I Always Wanted to Fly

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  “I graduated twenty-nine pilots. I never had any of my pilots flunk out. Then they made me an elimination test pilot. The wing policy was that if the elimination test pilot passed a candidate, he would have to pick him up as a student. I picked up about half a dozen guys and got them back into the program. I always hated to wash a guy out because I knew it affected his life. But at the same time, I thought it would be worse if he got killed or got a lot of other people killed. To wash someone out of pilot training was never an easy decision.

  “In 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the air force leadership decided they better get some more fighter pilots, and I was assigned to Nellis AFB in Nevada to check out in the F-100 Super Sabre. The Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, its pilots were our instructors, because most of the other instructor pilots were down in southern Florida because of the Cuban thing. The Fighter Weapons School pilots were absolutely top-notch instructors. We got to fire the cannons and drop real bombs on the range. When we graduated, we were rated as weapons officers. Then I went up to McConnell AFB in Wichita, Kansas, and we opened up the first TAC fighter outfit there—F-100Cs. Our job was to train and become proficient in the use of nonnuclear weapons. Then the F-105 came along. The F-105 was a tremendous airplane. It was like a Cadillac compared to the F-100. We all enjoyed the F-105, but we didn’t understand the airplane well. I became a weapons officer in the F-105. My job was to teach the guys to fly the airplane to survive in combat, to shoot the gun, and to drop bombs. As we pilots got more skilled in flying the F-105, we discovered that when we rolled the airplane over and pulled it around at altitude, high drag would slow it down, and then it would almost fall out of the sky. It wouldn’t turn at all at the speeds its builder, Republic Aviation, told us to fly the airplane. Generally, when you are in a dogfight, it is to your advantage to be in an arc, because it makes it more difficult for a pursuer to get a lead on you and hit you. The F-105 wouldn’t let us do that, at least not the way we were flying it.

  “About that time, the air force needed pilots in Germany, and I volunteered to go. A bunch of us went over to Bitburg and Spangdahlem. The two bases are close together. I became the weapons officer in the 7th Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem, and once again I was keeping all the scores of all the gunnery and running a bombing school at the same time. But I was still interested in why the F-105 wouldn’t perform like a fighter when it had enough power to be one of the best. One time the Republic Aviation guys came out and briefed us. I will always remember what one engineer said to me: ‘The airplane will pull 8.33 Gs. Aerodynamically, you can’t get more Gs than that out of it. But the wings are stressed for 12 Gs. So there is no possible way you can pull a wing off an F-105.’

  “While I was still at McConnell AFB, I also tried to get information from Republic on the aerodynamics of the airplane and its lift and drag curves. The data finally caught up with me at Spangdahlem. I found that the airplane had to do 285 knots to pull two Gs. Two Gs, in practical terms, is a sixty-degree bank at a steady rate and steady airspeed. But the F-105 in a sixty-degree bank turn would get such an angle of attack that it would slow down and fall out of the sky. I started experimenting with the airplane, and I discovered that I had to have it well over 300 knots. Then I could pull up to five Gs. But below 285 knots indicated airspeed, the airspeed would bleed off rapidly, and I would fall out of the sky. There was a guy named John Boyd, an air force colonel, a fabulous fighter pilot. He wrote a book called No Guts, No Glory. He collaborated in his theoretical work with a fellow named Davis. Davis and Boyd wrote a book together—this is before computers, mind you—called Through Gs Maneuverability. They developed a whole series of energy maneuverability curves. I wrote a letter to John Boyd and asked him if he could do the curves for the F-105. Boyd and Davis did the curves. From those curves I learned a lot about the aerodynamics and capabilities of the airplane. At 350 knots it had enough power to sustain the momentum to swing into a five-G turn, and it would maintain its airspeed. The energy curves let me extend what the 105 could do, and I started teaching it in the F-105 combat weapons course. All pilots had to attend the course every six months. It finally dawned on us that the 105 could be used in an air-to-air engagement if you kept your airspeed up and stayed down low. Then the 105 was a going machine. I think the training we gave the pilots at Spangdahlem and at Bitburg really turned it around for the F-105.

