Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (63 page)

Immediately slamming the throttle into afterburner, Rock flipped over, hanging in the straps a moment, then buried the stick in his crotch. Dirt, a tiny screw, and even a cigarette butt floated into his face as he pulled for the valley floor.

“Cedars . . . take it down!”

“BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .”

Missile launch warnings were screeching in his helmet, and he stared wide-eyed straight down at the cluster of hills. Slapping the throttle back to midrange, he twisted in the seat and watched the SAMs. The big smoke trails had bent over, and both missiles looked like they’d corrected to stay on him. The SA-2 was a command-guided system, so the Fan Song had to have line-of-sight to the target. Quickest way to defeat them was to put something between himself and the radar—like hills.

“Cedar Three, tally two missiles
. . .
right three o’clock!”

“One
. . .
One’s defendin
. . .
ah, tally three missiles!”

Rock just picked up the third one off to the southwest. It hadn’t pitched as high as the others and was already curving back across the Red River at him. With the ground rushing up, he smoothly pulled the stick back, and as the jet’s nose lifted he shoved the throttle intoafterburner again.

“Umpf
. . .
” Curt Hartzell grunted from the pit. “Still locked . . . still on us.”

Scattered clouds left black shadows against the dark green mass of Thud Ridge, and little roads ran off in all directions, like white spiderwebs. Flying instinctively, Rock bumped down to 500 feet, his eyes on the nearest SAM. He didn’t dare look away, so the terrain to his left was just a green smudge, and the fighter was muscling through the air at 600 miles per hour. He had to be supersonic, or close to it. Water zipped past on the left side. Another little crappy river . . . which one? . . . his eyes never left the incoming SAM.

The missile’s booster had burned out, but the sustainer left a thin gray trail that was still visible. Unbelievably, both had stayed with him, even down at 500 feet.
Not supposed to do that!
Intel bozos got it wrong. Chay . . . that was the river. The Chay River. Mind racing, he knew he’d have to do a “last-ditch” maneuver in a few seconds.

Half a mile . . .

Rock’s hands were firm on the stick and throttle, his head back, watching,

Almost . . .

A brilliant orange and black flash made him blink. It blew up! The missile had exploded maybe 2,000 feet away.

“Ya see
that
?”

“Uh-huh.” The pilot’s eyes were locked on the second missile. His right hand moved by itself to keep the jet steady as Vietnam blurred past. Then the other SAM detonated, leaving a dark stain against the pale blue sky.

“Gone!” Hartzell exhaled loudly. “We’ve got—”

“Third missile,” Rock interrupted him. “Right three o’clock, just below the ridgeline.” He was staring west and watched the thing correct its aim. Bumping the stick, the 105 instantly climbed a few hundred feet, then he bunted over, paused, and yanked the stick back.

Two hundred feet . . . so low that Thud Ridge looked enormous.

“It’s still on us!”

Sonovabitch . . .

A SAM break meant pulling straight up and blending in a barrel roll to create guidance problems the incoming missile couldn’t solve. Do it too soon and you were a sitting duck; do it too late and you were dead.

Three . . .

A stubby hill flashed past on the right side.

“Whaddya gonna
do
?”

Two . . .

“Rock . . . ” Hartzell sounded like he was being strangled.

One . . .

Rock flinched as the hilltop to his right erupted in a magnificent, violent explosion. Dirt, flame, trees, and debris flew up everywhere. A tumbling mass of orange fire, black smoke, and bits of Vietnam shot out in all directions.

Immediately easing back on the stick, Rock lifted the Thud away from the ground and he realized he’d been holding his breath. Still, zipping along at 1,000 feet per second just north of Hanoi was no place to relax. Whistling lightly, he pulled harder, and the fighter rocketed up, Thud Ridge and the valley falling off under the wings. Beginning an easy turn to the west, he saw wispy gray smoke from the missiles drifting over the Red River, but couldn’t make out the site.

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” the EWO muttered from the backseat, and the fighter pilot managed a slow smile.
All in a day’s work
. Quickly looking over the gauges, he exhaled—nothing wrong, nothing hit. Glancing at the fuel, Rock knew there wasn’t much time. Now they had to do what the Weasels were there to do.

Go kill the little bastards.

CHAPTER 14

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

WILD WEASELS HAD
been created to counter the threat posed by Leopard Two’s shoot-down in the summer of 1965. Triple-A had been around since World War I and attacks from enemy fighters were just facts of life. SAM systems, on the other hand, with their 5,000-pound, 35-foot-long guided missiles, were a new threat, but they had weaknesses. One was that the SA-2 missile had to be completely guided by the controlling radar, and these sites were huge. Though they weren’t mobile, critical components such as the radar and missiles could be relocated relatively easily to another prepared site, and this was done often to keep the Americans guessing. When the site that shot down Leopard Two was attacked, there was nothing there but dummy equipment—and lots of Triple-A.

Another weakness of early SAMs was the
command guidance
required for the missile intercept. Visualize the radar signal as a flashlight beam locked onto a shiny metal target. The reflection from this is seen by the ground radar, and then guidance corrections are sent via radio signal to the missile. This meant that the radar had to have line-of-sight to its target and continue illuminating that target all the way through the detonation. If a radar is emitting, then it can be found; it is also vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles that home in on those emissions.

The SA-2 could be detonated either by a signal from the fire control officer or by actually hitting the aircraft. Radar fusing was also used, so if the missile passed within a preset distance from the target, then it would explode. The 480-pound high-explosive warhead would spray out a blast pattern up to 800 feet, depending on the altitude. Bombers had warning gear, jammers, and electronic warfare officers, but a fighter initially had no way to detect the presence of the Fan Song.

