Conehead

On Saturday, Sarge posted an article that, in his own inimitable style, discussed a lot of worthwhile issues.  One of those topics is the existential crisis in Air Force Leadership, both officer and enlisted, but primarily Officer and lead by and caused by General Officers general officers.(The offenders not being worthy of honorifics).  Another was the absolute stupidity in the design of Air Force uniforms over the past 70 years of its existence.  Merrill McPeak (he goes by Tony, his real name, Merrill is more fitting) was the absolute winner in commander designed uniform awfulness.  Some time I'll post on his visit to Kadena and meeting the wing's Flight Commanders.  Yes, it involved a uniform inspection.  I'm pretty sure when translating "McPeak" from the original tongue means "Buffoon".

However (yes, folks, a different verbal pause!), the crux of Sarge's post was on the difference in military life when assigned to the Pacific than Stateside and even Europe.   To summarize, PACAF had much more of a Shaka Brah mentality than elsewhere.  While we took training and flying our mission VERY seriously, the day to day tediousity of military life was minimized as much as possible.

So (yep, back to the usual verbal pause.), as usual, an excellent post, much like the lyrics in refrain of this song. 

 Yeah, I'm a Jimmy Buffett fan.

However, even the Master makes a mistake every once in a long while.  And that once was Saturday.

He published this photo

  
Sarge's issue was Flounder's issue in Animal House, the ending of which is "....you trusted us".  The file name on the picture says "35th_Tactical_Fighter_Squadron_-_McDonnell_F-4D-32-MC_Phantom_-_66-8709.jpg", so Sarge said the same.

When I glanced at the picture, the first thing I noticed was the WP on the tail, properly topped with the fin flash of the 80th TFS, AKA "The Juvats" not the blue fin flash of the (PTUI!) 35TFS Pantons.  

I gently corrected him, and then I started looking at the rest of the jet.  I noticed the ECM pod in the front left Sparrow well and then noticed the Laundry rack on the spine.

"I wonder....."  and went back and found my flying records.  Yes, I have flown this jet, and was part of the first crew that used that laundry rack since the Vietnam War.  Course this was 1980, so 7 years,  not that big a deal.

But, when you're on a remote to Kunsan, and the golf course is not a whole lot better than a putt-putt course, it's easy to get excited about even the littlest things.

You see, the Laundry rack is an antenna and was used by the LORAN system mounted in some F-4s.  LORAN is one of those military acronyms and stands for LOng RAnge Navigation.  The antenna would capture radio beacons from various sources and plot their intersection.  That intersection would be the location of the receiver.

In the F-4, the LORAN was hooked into the Bombing Computer, which would allow you to automatically drop a bomb when the Bombing Computer determined that point the LORAN said the aircraft was currently matched the point the Bombing Computer determined was the Release Point for the weapons on board.

Think electronic version of the Norden Bomb Sight, and you wouldn't be far off.

As I said, the Juvats was my first assignment.  As is usually the case for first assignments, I wasn't very well qualified to do much of anything.  An additional factor was the looming arrival of an ORI, and the Wing and Squadron Commander didn't want a brand new 1LT, not well qualified, Aircraft Commander to have much impact on the results of the ORI.  Hence, I was relegated to the night schedule.

And.....

Because the F-4 was a two seat aircraft, and I was a new guy, I had to have someone experienced crewed with me.  But that meant one of their experienced WSOs would not be available for the visible portion of the ORI.  (No one on the IG team wanted to look at nighttime operations at Kunsan Korea in February, hence a lot of "sins" were hidden by the night schedule.)

A conundrum.

Seems a fairly experienced back seater was scheduled to arrive about 3 weeks prior to the ORI.  The Squadron Commander put out the edict that he would be Mission Ready before the ORI as he was to be my WSO.  Lucky guy!

Lucky me also, since he's got to get a mission qual check ride and I'm his front seater, I get to get another one.  Yay!  And this one will be at night.

We pass.  But we're relegated to night sorties which except for occasional moments of excitement (read terror), were generally boring.  Brief at sunset, takeoff around 9, drive to Koon-Ni Range, drop the two simulated nukes, pop up for 30^o dive bomb, then 20^o, then RTB to a couple of instrument low approaches then full stop.  Hit the rack around 0200, get up and do it again.  

We've been doing this for a few weeks, and one day, we're flying the jet in the picture above.  My WSO is looking at this new, old, stuff in his cockpit and trying switches.  He turns the Russian Switch (the OnOff switch pronounced Own' ov, you get it right?) to the On position and needles start to move in the back seat, but he's not sure what it is or what it does.

Since we've got a lot of daylight between sorties, he breaks into the flight manuals to see what that system is and what it does.  Yes....It was the LORAN system.  

He then decides that he's going to make a name for himself by learning how to and using the system.  Fortunately, 709 is a reliable airplane and on the night schedule, so getting  to fly it isn't hard.  Soon, we're able, with the help of some initially unwilling maintainers, to get the system working.  

He then decides we're going to get the system in such a state that we can attempt to drop a practice bomb with it.

That requires approval from the powers that be.

Batman approves the idea with a few safety caveats.  We will practice with the Combat SkySpot folks until we get correlation that anything that comes off our aircraft should hit planet Earth somewhere.  

This system would give you steering to a release point and then provide timing to release with 3 bongs, 2 ticks and then a Beep.  You would pickle when you heard the Beep.  

It was used in Vietnam quite extensively when the weather was bad.  Evidently, it was quite effective in turning trees into toothpicks.  VX and Dave may have better info than I.

In any case, we've tweaked the system and gone through a few dry missions where the Skyspot would run the delivery and we'd check their release point with LORAN's and vice versa.  We were fairly confident that we could deliver a BDU-33 25 pound practice bomb to somewhere near the Rock on Koon-Ni Range.  Certainly in the bay....Surely.....

It's time for an actual release.

First run will be Skyspot controlled.  Bong, Bong, Bong, Tick, Tick, BEEEEEEEEP!

I don't remember what the actual score was, but it didn't hit the rock, short.  (Not that I ever missed the rock entirely, Nope, Never, Ever!)

Now it's our turn.  We come in for a dry run, telling the Skyspot crowd when we would have pickled.  their prediction was that we'd be a little long.

Ok, their actual bomb was short, they said we'd be long, maybe.

We come back around for an actual delivery.  

Pickle.

The Ranger calls 500' at 12.  Not a bad bomb (well for a bomb dropped from 18K in level flight without visual aiming or guidance anyway).  Come back around and drop another.  A little short, about 400' at 6, but not bad.  This could work.

Get back on the ground and talk to Batman.  We're pretty excited, as best we could tell, those were the first LORAN bombs dropped since Vietnam and they were certainly acceptable.  We're on to something.

The Squadron Weapons Officer cools us down pretty quickly though.  He asks us what the delivery parameters were.  I told him straight and level, 400K, 18,000'.  He asks me what the TOF of a 57mm AAA round was to 18000'?   Or a SA-2?  Or a SA-3? All of which the North Korean's had in droves.

HISSSS!

OH!

My Backseater got his Callsign that evening, hence the title to this post.

Conehead PCS'd from the Kun to Moody and was my crewed backseater there also.  He went to the F-4 Fighter Weapons school while at Moody. We had a lot of excellent adventures and dropped a bunch of neat munitions from exciting deliveries but we never spoke much about LORAN again, except on cross countries to the PI when it came in pretty handy.