  “John Boyd’s contribution was really significant to the development of F-105 tactics. I would give Boyd and Davis credit for making an airplane out of the F-105. Before their work, the airplane was a straight and narrow thing to be afraid of. The curves they developed for us gave us an understanding of why you came into the pattern at 300 knots instead of 220: it was because the silly thing would fall out of the sky if you pulled it sideways at 220 knots. Also we learned to understand why the F-model, a longer two-seater version of the D, would go straight for two seconds longer than the D. Because of the extreme slope of the wing and the engine inlets, there was a two-second lag in the buildup of lift on the wing on the longer F model. A lot of engineering was done in those days on the new airplanes. We didn’t understand the swept-back wing that well, with its extreme forty-five-degree angle and high wing loading. It was the last fighter to be built that way.

  “By early 1966 we knew that everybody was going to go to Southeast Asia. We scrapped competition between squadrons because it was teaching the pilots to get in too close to the target, and they would get killed if they did that in Vietnam. We started teaching more realistic weapon-release methods on the range at Wheelus in Libya. I also taught the guys how to avoid getting shot down. I recommended to them that if you didn’t have to fly below 4,500 feet, don’t. And don’t ever fly straight and level. Always have a wing down at least fifteen degrees right or left, and don’t be mechanical about it. Never fly a straight line, and never slow down below 350 knots. The antiaircraft and SAM radars at that time calculated a linear projection for an aircraft’s track, whether you were flying a curve or not. That meant if you were in a curve with the wings down at least fifteen degrees, by the time a projectile got up there, you were out of range. If you flew these tactics, you would be about one hundred feet off a straight-line projection away from where the shells were exploding. Overall, I think the Spangdahlem and Bitburg pilots were pretty well trained when they arrived in Southeast Asia.

  “In October ’66 my transfer to Southeast Asia came through. En route I dropped the family off, bought a house, and spent three weeks in the Philippines in the jungle, camping out and learning how to survive. Then I went over to Thailand. I arrived in Bangkok on Christmas Day. On the 26th I caught a C-130 shuttle out of Bangkok for Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base. I flew my first mission the next day, December 27, 1966, over Route Pack 1 and bombed Ron Ferry. That was considered the low-risk training ground. We got shot at, so we knew what flak looked like. On the 28th I flew my second mission. I went up to Route Pack 6, flying wing on a Wild Weasel lead (the two-seat F model configured to kill SAM sites). We were circling at about six thousand feet, looking for SAMs to come up. I was on the high side of lead, looking down at the ground, and I saw all these blinking lights below me and wondered what the hell was going on down there. Somebody dropping CBUs? That can’t be. We don’t have that many CBUs. Then I looked up, and there was flak all over the sky.

  “Lead was zigging and zagging all around, and I was following and didn’t know what was going on, while the North Vietnamese gunners were laying 57mm and 85mm barrages on us—big, rectangular barrages. It really amazed me how they could do that. I counted eight explosions across and six down. There were nearly fifty guns firing together and moving this rectangle of AAA fire as we were flying along. I don’t know how they kept all those guns coordinated. The barrages followed us wherever we flew. We finally got out of there. That was my introduction to Route Pack 6, my second flight. From then on, I just got to go bombing and have a good time.” There was no humor in Ralph’s voice as he made this comme
nt. His eyes had narrowed and assumed that distant, trancelike look of a combat veteran.

  “I was assigned as weapons officer in the 469th Tactical Fighter Squadron of the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing. There were two other squadrons in the wing, with eighteen aircraft assigned to each squadron. All of us flew every day for three weeks straight. We regularly flew twenty ships in the morning and twenty in the afternoon. Then we had various four-ship flights go out over Route Packs 1 and 2 and into Laos. We flew about ninety-six missions a day total from Korat. Korat’s sister wing, the 355th at Takhli, also had three squadrons of F-105s plus two squadrons of EB-66 electronic-countermeasure aircraft. Ubon and Udorn had F-4s. Every morning and every afternoon, over two hundred strike and support aircraft launched against the North. Air refueling was the critical node, and all scheduling revolved around the availability of SAC tankers. There were never enough of them. As a result, air operations against the North became predictable and routinized, a deadly way for the offense to conduct an air war.

