Sheesh! What a bunch of wasted electrons over a hasty ill-considered
remark.
'Nuf said on that.
ROE - to make it sweet and simple we were cleared to fire without
seeking permission on 'a hostile aircraft committing a hostile act'.
Both were defined but it boiled down to any 'not clearly marked or
recognized friendly aircraft'
doing a bad thing - firing on the interceptor, releasing weapons,
paratroops, attacking a vessel not marked as an enemy (I am
paraphrasing here as I forgot the exact wording), that sort of thing.
So we had some latitude - more than in SEA!
FWIW anybody who straps on a single seat jet and takes off has guts. I
well remember my first solo in the T33 after learning how to fly in
props up to the T28 (270 knots in a dive was red line - 505 level in
the T-bird) I ran it up, looked down the runway, asked myself 'do I
really want to do this?' The answer was 'hell, yes!' and off I went.
That was (gulp) 49 years ago.
FWIW here goes on the Deuce. Even now - at night, mind you - the Deuce
would be a serious opponent. It had excellent radar, excellent IR,
missiles that worked if you fired all 6 at once ( I actually killed a
Firebee with a single obsolete radar Falcon despite its warhead being
dearmed) and was a very accurate - as accurate as strafing!) rocket
launcher in air to ground. Of course 24 later 12 2.75s won't do much
but we blew an old Navy destroyer (Patricia target) to pieces with
live (!) 2.75s. 40 sorties with 12 RX apiece left the poor thing very
much the worse for wear - bridge and deck houses flattened.
As for range a Deuce with two tanks is equal to an F4 with 3 and a lot
better handling and faster cruise for 1300 nautical with IFR reserves
(approach plus 20 minutes). You start at 35,000 and .87. Clean, you go
to 42-45+ and .92, and you can go 900 miles and still have IFR reserve
fuel. When the Deuce was new it was good for 1.3M at 35-38000
(tropopause). Then the engines got tired and 1.2 was about it. But it
could fly level at 59000 in AB - subsonic. It could snap-up and launch
on a U2 above 60. (Never did let us do it for real).
But in daylight - that 60 degree blind cone behind one made dayight
air to air dicey and something like a Thach weave mandatory - which of
course ADC never trained in. No RHAW gear. No armor at all. Wet wings,
a candidate for battle damage. No (sob!) gun. It did have an air to
air rocket sight supposed to be good up to 3G - I never got to try it
on a rag, though. That was incorporated for a radar-inop curve of
pursuit shot at a bomber. I guess you could say that beats ramming him
which was the last option we had.
Very sweet handling, very difficult to depart (coarse rudder at 95
KIAS will get you in a spin - recovery is standard, simple, quick),
fully controllable down to 110-115 KIAS, capable of one great bat turn
and then no more energy.
Flown delicately it would out maneuver a navy F4D Skyray at altitude
quite nicely. But, like I said, at night . . . it could lurk and
listen to GCI "bogey dope" (range and bearing to target, target
heading altitude and actions) and never say a word, never turn the
radar on, intercept a bogey using IRSTS and close to missile range and
then 3 seconds before fire 'radar on, lock on, shoot' 6 fully guided
missiles from a low six. How did we range in IR? get level, drop 3000
feet, close to a 30 angle-up on the bogie, you're a mile behind and in
range, get set and shoot. But it was a bomber-killer and with a
GAR11/AIM26 a good bomb-killer. (The bomber was collateral damage.)
Nice airplane. A couple serious design goofs: vision, no fuselage fuel
tank to feed the engine from a central point, no Sidewinder mounts,
wrong engine (it was supposed to get a 30K engine, Gyron or Olympus,
but design problems with them resulted in the J57 at 16K). One other
point - it was made of 7075ST which was NOT alclad hence they had to
be painted - more weight and drag, and airframe problems from
intergranular corrosion late in life. Case in point - I have heard the
Okinawa 102s were scrapped there rather than brought back to the
States because of the results of the vicious sea-salt environment
there...any body know about this?
Cheers - Walt BJ