FIGHTER SQUADRON 83
I had assumed command of Fighter Squadron 83 at the Naval Air Station Oceana, just outside Virginia Beach, Virginia, in September 1956. At that time the squadron was equipped with the Chance Vought F7U-3M Cutlass, a supersonic carrier fighter, the first to be armed with missiles only — no guns. The Cutlass was a disaster, but an ambitious disaster. It was a giant step forward in aircraft capability, but a little too long a stride. The technology of a supersonic, after-burning, tailless plane was too much for the carrier squadrons to maintain and the pilots to fly. The carrier landing-accident rate was out of sight. On VF-83’s previous cruise to the Mediterranean in the Sixth Fleet, the carrier’s commanding officer had gotten fed up with the Cutlass’s poor maintenance availability and deck crashes its first month on board and put the whole squadron ashore for the rest of the deployment at the French Naval Air Base at Port Lyautey in Morocco, where the U.S. Navy kept a small fleet air support facility.
The one useful aspect of this tour in the F7U was the experience of flying supersonic jets whose armament consisted solely of missiles. The F7U-3M was equipped to carry four radar-guided Sparrow I air intercept missiles. For the pilots, including myself, it was an introduction to the new tactics that would prevail in the future, as all naval fighter aircraft became equipped with air-to-air missiles as their primary offensive armament.
All of this changed in the spring of 1957, when VF-83 was changed over to a new mission of nuclear and conventional attack and equipped with the A4D-1 Skyhawk, a remarkable new production aircraft built by Douglas that had been specially designed to carry nuclear weapons. The designation of the squadron would also be changed to Attack Squadron 83, or VA-83. The primary mission of the squadron would be the delivery of tactical nuclear and thermonuclear weapons of up to 1.1 megatons yield.
This new mission required first a background security check for all of the pilots and a number of the enlisted men in the squadron, and then the successful completion of nuclear weapons training school on the part of the pilots. This was a three-week course in the design, operational use, and delivery techniques of nuclear weapons. It was a very practical course. The pilots learned everything they needed to know to deliver an atomic weapon or a small hydrogen bomb, but no more. They were not told so much that if they were captured — as they could expect to be in the real event — they would be able to help the enemy. This was not very comforting to the pilots, but it was better than flying the F7U.
When the first Skyhawk was delivered, it turned out to be an absolute delight to fly. My reaction was that the fun in flying had been returned to the pilot. The mission of special-weapons delivery required the plane to fly long distances at altitudes below five hundred feet, which would enable the planes to penetrate target areas by flying under the radar. Until this became a special-weapons delivery technique, it had been known as “flat-hatting,” a popular term for forbidden low-altitude flying, which was punishable by court-martial. Now it was not only authorized, but also prescribed for the A-4s as a primary tactic for day-to-day training.
Second, the principal method of attacking a target with a nuclear bomb from an A-4 was the “over the shoulder” technique, called by the pilots an “idiot loop.” In this maneuver, the plane flew over the target at a fifty-foot altitude at five hundred knots and immediately pulled into a four-G loop. As the plane passed through the vertical, a computer released the bomb, which went up to thirteen thousand feet and then fell back down on the target the pilot had just overflown. The purpose of this maneuver was to allow the delivery airplane to escape the blast effects of the nuclear weapon. After the bomb was released, and when the plane had passed through the top of the loop, the pilot completed the maneuver as a half Cuban eight, turning the plane right side up and diving for the earth to gain maximum speed and low altitude to escape. These were, in fact, low-altitude aerobatics, and engaging in them had been a court-martial offense. Now they were not only legal, but also practiced for hours on end as the idiot loop became the primary mode of A-4 special-weapons delivery.
The squadron also was capable of using conventional weapons: virtually every bomb in the inventory, forward-firing air-to-ground rockets, and guided missiles. With these dual missions, the squadron pilots were kept busy practicing their weapon techniques while at the same time maintaining the skills required for landing on a carrier. The A-4 was a light and nimble aircraft. Empty, its weight was thirteen thousand pounds. Filled with fuel and loaded with weapons, it could weigh almost twenty thousand pounds on the catapult ready for launch on a combat mission.
In the winter of 1958, the squadron flew down to the Leeward Point Naval Air Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the Navy maintained an extensive target complex with the bombing ranges instrumented with theodolites. The range observers would triangulate the puff of smoke from the bomb impact and send it to the range-plotting station. The radio talker would then call the pilot within ten seconds, giving the exact impact spot of the practice bomb in distance and direction from the bull’s eye. Direct hits on the bull’s eye were not unusual as the pilots became proficient through practice, especially on windless days.
The daily flight schedule was rigorous. All pilots flew two bombing flights lasting an hour each in the morning and two in the afternoon. Each bombing flight consisted of eight idiot loops with the pilot pulling four Gs on each maneuver. These training missions carried eight 6-pound miniature bombs with a shape aerodynamically designed to give them a trajectory similar to that of a full-sized bomb. The miniature bomb had a shotgun shell, loaded with black powder, in its nose. This fired on hitting the ground, marking the bomb impact point for the theodolite operators on the bombing range.
SIXTH FLEET DEPLOYMENT
On 31 January 1958, Attack Squadron 83 embarked in the USS Essex and deployed to the Mediterranean for a six-month tour of duty with the Sixth Fleet. The squadron had exchanged our original A4D-1 aircraft for a new model, the A4D-2, which had an in-flight refueling capability. This upgrade was necessary for the A4Ds to reach all of the programmed general war targets in central Europe from a larger number of launch points in the Mediterranean.
The squadron’s aircraft were factory-new, and VA-83 was the first squadron to deploy to the Sixth Fleet with an in-flight refueling capability. The A4D-2 had a long probe projecting from the nose of the aircraft to receive fuel from a tanker. It also had the capability of carrying a three-hundred-gallon fuel tank that could reel out a trailing drogue to refuel other probe-equipped squadron aircraft.
The nicest aspect of the cruise, though, was the carrier’s angled deck and mirror landing system. In my last squadron deployment in F9F-2 Panthers on board the Boxer, I had flown from a straight deck — a real nightmare, especially for jets. We got used to it, but only because we had no choice; there was nothing else. On the straight deck, the plane landed on the aft end of the carrier with all of the previously landed planes — the pack — on the forward end. There was a wire barrier that was raised and lowered to stop the landing plane from crashing into the pack if the landing pilot’s hook failed to catch a wire. Often a jet that failed to catch a wire would bounce all the way over the barrier fence and crash into the pack with predictably horrible consequences. It was part of the problem of flying jets from carriers.