VX-4 phantom loads

Ed Rasimus wrote:

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:30:15 GMT, Guy Alcala
wrote:

Ed Rasimus wrote:

That would be tempered by
time-to-go to TOT and distance read out on the INS. The escorts would
be trying to keep 420 indicated which was an approximation of corner
velocity.

Wouldn't they want some extra E over corner, because they'd be bound to **** it off quickly with any
hard maneuvering?

It's always going to be a compromise between what you want and what
you can have. In any A/A mission I always like to be very fast at
entry--in those days you could bleed off airspeed a lot easier than
gain it (not so for most aircraft today!)

In the escort role, the constraint was to maintain station on the
escorted force. So, with a bit of maneuver you could hold near corner
and plan on having a minute or two to accelerate upon getting a Disco
call or hearing of a MiG spotting somewhere in the package. Worst case
would be as the intercept target with no warning. C/L tanks would be
gone as soon as they got empty, so first move would be a slice into
the attack with full reheat, then a conversion of the fight into a
vertical rather than horizontal engagment.

In that case, his claim of maintaining 450 while weaving is at least possible.

No way to get to that speed at that altitude. I'd readily accept 1.2M,
but can't imagine getting to 1.6 and would really find it tactically a
mistake to get going that fast even if you could.

Okay, although since he was rear aspect on the MiGs who seem to have been doing their usual
supersonic (or at least, high transonic) missile pass and blow through, being well above transonic
would seem to be necessary if he was going to catch them. It would certainly give his AIM-7 a better
chance of overhauling them. Do you ever see him at Rats reunions? If so, maybe you could ask him
about it.

Attendance at Rat reunions seems, at least to me, to be more weighted
toward earlier participants and definitely toward multiple tour guys.
I don't see that many from the Korat Linebacker days. Haven't seen
either of these guys since 1973.

Well, we had been talking about the F-4E portion of the Hunter/Killer
team and the carriage of dual pods. My original point was that some
equipment like ECM pods and AIM-7s were standard throughout the
squadron and not adjusted for the particular role of a tail number on
a particularl day--hence, H/Ks carried a pod even if we weren't going
to use it.

No argument there. I still don't know how I easily managed to find shots of two different 34th TFS
a/c (as well as one from the 421st) carrying two pods in that era, if it was as unusual as you state.
Just one more minor mystery that's unlikely to be solved.

421st F-4s were never (at least to my knowledge) at Korat.

No, thea/c in question was at Takhli, after the 421st moved from Danang (and the 366th was closed down).
My point was that dual pod carriage was not limited to the 388th; I've got photos of 421st, 388th, and
432nd a/c so equipped, i.e. those from 3 different bases, all with escort or MiGCAP tasking.

The war
lasted a long time and the only consistency was constant change. I can
only report on what I encountered from July of '72 to July of '73 at
Korat.

Sure.

I pointed out the minor error in Jenkin's quote that you offered
regarding emphasis on a pod for Iron Hand applications.

snip

I think we're talking past each other here. My point was that the higher commanders/people who wrote
the requirement for the ALQ-101 very likely* did so for exactly the reasons Jenkins claimed, i.e. to
provide better protection for a/c that weren't able to benefit from mutual jamming. Subsequent
priority deployment of the ALQ-101 to those a/c tasked with such detached missions, i.e. Iron
Hand/MiGCAP/Recon, indicates that Jenkins' comments about the perceived need for the development of
the 101, _regardless of whether it was actually turned on by the crews_, is correct.

*I say "very likely" because I don't have Jenkins here, and don't know what his sources were for this
statement, if he gave them.

Offhand, I don't recall seeing photos of a/c other than F-105WW or MiGCAPs carrying ALQ-101s from
1968-1973, although it may have happened. But even if there are some shots of same, the vast
majority of photos I have of strikers/chaffers/escorts during LB I/II show them carrying pure noise
jamming pods, and not ALQ-101s. I don't think I have a single photo of a 388th F-4E carrying an
ALQ-101 during the bombing halt and LB periods.

Whew, what a load of my senile mind! That's consistent with my
recollection of Korat in '72-3. I don't recall the big ALQ-101 until I
arrived at Torrejon and we had them with the F-4Cs that we received in
October of '73 when the E-models were realigned at Bitburg.

