plummeting roller coaster on the verge of collapse. You’re buffeted from side to side, helmet hammering the Plexiglas canopy, harness digging into your shoulders and hips. G forces cause blood to surge and drain from your extremities, including your head. Our program tested not only a student’s body, but his mind.

  With four or even five separate test engagements on every flight, you can do the math and then imagine the strain this places on a pilot. It beats you up and sometimes, on the most instructive days, drains you to your core. ACM is a full-contact sport played on the edge of life and death. The fast pace of operations exhausted even well-conditioned aircrews. We were especially zonked after starting the day with an 0430 briefing. To allow for recuperation, we alternated schedules. After an early day in the air, the next morning we slept in, meeting in the classroom at 0630 or 0700. We worked almost around the clock, eating when we could, usually from a food truck that rolled onto the 121 ramp. We were that lady’s favorite customers, devouring her sliders and hot dogs, heavy on the mustard and onions.

  There were a couple of names for the MiG-killing new tactic we developed for the F-4 community. It basically involved flying a Phantom like a Saturn V rocket. Straight up. Sometimes we called it “using the vertical envelope.” It was also known as the “high yo-yo.” But the name we settled on was inspired by the shape of the airspace we used while flying it. J. C. Smith called it the Egg, and the moniker stuck. That was the shape our Phantoms traced, rocketing up and coming back down. I should point out that Topgun did not invent this maneuver. The guys in the F-8 Crusader community had been using “the vertical option” for years. Our breakthrough was applying it to the fighter of our day, the F-4 Phantom, an aircraft that was never supposed to perform such tricks but that proved very well suited for it thanks to its powerful engines.

  The maneuver really did break new ground. In the safety-conscious cocoon that was the RAG, what little dogfighting we did stayed in the horizontal plane. The vertical was something that only a few rebellious instructors fooled around with from time to time. You might guess the names. Mel, he was one. I had used it in my “fight club” days off San Clemente a decade before. The best pilots we encountered in those after-hours hassles always used the vertical. I learned from the best out there, just as Mel had when he was stationed at North Island.

  None of our students had ever flown an F-4 Phantom like a space vehicle out of Cape Canaveral. None ever forgot his first experience of the “pure vertical.” With the student in the rear seat we’d fly somewhere out over the ocean or the desert of El Centro, then start the demonstration. Lighting the afterburners, I accelerated to five hundred knots, then hauled the stick back into my gut. Since the Phantom had no trouble reaching Mach 2 in level flight, it wasn’t hard to fly straight up. We sank into our seats as the airplane began to climb. With those twin J79s cooking away, we pointed our nose to the stars. I held it. And held it. And held it some more. Our nose was still pointed high. Despite the enormous thrust of the engines, the big brute eventually started to decelerate. That was when the student in the rear seat got worried.

  As we lost speed, trading kinetic energy for the potential energy of altitude, the basic aerodynamics of lift came into play. Airplanes aren’t engineered to grip the sky at very low speeds. The airfoil of the wing just can’t do its work. A maneuver like this is a no-no in any RAG. At low speed but under full power, the airframe starts to vibrate ever so slightly.

  At that point most aviators want to push the nose over and let gravity get them moving again. They want airflow rushing over that swept wing to resume giving them lift. But that wasn’t what we were doing. Not yet. Both hands on the stick, elbows against my ribs, I kept the nose high with absolutely no aileron input.

  As the Phantom sat atop that towering parabola, engines still putting out full power but with our airspeed feeling like it was near zero, we started what’s known as a tail slide. It’s an unnatural thing for a heavy jet to do. Properly done, though, it’s safe. The engines hiccupped, belched some flame and smoke, but they never quit.

  At this point, I’d often hear hollering in my headphones. “Do something!” The poor student was along for the ride, helpless. But I couldn’t worry about that. I needed him to experience the physical sensations of this unusual “flight profile”—and know he could live through it. Because this was where the magic happened. Anyone who’s tossed one of those little balsawood gliders into the air with the adjustable wing shoved all the way forward has seen how elegantly a three-ounce toy plane rises up and falls back. That was basically what we were doing here.

  If this were a combat scenario, we would have left our enemy well behind as we rocketed heavenward. Now as we turned back over at the top, my RIO scanned the sky below to help me find him. It was hard for him if he wasn’t tracking closely. It was tricky to keep an eye on your prey, sitting there upside down, G forces pulling you. But if you paid attention throughout the maneuver, you’d know where your target was. That was bad news for a MiG. We were going to turn him into a bag of dust.

