F-4 chaff/flare loads

Ed Rasimus wrote:

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 10:23:25 GMT, "Tom Cooper" wrote:

"Ed Rasimus" wrote in message
.. .

No flares on F-4s in SEA. (Photo-flash carts on RF-4s only). No
self-protection chaff carts either. We carried cardboard boxes (about
the size of a box of Xmas tree tinsel) in the speedbrake wells. Open
the boards to deploy. Try not to use speed brakes earlier in the
mission. One time use.

Ed,
do you possibly know the reasons why no chaff/flare dispensers were mounted
on Phantoms at the time (and, AFAIK, for most of the 1970s)?

From the standpoint of our days this appears as a very strange measure to
me: given how many R-13 shots could have been averted over Vietnam alone....

Tom Cooper

They weren't mounted because they didn't yet exist. The ALE-40 (the
blister dispenser bolted on the side of the wing pylons) came into
production around '73 or '74 after the air war was over. As I
mentioned, the operational E-models got them, but they never got
retrofitted to the C's that were still active. (I don't know about the
D's.)

The ALE-40 may not have existed, but (according to Thornborough, pg. 16) the navy
was using the ALE-18 starting from April of 1966, at the same time they installed
the ALQ-51, APR-25 RHAWS and APR-27 LWR (for some reason the navy used the latter
rather than the APR-26). The ALE-29 seems to have replaced the ALE-18 from 1967
or 1968, and I think the ALE-39 was available before the end of the war. There's
no obvious reason why the air force couldn't have used dispensers on their
tactical a/c at the same time. Hell, the F-105D had its dispenser (an ALE-2)
removed from the spec as a cost cutting measure (along with the APS-92 RWR and
ALQ-31 jammer), in about 1959 or 1960.

Guy