The actual missile launch was fairly easy to see if a pilot was looking that way, but sites were well camouflaged and weather could obscure a launch. Cloud decks mean nothing to radar, so aircraft above them could be tracked with no visual indication whatsoever, and this is precisely what happened to Leopard Two. If launches were seen, they could be defeated by special maneuvers, such as the “last ditch,” that gave a Fan Song too many guidance problems to solve and the missile went stupid and missed. Fighters could do this easily if they saw the missile, but bombers could not, so another solution was needed.

Electronic countermeasures (ECM), like radars, were also developed during the Second World War from the principle that if a radar detects targets through reflected energy, then it would also be possible to deceive such a system by creating false reflections. The notion of using semi-rigid strips, initially coated with aluminum, was proposed in 1942 by a Welsh-born physicist named Joan Curran.
^*
These strips (called “Window”) would reflect radar waves and generate clutter. With enough clutter, real targets could not be discerned. (In future years, missiles that did their own tracking would be decoyed onto the chaff.) Primarily used to interfere with German 88 mm flak guns, chaff was extensively employed on D-Day to simulate huge numbers of ships in the Dover Strait.

Jamming equipment was standard on bombers, but it was quickly adapted to attack jets following the Keirn/Fobair shoot-down. The basic idea is to generate signals that interfere with a radar’s picture and a variety of techniques can be used. Spot jamming is like a narrow stream of water from a hose; it works against a single frequency and can be very effective as the power is concentrated, but the difficulty is knowing which frequency to jam. Barrage jamming clutters up multiple frequencies, like a sprayed stream of water, but the range is limited. This means that “burning through” the jamming with the radar is easier and a clear picture can be regained faster.

Countertactics develop against any new technology, and electronics was certainly no exception. To negate jamming effectiveness, some method of switching frequencies was needed, and a hopping algorithm (based on the mechanisms of a player piano) was patented in 1942. Out of eighty-eight frequencies, one is randomly selected and used for guidance. The system will automatically switch, or hop, to another frequency at preset times or when jamming is detected.
^*

In tandem with these efforts, a company called Applied Technologies, Inc. (ATI) modified a series of receivers into a system that would detect, identify, and roughly locate an emitter radar. A threat like the Fan Song must emit a radar signal, called a beam, to track a target, so with beams bouncing all around, it was simple enough to install antennas that detected them. Once a signal hit an antenna, its strength could be measured, giving an approximate distance. The angle at which the beam struck the antenna also provided a direction of arrival, thus giving a rough bearing to the radar. The frequency was also detected, and in the early days, before the proliferation of radars, it was fairly easy to positively identify which system was looking at you.

This wasn’t a new idea. The Ferret I program had been fielded in 1943 using modified B-24D Liberators. They initially flew radar countermeasure (RCM) missions against Japanese Mk I radars in the Aleutian Islands, while the Ferret III and VI programs flew B-17Fs from Foch Field in Tunisia until late 1944. Ravens, the first jamming aircraft, were B-24s, B-25s, and B-29s that carried receivers to find radars, pulse analyzers to identify the systems, and jammers to disrupt signals.

Hunter-Killer teams appeared during the Korean War, with TB-25Js locating radars and B-26s, then killing them. After the war the 9th Tactical Recon Squadron was formed, and there was subjective agreement that electronic combat was indeed useful. However, it wasn’t considered extremely urgent until the surface-to-air missile became operational and planes began going down. Then suddenly jamming, signals analysis, and countermeasures weren’t science fiction anymore; they were survival.

ATI called their system the Vector IV. It was composed of the APR-25 radar homing and warning system, APR-26 launch warning receiver, and IR-133 panoramic receiver/signal-analysis set. The government ordered five hundred sets and the USAF immediately began installing them into the F-100F. Called a “Hun,” this was a two-seat version of the F-100 Super Sabre and, combined with Vector IV, it became the Wild Weasel I program. Flying from Korat, Thailand, four modified Huns of the 6234th Tactical Fighter Wing commenced Weasel “Iron Hand” missions on December 1, 1965. Three weeks later Capt. Allen Lamb and Capt. Jack Donovan killed the first SA-2 near Phu Tho on the Red River, northwest of Hanoi.
^*
Allen Lamb would later say:

Our flight that December morning was call sign Spruce, and our F-100F was Spruce 5. The F-105s, Spruce 1 through 4, took off right after we did. Everything was standard through form-up and refueling with a tanker over Laos. We took the lead at our pre-briefed initial point, and with two Thuds on each wing, we headed for the Red River Valley, a flood plain that was home to some of the best air defense systems in North Vietnam. The mission parameters were fairly fluid after that. We didn’t have a specific objective or a series of known targets. Our job was to probe the enemy’s air defenses until they warmed up to take a shot at us.

There was complete radio silence after going to the strike frequency. A little after noontime, Jack told me that the Vector IV had picked up a Fan Song radar in search mode about 100+ nautical miles out. I pushed the engine up to 98 percent and locked the throttle. This gave us 595 knots airspeed, just under max while carrying ordnance. After I started homing in, I transmitted “Tallyho.” That was it. I kept the SAM at ten to eleven o’clock so he wouldn’t get the idea I was going after him. When I could, I dropped into shallow valleys to mask our approach. Every now and again, I’d pop up for Jack to get a cut. This went on for about ten to fifteen minutes.

After breaking out into the Red River Valley, I followed the strobes on the Vector and turned up with the river alongside. The IR-133 had receiver antennas located on either side of the fuselage in line with the cockpit for homing on a target. The strobes started curling off at twelve o’clock, both to the right and left. And I knew we were right on top of him. I started climbing for altitude and Jack kept calling out SAM positions literally left and right. The right one turned out to be a second site. I was passing through 3,000 feet, nose high, and I rolled inverted while still climbing to look.