Jim

Went to the Army missile school at Fort Bliss and never heard about
that there either.

When I went super sonic never got a warning in cockpit that a missile
radar had locked on to me back when we could go SS over the US.

And that leads to a war story.

Oxnard had F-89's (carried 104 2/75 FFAR's). The Commander at Oxnard
and the Navy commander at China Lake were good drinking buddies.

Oxnard got a call from Navy one day that a drone had got away and was
drifting toward Los Angles. Oxnard was asked to shoot it down, so a
pair of F-89's were scrambled.

They were vectored up and closed very close behind the drone (filled
the windscreen) and the first fired his full load of rockets (104 of
them in salvo) and punched some holes in the drone and it kept on
flying. The 2nd F-89 came up and did the same thing. None of the 208
heads that hi the drone exploded. It kept on circling and drifted
south of LA and ran out of gas and bellied in with no damage to anyone
on ground.

The FFAR's that were fired impacted a county road north of LA and blew
big holes in it ) as the heads had armed well before they hit the
ground.

The report went up channels to Washington and 2 things took place.

1. All 89 pilots were again briefed that the heads of the FFAR's did
not arm for several seconds after they were fired to give them time to
clear the launch airplane.So not to try to fire them very close to a
target. Let the radar fire them which would give proper separation.

The second thing that happened was that in any future case like this,
authority to fire had to come from Washington.

6 months after this, another Navy drone got loose around Seattle. ADC
launched alert birds and tailed it all the way down the coast until it
crashed north of LA again not hurting anyone on the ground. Washington
would not let anyone fire on it over the US (

End of true War Stories for today )

Big John

*********************************************
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:35:02 GMT, wrote:

Big John wrote:

Jim

I spent many years in the Air Defense Command (from fighter pilot on
alert to Cmd and Control in a SAGE Block House) and never heard about
any authority to shoot down an aircraft going super sonic as the
criteria.

During the cuban Missile crisis I ran a shift on the Dias in a SAGE
center and we controlled all the fighters in the sector, launching
them and giving them shoot down authority.

Where did you get your shoot down info?

Army Air Defense Command.

I was oversimplifying.

We were authorized to track, lock on, and arm warheads for unannounced
supersonic traffic.

Final authority to launch came from ARADCOM or, within certain guidelines,
the battery Commander.