Another Ancient Military Plane Grounded

wrote:
On Dec 21, 1:05 pm, wrote:
Jay Honeck wrote:
If the USAF wasn't so hell-bent on having the latest tech in their
planes, I'm sure Boeing & Lockheed Martin
could sell them more brandy-new Eagles and Falcons. Probably for a
good price too.
In the "olden days" (like, the 1950s-60s) up throught Robert McNamara,
the USAF always had a "range" of fighters to do different jobs. Since
(I presume) the assembly line for Falcons/Vipers could be re-started
fairly easily, you'd think the Air Force would want a few dozen
squadrons of F-16s, and two squadrons of F-22s, rather than (for
example) just eight squadons of F-22s...

The services always seem to want a clean sheet design for new aircraft,
which generally raises the cost substantially.

No one seems to want to take a usefull old design and just improve
it where the technology has advanced, such as in engines, avionics,
and materials.

Though to be fair the Air Force is doing that with the C-130 and
the Army with the CH-47.

Given the current status of our Air Force -- essentially impotent in
the War on Terror, and shrinking fast -- this would seem the most
logical path for them to take. At the rate they're going, in ten
years we'll have a single squadron of fighters on each coast and one
on the Gulf of Mexico, a hand-full of bombers and tankers -- and
that's about it. Everything else will be Air National Guard.

Which is probably as it should be as there is no Soviet Union with
waves of bombers poised to attack the US for fighters to defend against
nor a Soviet Union with US bombers flying 24/7 poised to attack in
retribution.

Plus in an era of ICBM's and cruise missles, the days of massive
fighter dog fights and protection of bombers are essentially over.

The current requirement is mostly for transport of the Army and
ground support for the Army.

It doesn't take supersonic bombers or Mach 3 fighters to do that.

--
Jim Pennino

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Mao charlie will soon be the next boogie man..don't close those Lock-
Boe-Northrop factories yet...JG

How much of your money are you willing to contribute in the form of
taxes to counter what is currently a minimal threat?

Building stuff now means it will most likely be worn out and need
replacement by the time (if ever) it is needed not to mention
the money down a rat hole.

The Chinese have their own problems and little interest in things
outside of Asia other than sales.


