The F-102 Delta Dagger (Was GWB as a Nat'l Guard Fighter Pilot threads.)

"Guy Alcala" wrote in message
. ..
"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

In message m, David
E. Powell writes
Third. did the F-102 have a gun or just internal missiles in a weapon
bay?

Falcon missiles (six IIRC) in the bay, plus 24 x 2.75" rockets (launch
tubes in the bay doors). From memory there were twelve tubes each with
two rockets nose-to-tail: this was sometimes downloaded to twelve, and
F-102s in Vietnam did some very light ground attack (using their IR
sensor to find targets like campfires and the rockets to engage). My
recollections may be at variance with the facts, so check before using


Thanks! I hadn't known about the 2.75 rockets, sounds like the F-94
Scorpion. The Falcon must have been a decent missile, the -106s and other
fighters used them into the 80s and early 90s.

*There was a massive "Was GENIE a rocket or a missile" debate on
another
group, which I won't get into here. I think the verdict was a rocket,
which
it was, guided missile or not.

Unguided (and hence unjammable, but demanding to use correctly)

OK....

Jack Broughton was less than confident about the Genie's accuracy. He
compared
firing one to tying a piece of string around your finger and the other end
around the trigger of a shotgun. When you wanted to fire the shotgun, you
threw
it away from you and it fired when the string pulled taught, with the
accuracy
you'd expect under such conditions. He goes on (I've left his spelling
unchanged):

"Two specific cases made me a non-Geenie [sic] fan. The first Geenie that
was
test-fired from an F-106 came right back up, blew the nose off the
aircraft, and
killed the pilot. Years later I got a chance to go to Tyndal [sic] with
my
F-106 squadron. ADC had saved their resources too well and wound up with
a
large number of Geenies that only had a few days to go before they would
run out
of shelf life and have to be destroyed. The plan was to fire as many of
them as
fast as we could, so for a week straight we saturated the Gulf of Mexico
with
every Geenie that we could get to accept the firing signal and leave our
aircraft. They took off in all directions, but very seldom towards the
target
drones. One particular Geenie turned hard left as I fired and I watched
it do
lazy concentric barrel rolls as it headed straight down to my left. I
knew that
if it was for real the boom only had to be close, but suppose straight
down and
to the left was the area I was supposed to be defending? Well, the other
theory
of the times was that we would be intercepting all the invading bombers
way up
north someplace, where I wouldn't know anybody living off to my lower
left."

Over tundra or ocean would have been the ideal use considered, I guess....

[quoted from "Going Downtown", by Jack Broughton]

Guy