When I reported in at George, April 1957, long-range deployments were a new art. Only the year before, as leader of our wing gunnery team in Germany, I had flown the ocean in an F-86 Sabre that had no airborne refueling capability. We flew back to the States to compete in the finals in Nevada by hopscotching across Europe to land and refuel until we reached Scotland. There, extra wing tanks were added, and we raced our fuel gauges across the Atlantic, hoping to reach Greenland before our tanks went dry. Then we hopscotched across North America to Nevada, an exhausting two-and-a-half-day trip.
Airborne refueling was developed for the big SAC bombers, and I had helped train their first tanker boom operators years before. But until a fighter could hitch onto a filling station in the sky, crossing the Atlantic in a single-engine airplane was as awesome as when Charles Lindbergh first did it, thirty years before. The ability to refuel without landing was as revolutionary to military aviation as the invention of the jet. In World War II, it had taken a full six months to transport and establish an operational fighter squadron in England. Now, we could fly anywhere and set up for combat in a matter of days.
My outfit was the first daylight air defense squadron of 100s in the Tactical Air Command, so they were an elite group, like being handed a Rolls-Royce. They were the best bunch I ever flew with, and my two years with them was the most fun I had as a squadron commander. TAC gave us the first Sidewinders, eager to discover how quickly their best pilots could become proficient learning to fire weapons that cost fifteen thousand bucks each. At those prices we didn't waste many practice shots. Firing those Sidewinders really impressed us about how well we would need to fly to survive future combat. All we had to do was wax a tail, turn on the system and get a rattling tone in our headsets, which meant that the heat sensors were locked on the hot-air exhaust of another jet, turn on our gunsight radar that locked us on target, then fire and watch that missile streak right up the tail of a drone, blasting it to pieces. Until evasion tactics could be developed, the price of getting your fanny waxed in future combat would be a high-explosive missile rammed up your behind.
But before that could happen some sumbitch would have to stick on your tail long enough to close in and get a lock on your exhaust. Dogfighting with missiles would really be survival of the fittest, but the new technologies were already weeding out weak sisters. For example, any fighter pilot who couldn't hack formation flying was in a tough spot hitching up to a refueling tanker high above the ocean. If he couldn't maneuver himself-into position to fill his fuel tank, he was going to swim. Good pilots learned to master these new challenges; the others got out. It really was a black-and-white situation. The good ones had few problems adapting to the changes.
Until my squadron deployed to Spain in 1958, the Tactical Air Command had never enjoyed a perfect deployment and were beginning to wonder whether fighter aircraft were capable of extended range flying without suffering numerous aborts. We made it to Spain and back with all our airplanes. The next year we flew to Japan, then later, deployed from the States back to Spain and on to Italy. And we maintained a perfect deployment record, unique in TAC. I felt almost as good about that as breaking the sound barrier because a transoceanic deployment was how the TAC brass rated a squadron s leadership and ability. A lousy bunch lost half their airplanes to aborts en route.
Commanding an elite group eager to bust their tails to please me was a wonderful position to be in. We practiced airborne refueling under every kind of weather condition until we could do it practically in our sleep, and it was a pleasure watching a squadron of really proficient fighter pilots flying crisp and precise. In-flight refueling was actually used in the 1920s when an airplane named Question Mark set an endurance record by flying back and forth between Los Angeles and San Diego for 150 hours, being refueled in the air by pumping fuel through a hose from an airplane flying overhead. Our technique wasn't too different. It was called "probe and drogue." The four engine tanker, holding about thirty thousand gallons of fuel, ran out a long hose with a funnel attached at the end. Our airplanes had probe outlets on the side and we positioned ourselves to push in the funnel against the probe. The tankers could refuel three fighters at a time from drogues dangling from each wing and its tail. For an experienced formation flier it was not difficult, although bad-weather refueling could get rough. Even then, it was a matter of squadron pride to do things right.
So when the order came to deploy to Spain, I told them, "We're gonna do this the TAC way-we get where we're going, every damned one of us." I didn't get any arguments. There wasn't a pilot there who didn't know he'd make it wherever he was sent even to hell and back. Transoceanic flying didn't intimidate that bunch. They knew their airplane and its systems and could cope with any problem. If a good pilot knew what he was doing, flying to Spain was no more difficult than flying to Indianapolis. Maintenance was the heart of a squadron, and our crews had everything they needed to keep our airplanes in top shape. I just told the crew chiefs, "You guys are in charge. When you tell a pilot that his airplane is ready, that's all he needs to know. So, you'd better make damned sure you know what you're talking about."
I never applied pressure to keep all of our airplanes in the air; if two or three were being serviced, we just lived with an inconvenience, rather than risking our lives with aircraft slapdashed onto the flight line. I wouldn't allow an officer-pilot to countermand a crew-chief sergeant's decision about grounding an unsafe airplane. A pilot faced with not flying wasn't always the best judge about the risks he was willing to take to get his wheels off the ground. And it paid off. My pilots flew confident, knowing that their equipment was safe.
Other squadrons suffered aborts because pilots got uptight once land was left behind, becoming supercautious if anything went wrong. Fighter pilots had much less experience flying over oceans than bomber pilots, who had been doing it in their big birds since the war. There were some damned good reasons to turn back from a mission, including a fuel leak, but to be able to make a sound judgment about whether to stay or abort meant knowing what was a manageable problem. There were dozens of ways to circumvent malfunctions, but the guys knew that I wouldn't risk their lives to avoid an abort. Squadron commanders who lacked experience and were unsure about their airplane's systems often agreed to aborts simply to play it safe over water. But the best way to fly safe was to know what in hell you were doing.
To get to Spain, we had to rendezvous successfully with two sets of tankers en route. Navigating to the rendezvous points was my job as flight leader. The longest leg of the trip was six hours to the Azores where we would land, refuel, then fly to Spain on our extra 275-gallon wing tanks. On the first leg eighteen Super Sabres in our squadron left California and flew to Langley Field in Virginia, where we refueled and took off for the Azores in flights of six.
Ocean weather was changeable, and we encountered strong head winds at 35,000 feet, that slowed us and increased fuel consumption, so we climbed a couple of thousand feet at a time, until the winds decreased at about 40,000. At the two-hour mark we made our first tanker rendezvous, and the refill operation was perfect. But two hours later, the weather turned murky and it became damned near impossible to visually sight those big birds. We only carried gunsight radar, which is why we were limited to day flying. No radio contact either. Nuthin. I began to sweat it. As far as I could figure we were right on time and on the mark, and those tankers were probably in our vicinity; but that wasn't good enough with fuel gauges edging toward empty. I was practically straining the eyeballs out of my head, until by sheer luck I came in right on the tail of a big lumbering shadow in the middle of a dark cloud. Those guys had been calling us on the wrong channel frequency. The last of our airplanes to refuel had about two minutes of fuel remaining.