--
Jim Pennino

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Jay and perhaps some others seem to think that we should have launched every
available alert aircraft during the 9-11 attacks. I don't want to argue for
or against their points, but I do want to point out how things were in West
Germany during the time I was there from 1983-86. I've already posted how
few fighters NATO had on alert during the time, but what some of you guys
might not know is that the Warsaw Pact frequently sent fighters across the
border into West German airspace to test our reactions. During each
incursion, only two NATO ZULU alert fighters were launched, sometimes from
Ramstein, sometimes from Bitburg, sometimes from one of the other bases with
ZULU Alert commitments. Fighters have about an hour or two endurance without
air refueling, and it would be stupid to launch all of your jets at once.
Imagine how vulnerable to attack we'd have been had all of our alert jets
been airborne at the same time, then they all had to land and had been off
alert status while they were refueled. I never heard if the Warsaw Pact made
incursions at more than one point at a time, I'm supposing if they had then
NATO would have launched sufficient ZULU jets to make intercepts at each
point, but certainly not all of the ZULU jets at once. It could be that
NORAD only launched a minimum of alert aircraft on 9-11 for the same reason.
If you look at a map that shows where Ramstein, Bitburg, Soesterburg, and
RAF Wildenrath (not Bruggen, Bruggen was the Jaguar base, Wildenrath had
Phantoms. I was mistaken in my previous post) were in relation to the
West-East German border, you'll see that our bases were on the far side of
West Germany away from the border. It took some minutes for our jets to
get airborne and cross West German territory to make the intercept. As our
jets got close, the Pact fighters would turn around and head back for
their side.
Here's a story about one such intercept. I had to meet our F-4Es at ZULU as
they landed on one day because while they were coming back to Ramstein
after an ALPHA launch, one had squawked a problem with its IFF
interrogator, and I needed to fix the jet as quickly as possible after it
had landed so they could put it back up on alert status. As the crew were
getting out of their jets they were excitedly talking back and forth about
what they'd seen. From what they said, they'd been in IMC, and as they
approached the Munich area, they had a radar target which accelerated away
from them, heading back over the border at Mach 2.8 and accelerating. While
they never got a visual ID, they were certain it was a MiG-25.
One more story. I mentioned the pair of Luftwaffe ZULU F-4Fs that diverted
into Ramstein one day in late 1985. I should mention that we launched our
alert jets at least once a day, usually for what we called TANGOs, which
were training sorties, not actual intercepts. As the Phantoms rolled out
onto the runway, they were told if it was a TANGO, so when they took off
on Runway 09, they immediately made a left turn and came out of burner so
as not to overfly the city of Kaiserslautern and **** off the locals.
Actual intercepts were called ALPHA launches, and us groundcrew could
always know when it was an ALPHA because the jets stayed in burner and
flew right over Kaiserslautern heading east, still in burner as far as we
could see them.
So this one day, our ZULU jets launched on a TANGO. It was a typical rainy
German day, but not too bad as I could clearly see the jets come out of
burner and make their left turns. Later Job Control announced over our
maintenance radio net that the jets wouldn't be coming back, they'd
diverted for the weather and we needed to upload a couple more F-4Es and
get them over to ZULU ASAP. It was about that time that the Luftwaffe jets
landed and were parked in our Restricted Area. They were gone when I came
back to work the next morning. I'd always wondered what was going on, why
our jets had to weather divert when it wasn't that bad out, and the
Luftwaffe jets had landed okay. I don't know when our airplanes finally
returned.
Fast forward to about 7 or 8 years ago. I was at the Manitowoc, Wisconsin
airshow, and there were a couple of A-10s from the Battle Creek ANG unit
on display. The pilots were standing by the jets talking to people, and
one of them, a LT Colonel, looked very familiar to me. Turned out he had
been a Phantom Phlyer in the 526 TFS at Ramstein while I was there, and we
started talking about the good old days. For whatever reason, I mentioned
that day when our jets diverted and the Luftwaffe jets landed instead, and
he told me the rest of the story. Someone high up at NATO had decided to
do something about all of the incursions by Warsaw Pact aircraft, so they
came up with a plan. They launched out our ZULU F-4Es on a TANGO, and at
the same time TANGOed the Luftwaffe ZULU F-4Fs from JG 74 at Neuberg,
which is a bit north of Munich and much closer to the East-West German
border. All four Phantoms joined up and swapped callsigns, and landed at
each other's airfields. The 526 TFS jets were immediately refueled and put
on alert status at Neuberg in the Luftwaffe ZULU barn. Sure enough, a few
days later a Pact MiG-23 flew across the border into West German airspace.
But instead of Ramstein or Bitbirg launching their alert aircraft from all
the way across Germany, the pair of 526 TFS F-4Es came up from Neuberg,
between the MiG and the border. The LtCol told me the plan was to shoot
down the MiG on our side of the border, but only if they could be sure
that the wreckage would fall away from any towns. The F-4Es were under
Ground Controlled Intercept control, but there was some glitch and they
were not given permission to fire. So one parked himself at the MiG's
six-o'clock while the other pulled up alongside the MiG and they escorted
the MiG back to the border. He told me there were no further Warsaw Pact
incursions after that.
One other thing I'd like to point out for the guy who seems to have a
problem with the ANG holding the alert commitment in CONUS. He seemed to
think this was a bad idea because, he thinks, the ANG doesn't have enough
full-timers to generate a large number of aircraft if there were an
attack. Chew on this info... During my time at Ramstein from 1983 to 86,
during the Cold War, Reagan's sabre rattling, the attack on Libya, NATO's
equipping with Pershing 2s and GLCMS, we worked three shifts Monday
through Friday. During the weekend, we had a skeleton crew of one
maintenance specialist from each specialty, plus I believe four crew
chiefs if memory serves. There were also four crew chiefs assigned to the
ZULU rotation, at the other end of the airfield from our Restricted Area.
We worked 12 hour shifts during weekend duty, from 5 AM to 5 PM. From 5PM
to 5 AM we had NO maintenance people on duty. Aside from the four
crewchiefs and four aircrew at ZULU, I don't know how many pilots had
weekend duty as Operations worked out of a different building, but I'm
guessing very few if any after 5PM. As a reminder, an F-4E can't launch
out without ground crew, since Phantoms use external start carts
(AM32A-60) to start the engines. Not that it would've mattered anyway,
since none of the jets were armed with anything but the nose gun. Had
there been a "bolt out of the blue" attack, ZULU would have been on their
own until sufficient maintenance and weapons people could be called in to
start loading out the jets and we had aircrews on hand to fly them. No
****. I'm quite sure the Soviets were well aware of that too. We
communicated with each other and Job Control with Motorola hand-held
radios which weren't at all encrypted. Any Soviet spy could've been
stationed off base, monitoring our radio traffic and known everything that
was going on.
Scott Wilson