Gun Pods on Navy F-4s: Why not?

[Matt Wiser]

As the air war over NVN heated up in 1966-67, why didn't the Navy adopt the SUU-23 gun pod
on its Phantoms? The AF's 366th TFW certainly did, and got several MiG kills as a result of
the pods' usage. What was the reason? NAVAIR not approve or what? Navy F-4 crews were
screaming for a gun all through the war, but had to wait until the F-14 arrived with its internal
Vulcan. It's been said in several books that if VF-96's Phantoms had guns on 10 May 72,
there would've been several more MiG kills that day. Any ex-F-4 drivers able to clear this up?


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[John Carrier]

"Matt Wiser" > wrote in message
...
> As the air war over NVN heated up in 1966-67, why didn't the Navy adopt
> the SUU-23 gun pod
> on its Phantoms? The AF's 366th TFW certainly did, and got several MiG
> kills as a result of
> the pods' usage. What was the reason? NAVAIR not approve or what? Navy F-4
> crews were
> screaming for a gun all through the war, but had to wait until the F-14
> arrived with its internal
> Vulcan. It's been said in several books that if VF-96's Phantoms had guns
> on 10 May 72,
> there would've been several more MiG kills that day. Any ex-F-4 drivers
> able to clear this up?

Wasn't this posted before? The gun pod was notoriously unreliable in the
shipboard environment. The aircraft lacked a lead-computing gunsight. If
the F-4J had an internal gun and an appropriate sight, and if the aviators
trained for it, the additional kills might have occurred.

USMC shore based F-4's did carry the pod for CAS, etc.

R / John

[Tiger]

Matt Wiser wrote:
> As the air war over NVN heated up in 1966-67, why didn't the Navy adopt the SUU-23 gun pod
> on its Phantoms? The AF's 366th TFW certainly did, and got several MiG kills as a result of
> the pods' usage. What was the reason? NAVAIR not approve or what? Navy F-4 crews were
> screaming for a gun all through the war, but had to wait until the F-14 arrived with its internal
> Vulcan. It's been said in several books that if VF-96's Phantoms had guns on 10 May 72,
> there would've been several more MiG kills that day. Any ex-F-4 drivers able to clear this up?
>
>
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> http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
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Well For one thing, there plenty of Crusaders around still. They were
doing more of the MIG killing. The rest was just typical DOD paper
pushers not listening.