Not sure what you mean by the "big ALQ-101". Are you referring to the longer versions starting with the
(V)3, as opposed to the original short versions like the ones shown in Davis? I've got a shot of a 4th
TFS bird carrying an ALQ-101(V)-3 according to the caption, on the left I/B. It's got the strip lights
but the short gun fairing. It may have one on the right I/B as well, but the angle is wrong. Oddly, the
a/c has three tanks, but apparently no weapons. BTW, most of the photos of 388th F-4Es I have are in the
Warbird Tech series book titled "F-4 Gun Nosed Phantoms".

We carried
them for about 2 years and then began getting a few of the ALQ-119
pods.

I know that the 388th had them when they were still
equipped with Thuds, because there's a photo in Larry Davis' "Wild Weasel", taken at Korat, of a
whole rack of ALQ-101s waiting to be loaded on a/c, with Thud tails visible above the revetments in
the background.

Davis book is hard to reference since it isn't indexed, but I did find
the section you refer to. The pods are noted as arriving in July of
'68 (which is about the time of cessation of NVN bombing and the end
of Rolling Thunder.)

Yes, which is probably why there are so few photos showing them being carried by Thuds (or any other a/c).

Tony Thornborough in "Iron Hand" notes the 7AF demand for carriage of
pods and the Weasel's resistance because of both interference with
RHAW equipment and loss of a Shrike station.

Uh Huh.

It should be noted as well that not all two-seat aircraft at Korat by
1968 were Weasels. There were Ryan's Raider aircraft, Combat Nail,
T-Stick II, etc. Some of these might have had good applications of the
-101 pod, if they were going to SAM country.

I've only got a single shot of a Combat Martin a/c, a 357th a/c, and it's carrying what appears to be an
ALQ-71 on the left O/B (and probably on the right I/B also), but the shot is from the left wing so it
can't be seen. Ryan's Raiders', I don't know. I'd think they'd want to keep the jammers turned off (ISTR
that the Vark pilots normally kept their's off, even though they were loaded with a pair of -87s in
Vietnam). The idea was to give the minimum warning that they were coming, and rely on terrain masking to
beak any locks. Although at least one 'Vark pilot from that era has said that coming in under the radar
was a joke, and that the RWR was lit up solid for several minutes prior to the target and on the way out.

Presumably there were only limited numbers of -101s available in the theater, so if
those pods weren't at the 388th in 1972 they must have been somewhere else. From photo evidence it
appears that "somewhere else" was the 432nd at Udorn, the unit tasked with MiGCAP and Recon over the
north, which is right in line with the intended deployment of the -101 described by Jenkins (the
F-105Gs had their own " -101s" by this time, the ALQ-105).

Along that line, I could only find a single shot of a 67th TFS F-4CWW carrying a pod, and it's an
-87. The sample size is way too small to reach any definite conclusions, but I'd guess that there
may not have been enough 101s to go around. The 67th was apparently tasked to do a lot of pre-emptive
Shrike firings, which would have kept them out of the worst threats. Alternatively, Davis has
illustrations showing them carrying ALQ-119s, which may have been just entering service at the time.
The F-4Cs at Spangdahlem carried -119s a few years later, but I don't know when they became
available.

When the 67th deployed to Korat for Linebacker II, they were barely
operational. Only the need for additional 24-hour/day Weaseling made
it necessary to deploy them to the war. Higher priority missions in
SEA would have kept the Kadena guys from getting the latest equipment.

I don't know about pre-emptive Shrike firings. I never heard of it
during a lot of Weasel supporting. The first I recall consideration of
the tactic was several years later (around '75-'76) when Shrike supply
levels had stabilized and there were sufficient numbers to expand in
that manner.

Unless you had a very tight, single-thrust, strike package on a very
explicit timeline, I think it would be pretty hard to safely
coordinate a pre-emption program.

Thornborough, in his F-4 book, interviewed several members of the 67th, and IIRR they described their
pre-emptive tasking. This was largely during LB II. I've also got a statement from a contemporary
briefing (quoted in the SAAS Thesis "Planting the Seeds of SEAD: The Wild Weasel in vietnam", by Maj.
William Hewitt, 1993) which describes the use of pre-emptive firings beginning in about April 1972,
accompanied by a chart which breaks down the firings by missile type, number fired, type of firing, and
results for the April-October 1972 period. For the USAF it shows 320/678 Shrike launches were pre-emptive
in that period, while the Standard was 0/230. USN usage was 254/1,257, and 0/165 in the same period.
IIRR, pre-emptive firing had been a navy tactic for some time before the USAF started to use it.

Guy