  Normally our Phantoms flew in pairs. The formation was known as the Loose Deuce—two planes flying in line abreast. As soon as we made contact with an enemy, one F-4 would attack, beginning a turning fight. The other would skyrocket into the vertical, as I have just described. While the enemy was busy with the wingman, turning and veering in the horizontal plane, he would have little chance of seeing the other Phantom as it rocketed to the top of the Egg. I would use these unbothered seconds to choose a flight path that put the enemy dead center in my missile envelope.

  Technique was critical as I came off the afterburners, pressed my foot down on the rudder pedal, and fed in some rudder. As the nose of the plane began to fall through, pointing back down to earth, we began a dive that allowed us to regain airspeed. We took a vector to lead the enemy or latch on to his tail, keeping enough distance to set up a good missile shot.

  This was the important tactical evolution we developed at Topgun. I would explain it to my rear-seater on the intercom system as we went along, and gave him a debriefing on the way back to base. Because his turn at the stick was just moments away.

 
; By the time we landed back at Miramar and taxied to the octagon, as the rotary refueling facility installed there on the taxiway is known, my student was completely exhilarated, realizing that we’d just rewritten the rules. As I shut down the port engine for a hot refueling, ground crews hustling in our giant NASCAR-like circular pit stop, my student could hardly wait to try to fly the Egg himself. As soon as the refueling was done, we switched seats, taxied around, and took off again.

  Out over the desert or the ocean, I’d coach him through the vertical maneuver. He had never dreamed a Phantom could do it, but our rugged machine performed the same way every time. Once the student decided he could trust it, he was exhilarated to fly the F-4 as it was never supposed to be flown.

  Back on the ground, there was always a lot of laughing and hollering from the front cockpit. The student would be ready to beat his chest. And trust me on this: Once four or five twentysomethings have an experience like that, the energy level at the O club that evening is something to see. If you walk in and witness it, the buzz you’ll hear isn’t rowdy idiocy. It’s the sound of people believing in themselves, in their aircraft, in their weapons, in their leadership, and in their ability to win a war when it all comes together.

  The day to start worrying about your military is the Friday night you go into an officers’ club and everybody’s quiet, staring into their beer.

  We knew that the RAG’s emphasis on radar interception was not going to help us in Vietnam, where visual identification of a target was required by the rules of engagement. It especially worried us that the missiles were still treated as infallible when experience showed us they were anything but. So when nuggets were told that they could get a kill with their AIM-9B Sidewinder if they fired it within a thirty-degree arc of the enemy’s tail—and that was the only parameter they thought they needed—we knew we had considerable work ahead of us. Truth was, a missile shot was exceptionally difficult when your target was maneuvering for his life and angles were sharp. Jim Ruliffson broke this down at the level of circuitry to show why targets needed to be led a little in order for the infrared sensor to have time to activate and acquire the target after the missile had launched from the plane. That short lag was causing a lot of missiles to fly uselessly around Southeast Asia. Out in the fleet squadrons, those busy COs didn’t have a lot of time or space to troubleshoot and innovate.

  Flying every day, we worked on all of this, and hard. We developed the Egg in a way that made excellent use of our two-plane Loose Deuce formation. As one Phantom tangled with the opponent at some lower altitude, the other Phantom soared heavenward to set up a kill on the next pass. Working in tandem against an opponent, two pilots could alternate turning and dogfighting and soaring to the top of the Egg, trading status as “free” and “engaged” fighters. It enabled them to keep constant pressure on a MiG, slowly running him out of altitude, airspeed, energy, and eventually fuel, until they could kill his ass. (That off-color language isn’t what I was raised to speak. But war isn’t pretty and killing is the name of the game. I see no reason to sanitize this reality.)

  The Loose Deuce tactic reflected Topgun’s culture, which empowered junior officers to act and speak freely. There was no leader/wingman hierarchy in our tactics, which left either fighter free to attack, depending on who sighted a bogey first. Loose Deuce was versatile and aggressive. Certainly it was a far cry from the Air Force’s tactic, the Fluid Four, which in spite of its adjective was quite rigid, giving the initiative and most opportunities to the flight leader.

  The confidence we invested in our students was well placed. They continued learning fast, and after three or four days of our brand of rocketry, the skeptics came around. Soaring and plunging to and from the top of the Egg, they got educated fast while squaring off with instructors flying as aggressors, and with guest pilots from other squadrons flying F-8 Crusaders, Air Force F-4s, F-86s, F-100s, and other types. The spirit of our tribe caught hold of them deeply, and they became the second generation of believers.

  They were good, and their confidence grew. That had its own dangers. We had no alternative but to live dangerously and feel comfortable doing it. Some ego is essential. I considered our rivalry with the pilots of VF-124, the RAG squadron that flew the F-8 Crusader at Miramar, as healthy up to a point. Their long, sleek, gape-mouthed gunfighter was a heck of an older bird. We went head-to-head with them often and a couple of their guys were as good as it got. Moose Myers, Boyd Repsher, and Jerry “Devil” Houston come to mind. I never passed up a chance to fight them. God help the MiG driver who ran into their like on a clear day.

