I have received requests for more stories about my flying
experiences. Since there hasn't been much activity on RCSE lately,
this seemed an appropriate time to post another story. This is
actually the second part of a story I wrote about flying target for
training F86D pilots. Part 1 posted here a few months ago covered
the initial climb out to altitude and the view of the stars on a
moonless night above an overcast. This part covers the actual high
altitude intercept. Part three will cover the end of the mission and
has a little more action. This story was extracted from a story I
wrote titled The Face of God. This story took place in February, 1956.
Chuck Anderson
TARGET
After reaching 42,000 feet altitude, Control put me in a holding
pattern over Albany Georgia until the fighters were airborne. Fox
Flight was the call sign of the first group of fighters. Fox 1 and 2
were students getting their final check ride in night intercepts
while Fox 3 was the instructor monitoring his students by
radar. Control was directing Fox 1 while Fox 2 and 3 were holding
position five miles apart using their own radar. Control then turned
me towards the target while the fighter string climbed out in the
opposite direction on a parallel track offset about 30 miles to the
east. The target, Panama City, laws about 200 miles ahead.
When Fox 1 called level at Angles 42, Fox flight was at my altitude
and about 30 miles ahead but I still couldn't see him. The stars
were visible all the way to the horizon and the aircraft lights
blended right in. When Fox 1 was about 15 miles away the controller
turned Fox flight to its final attack vector 90 degrees to my
heading. All three airplanes simultaneously turned to the final
attack heading. If all went well, they would cross my path at
45-second intervals.
The afterburner flames became visible at my 10 o'clock position as
they turned perpendicular to my flight path so I gave a Tallyho to
tell control I had the fighters in sight. Fox flight followed with
their Tallyhos as they locked on. The controller then gave Fox
flight the heading to turn to after completing their passes. Fox
flight now completed the attack using the F86D radar.
Fox 1 called "20 seconds" to go and began to drift aft as his fire
control system switched from a collision course to a lead collision
course. As soon as I was satisfied that we were not on a collision
course, I cleared Fox 1 to complete the pass. If I had not been
satisfied that the pass was safe then I would have called "Break" and
started a standard break away maneuver. I would turn down and away
from the fighter while the fighter would break up and towards
me. This maneuver was designed to maximize the miss distance for
most situations. Following procedures was most important since the
rate of closure between the target and fighter was over 800 mph and
the miss distance was less than 500 feet.
Fox 1 was drifting aft at a nice rate and would pass well to my
rear. Fox 1's afterburner flame was blue white and streamed out far
behind the aircraft. It made the aircraft easy to see on high
altitude missions. Flying target was much more challenging at
altitudes below 25,000 feet where the F86D was not running in
afterburner. There, only the aircraft lights were visible and the
F86D was much harder to pick up early in the intercept.
As soon as each F86D completed their intercept, they turned left 45
degrees set up for another pass. Each fighter was supposed to have
two passes to shoot down the enemy bomber before he had a chance to
drop his bomb. The fighters didn't have much of a speed advantage
over the target and it was hard to get far enough ahead for a second
pass before the bomb release point.
We had a sharp controller and Fox flight completed the second pass
before I reached the theoretical bomb release point. After the last
pass was completed, I turned back towards Albany for another
intercept and resumed my stargazing while the controller vectored Fox
flight for a radar recovery at Tyndall AFB. I had been airborne
almost an hour and a half and had sufficient fuel for at least
another hour and a half. On the other hand, the F86s had been
airborne only about 30 minutes were almost out of fuel. Afterburners
are exceptionally fuel greedy and the high altitude missions were
afterburner all the way.
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