  “On March 14 I led a flight of four aircraft into northern Laos, near Dien Bien Phu. There was a key highway snaking down a narrow valley. The highway made a loop around a mountain, a prominent ridge with a level outcropping at the top, straight down on all three sides. The outcropping was probably one hundred feet across, but it jutted out for perhaps four hundred yards. The communists had made a fortress out of the rock and hollowed it out. On top they had mortar emplacements, machine guns, and gun pits. From that rock they could command ten miles of road. Number four aborted as we approached the area. I sent number three back with him. A flight of F-4s was being controlled by a FAC in an OV-10 when we arrived in the area. The FAC asked us to hold. The F-4s were attacking with rockets. There was a cloud ceiling at eleven thousand feet, and the elevation of the rock was four thousand feet, leaving us little altitude to work in.

  Laos. Aces and Aerial Victories 86.

  “We were circling around watching the F-4s. The FAC fired a smoke rocket designating the target, and the F-4s fired their unguided rockets at the side of the cliff, doing no damage. We had six 750-pound bombs each. With time to play around, I calculated a thirty-degree dive angle (we generally used forty-five degrees) at 350 knots. Using those parameters, I thought, we might be able to stay underneath the cloud layer and still have enough altitude at pullout to clear the exploding bombs. When the F-4s went home, they hadn’t done any visible damage to the mountain. The FAC indicated that the Laotian Royal Army was just to the north of the outcropping, waiting to attack the rock. I had to drop the bombs from north to south so as not to hit the Laotians. I called the readings out to my wingman—‘Thirty-degree dive, 350 knots, kind of slow. Try to follow me.’ I lined up and came rolling down. I pickled five of my six bombs. The sixth would have gone down into the valley. I set my bombs for individual release so I could spread the 750s out and not have them all fall in the same hole. As I pulled off, I looked at what I had done. My first bomb hit a hundred yards from the lip of the cliff, and the others walked along right up to the opposite edge. Number two rippled his off, and his first bomb hit right at the edge and walked up to my third bomb. The FAC nearly jumped out of his airplane, he was yelling so loud, ‘They are running out at the base of the cliff!’ I couldn’t see them, but we went in strafing the sides anyway. ‘I have a bomb left,’ I told the FAC. ‘How about me putting it in the side?’ ‘Go ahead, if you can do it.’

  “The FAC got out of the way, and I made a flat fifteen-degree dive and pulled up real sharp. I hit the side of the cliff about two-thirds up. The FAC was ecstatic. We strafed some more at the people we couldn’t see, and he kept yelling ‘They are all coming out.’ So we strafed some more. On the way back, I still had some 20mm left. I wanted to get a counter for the mission, and you had to fly into North Vietnam to get a counter, so I went to a truck park in Route Pack 5. With the radar, I was able to pick up the highway through the clouds. We came in underneath the clouds, and there was this truck park ahead of us, and I swear there was a yellow road grader parked under the trees. We went in and strafed the hell out of everything. By the time we got back to base, the FAC had sent a message to Korat saying that the Laotian army walked in and took over the mountain fortress. They found nobody left alive. He put us in for a Distinguished Flying Cross.

  “We kept a separate tally of Route Pack 6 missions north of the Red River. We called that ‘Indian country.’ Most of the pilots leaving then with one hundred missions had fifteen to twenty missions in Route Pack 6; all the rest they flew in the lower packs. When I got my one hundred, I had twenty-nine missions in Route Pack 6.

  “On June 3, 1967, my call sign was Hambone 02. I was number two in a flight of four. We were going to bomb a highway bridge ten miles northeast of Hanoi. Zigzagging at fifteen degrees, wings down, we flew in from the water. We were going in north of the flak, and then we were going to fly southwest into the target, hit the target, and come out to the northeast. They were shooting 85s at us. I was watching the 85s and their movement. They were radar controlled but weren’t accurate that day. I wasn’t too worried about them. I was flying with my left hand. For some reason I was relaxed. The arming switch for the bombs was over on the right side panel. I had the bombs all set up. I reached over with my right hand and flicked on the arming switch, and I felt a thunk. The three thousand–pound bomb on my right wing dropped. Why that happened, I don’t know. I had one bomb left, on my left wing. We rolled in on the target to the right. When we rolled in on a target, we ended up upside down and then released the bombs. As we were going down on the target, I wondered how the lone bomb on my left wing was going to affect my roll. I was doing about 550 knots. I tried, but the aircraft wouldn’t roll over the top. I finally cut the bomb loose. It missed by a mile.