  But technology is usually on the side of the newer airplane. A well-flown Phantom did not lose to an F-8 in a 1 vs. 1 contest. Mel went undefeated 1 vs. 1 against the Crusader after 1968, and he fought them constantly. One time I went 1 versus 2 with a Crusader squadron skipper and his wingman. Though they were both good sticks, I was up 3–0 at the end of the third engagement, flying our A-4E Mongoose, even though I was the “1.” Feeling pretty good about it, I listened in on their radio conversation. The skipper said, “What the shit is going on here? Damn it, we have to go back and retrain.” I’m sure they did, but training wasn’t the problem. The problem was that their plane had seen its best day. It was on the way out. But the F-8 guys, bless ’em, never lost their attitude. A lot of them transitioned to the F-4 as the war dragged on. Some of us could not resist the impulse to keep them humble.

  In their hangar at Miramar was a glass case containing a beautiful longsword. Its origins were dubious, but the squadron claimed it had been wielded by a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Crusader. They treated it as some kind of holy talisman and generally guarded it accordingly. One night we caught them in a lapse. Some of our guys staged a clandestine operation to liberate the relic. Our student Jerry Beaulier did the honors, sneaking in and taking the sword from its case. The next day at the O club, our guys led a show-and-tell with the blade during happy hour. Some F-8 guys were present. A fracas ensued. Somehow the Topgunners managed to escape with their prize.

  We later showed mercy and returned the Crusader sword, with a finishing touch. Marland “Doc” Townsend, a senior instructor and future skipper of VF-121, attached a placard to it certifying that it had been carried aloft at Mach 2. That was a sore point because the Crusader maxed out short of that. I was briefed later on the fistfight that developed in the bar afterward, but neglected to write an after-action report.

  Life at Topgun was a fight club every day. As the instructors flew against the students, it was natural for the students to want to take a scalp now and then. If one of them beat Rattler, Smash, Sawatzky, Cobra, or me, it could help his service reputation. They seldom did it. But by the end of the syllabus and its twenty-six flights, it did happen. There was plenty of pride to be taken in that. I tried to keep them grounded. Everybody gets beaten now and then, I told them. If you managed to beat Mel and were smart, you understood it was dangerous to pump up your ego. The lesson there was that if Mel could get beat, anyone could. I considered this attitude the heart of professionalism. And as for my instructors, from time to time I had to warn them, “No egos, fellas. We’re here to teach.”

  All that said, I couldn’t always keep Rattler and Nash from wanting a piece of each other. Though these guys were close, they were just so strong-willed. Nash was a real needler. He could piss off the pope. He was always working on Mel. Maybe he didn’t like the consensus that Holmes was the most talented Phantom pilot we had. I understood this and watched them carefully.

  One day during a 2 vs. 1 with a student, they mixed it up hard. Mel and the student were the 2, going against Nash, who was flying an adversary aircraft. It turned into the Rattler versus Smash show, a contest of greats. It happened more than once, and we had a serious offline discussion. I had to lay down the law once again: no dogfighting between Topgun instructors. We were there to teach, not to feed our egos. Too much was at stake. I was mindful of Halleland’s warning. One accident could scuttle us, the ski
pper had said. If Nash and Holmes stayed on this course, very likely one or both would be making a long trip back to the trailer on foot, with a popped parachute bundled up under his arm. Losing a plane could number our days.

  No, I didn’t want my pilots living on the pride of whom they could beat. All of us were in the same fraternity. When, say, Jerry Beaulier was finished with Topgun, I wanted to be sure how he would do against a MiG—and maybe unsure how I would fare against him. If we did our job, we’d have made him pretty dangerous. That’s where any good instructor will find his pride.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SECRETS OF THE TRIBE

  Miramar

  1969

  Only in 2013 did the U.S. government finally declassify its reports on a secret Defense Intelligence Agency project to test actual MiGs. Part of the effort went by the name of Have Doughnut. That program was made possible after an Iraqi pilot defected to Israel in 1966, delivering his prize MiG-21 to the West. A bit later, a Syrian pilot mistakenly landed in Israel with his MiG-17 and another operation was born. The DIA called that one Have Drill.

  We were in the middle of teaching Class One at Topgun when our friends up the highway at Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Four, or VX-4, let us in on the secret of the captive MiGs. The squadron’s CO, Commander James R. Foster, often invited us to his base at Point Mugu, north of Los Angeles, to join the fun on their Friday “fight of the week” event. His guys, all of them seasoned test pilots, were always ready to try out some new tactic in a new plane. We tried never to miss the show.