Bush Flew Fighter Jets During Vietnam

Mary Shafer wrote:
The F-5 model with the long pointy nose (the F, maybe) spun more
easily and was extremely hard to recover. It took jettisoning the
canopy to break the spin, in fact. The T-38 and the other F-5s
weren't nearly so difficult to recover, but they weren't really easy,
either. The gouge about "easy to spin, easy to recover; hard to spin,
hard to recover" has a certain amount of truth to it.

The E's and F's we had at Top Gun in '81 had the shark nose mod
and leading edge extension. That they were spinnable was proven
(along with difficulty of recovery) when the skipper (MiG killer
Roy Cash) had to return one to the taxpayers.

We all talked about jettisoning the canopy and, in the case of the
2-seaters F's, directing the backseater to eject, in attempts to get
some nosedown pitch (the backseaters used to point out that
having the frontseater leave, instead, was more likely to work--
particularly since HE was the hamburger who had gotten you into
that fix anyway--given the realtive positions of the seats). Nobody
ever had to test the backseater idea, and I am skeptical about the
canopy idea. If you've got no airflow anyway, what good to throw
away the window? Then again, what do you have to lose?



Jeff