In article ,
Ed Rasimus wrote:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 23:38:43 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

But by the early 1980s, a lot of jet jockeys were back to the "pods
are for wimps" sort of attitude. I saw it every time we loaded the
119s onto F-4s for exercises. And then we had a squadron go to Red
Flag, and suddenly all of the pilots were wanting one every damned
day... getting "shot down" a few times with no recourse tends to do
that.

I would say by the '80s, the only crews with that kind of attitude
would be those with no combat experience or those who didn't pay
attention to intel briefings.

Pretty much half of all fighter pilots by that point, then. cough

I got to work with the Wing's EW officer, and every time I talked to
him, he complained about the "who needs it" attitude of most of the
other pilots.

Certainly by the '80s no one was still carrying ALQ-119s. I'd bet
that by that time it was ALQ-131.

You'd lose that bet. Out of four years from 1981 to 1985, I think I
loaded *one* ALQ-131 on a plane, to be ferried somewhere else. Whenever
we loaded pods, it was 119s. They used a few on the F-4Gs, but even
there, they were predominantly 119 users. Not sure why (reliability?
availability?), but that's the way it was. We sure didn't have many in
the 35th TFW or the 37th TFW.

I remember this vividly, since I was one of three guys in our CRS who
were pegged as "jammer drivers" for pod loading. We had an MJ-4 rodeo,
and the winners got the job more often (which entailed sitting down a
lot).

There were still ALQ-119s in use as of Desert Storm, by the way...
upgraded insanely from the Vietnam years, but still ALQ-119s.

Speaking of Vietnam: one afternoon, we were working on a plane, and one
of the sheet-metal guys came over to us. He'd just replaced a patch on
the tail of one plane, and he had the old patch in his hands. It was a
flattened can of Vietnamese beer from ten years back...

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