  “With all that maneuvering, I got separated a bit from lead. I was supposed to be on his wing. He was about a thousand feet in front of me and snaking out across the ground. I saw three MiG-17s crossing a little bit under his nose from left to right at about thirty degrees. I thought they were going to jump our 105s as they came off the target. John Flynn, my lead, decided to attack. He put his airplane into a ninety-degree hard right turn. I followed. I figured if he put his airplane in a hard turn, I would do the same, but I wouldn’t be able to see where he was, so I continued into a 180. We were at five to six thousand feet, still at 500 knots indicated airspeed. I pulled around as tight as I could. When I came out, I was kind of abreast of him, and all I had to do was slide over into position. We were going faster than the MiGs, and he was closing on them. Then the MiGs went into a left 360—a pretty tight turn. John rolled into a 360 with them. We chased them around one half of a turn. We were carrying full belly tanks—850-gallon tanks, I think they were. John pulled probably between two and three Gs. I sat right below him. He said, ‘Releasing belly tank.’

  “John pulled the release, and I watched his belly tank come off his airplane. The tank turned sideways and barely cleared the tail section of his airplane. It narrowly cleared my right wing. I thought to myself, ‘I’ll hold my tank a little bit.’ We went around and made almost another 180. Larry Wiggins was number three. I forget who was number four. As we were coming off the target, all strung out, number four looked back. When he looked forward again, the three of us were gone. We had made that 180. All of a sudden, number four had lost the flight. Larry Wiggins thought the other plane was still on his wing, though, and that he was covered. You can’t look back in a sixty-degree cone behind an F-105 and see anybody. The MiGs were in a fifteen-degree bank. Larry Wiggins, the number three, hosed off a Sidewinder. The MiGs were in an arrow formation, one on each side of their lead. The one to the left was about 1,500 feet trailing, the right one was about 1,000 feet to the right in trail. Larry went after the one on the left. At the time of his shot, the MiG was at my nine o’clock position, and I was really worried about him. All he had to do was straighten his wings and slide across my rear, and he had me cold.

  “I watched the Sidewin
der snake up behind that MiG and go off right under the horizontal stabilizer. The MiG started streaming fuel, went from a fifteen-degree turn into a ninety-degree turn, and pulled out slightly. About that time, Larry came in and hosed him down with the 20mm gun. The MiG blew up like in the old World War II movies of the Japanese zeros. I said, ‘That was a good shot, Larry. You got him.’ I was glad to see him get that one. I called John Flynn, my lead, and said, ‘We got one at ten o’clock going to two o’clock. We ought to do something about him. He’s starting to get behind us.’

  “John said, ‘If you can get one, go get him.’ John thought he was talking to number three, Larry Wiggins. He didn’t realize that I was still with him.

  “I said, ‘OK. I’ll pass on your right.’ I figured he would pull in on my tail. I thought his guns or his gun sight were jammed, that’s why he didn’t go after the MiG. I went ahead and pushed the afterburner up and passed him on the right. I went after the MiG at our eleven o’clock position. He went into a ninety-degree bank right turn. I was basically coming ninety degrees into him. I started shooting when I thought I was within range. I had to have a forty-five-degree lead on him. I didn’t. I quickly realized I had no chance of hitting him. He went on past, and I went into a climb and slowed her down and rolled in and dropped behind him. As I came down on him, for some dumb reason he almost leveled out, which allowed me to slide in behind him. I figured I was at 1,500 feet. I fired a whole bunch of rounds and didn’t hit him. I raised, lowered, went around him a couple of times, and never did hit him. I thought, ‘Where are those bullets going?’ About that time I saw his right aileron go down, his left aileron go up. ‘You dumb ass,’ I thought, ‘I got you now.’ I knew the MiG couldn’t get through the stream of bullets if I set it up like a saber in front of him. I threw all I had into a hard turn, all the rudder and all my aileron, and I was able to roll a lot faster than he was. I pulled the nose of the airplane in front of him and was closing. I moved the stick back as far as it would come, snapped the nose of the airplane up, and let it slide through him as I fired the cannon.