Flying the USAF F-4 Phantom | Steve Ladd (Part 1 In-Person)

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force officer he never uh he never maneuvered me in that direction he never pressed me in that direction and quite honestly um as i was growing up getting getting out of high school i had the faintest idea what i wanted to do i went to i went to university and one of the things that was playing on my mind was playing major league baseball oh wow but i figured out i figured out very very early in that process that i wasn't anywhere near good enough to do that so i went to university i got into the reserve officer training corps program at the university of south carolina i did a number of military courses and part of that was light aircraft flying so i actually got my private pilot's license while i was in university and that's about the time i started thinking about uh thinking about aviation for real yeah so i took the air force qualification test which was which was a real but i passed it and uh i got a pilot training slot and i think the urge and the motivation grew from that point on so uh it i was i was late to i was a late comer to aviation i was a late aficionado but uh it caught on and it did pretty well for me exactly yeah yeah so what aircraft did you start training on when you joined the u.s air force the air force training program is is 53 weeks the year of 53 weeks and it's it's nicely tailored to build up to a high performance aircraft the first one is basically a cessna 172 which which the air force designates it at t-41 sounds cooler yeah and that airplane is there for attrition it's there to determine those people who will never fly they either don't have the aptitude or the desire or some of them find out that they're simply terrified when they when they go up to fly and that airplane is is one that you weed out the folks that aren't going to make it you you go through that and then you move into a subsonic jet t-37 which was euphemistically known as the tweet uh because of the noise it made it's a high-pitched awful wine it's it's not something that's uh that's nice to to listen to but it's a great airplane for intermediate pilot training because it's uh two engines no reheat no afterburner uh but it's uh fully acrobatic it does all the things that a that a frontline fighter will do albeit not nearly as well but it gets you used to it and after about four months of t-37 time then you go into an airplane that will always be near and dear to my heart the t-38 which is known as the white rocket beautiful aircraft beautiful beautiful airplane supersonic reheats afterburners it it does most anything it for a while held the speed record until the until the f4 moved back in and took it away but uh it was a beautiful beautiful airplane to learn on it was it was sleek and sexy and it was a great a great learning tool if you will yeah yeah so at this point in your training did you know what aircraft you wanted to go on to i knew i knew it was fighters i knew it had to be fighters and i plugged for that from day one and pilot training i figured if i'm going to do this i don't want to fly a mini motor i don't want to drive something from point a to point b i want to do something exciting so it was always a matter of of looking for and trying to get to the point where i could end up with a fighter the f4 came about simply because the way the assignment system worked is when you graduated from pilot training there were i think 52 of us that graduated 70 odd that started but what the air force does is it it brought down what they called a block of aircraft one one aircraft for each graduate right right if you graduated number one you went into the boss's office he had all the airplanes up on a blackboard you picked the one you wanted if you graduated number last you got the only one that hadn't been picked yet so our class had not a lot of fighters we had we had one f-105 and we had i think 12 maybe 14 f-4s and fortunately i finished high enough in the class that i could go in there and point at an f4 and say that's what i want boss and that was the velcro that's what i got so how long did your training take before you got posted to the phantom um not very long actually uh i graduated uh from pilot training in may and i went to what they call a replacement training unit the rtu uh in i think it was july or august now at that time the the vietnam war was raging and they were pumping people in like there was no tomorrow so there weren't any delays i i went right straight into f4 training at mcniel air force base near tampa in florida uh did about uh oh four or five months of that and then straight across the water after a couple of survival schools that's great i mean compared to these systems it's it's you know it's like that isn't it when you go through oh i know i i think people today unfortunately are delayed and delayed and delayed it's uh it's it's a shame because you once you graduate you're pumped up you want to go you want to go ahead and do it so steve what were your first thoughts on the f4 phantom mean aggressive uh an airplane that looked like it meant business it's absolutely no doubt about it it was it was something to behold uh and uh very very impressive and of course the phantom at the time was was the airplane uh for the usaf and and for the world really so it was it was something that got your heart beating if you wanted to be a fighter pilot so what was the role of the phantom when you joined well the phantom the reason the phantom has been around as long as it has been and it's only just phased out in some countries it's still being flown by a few uh is the fact that it's versatile it does everything uh it was it was an excellent air-to-air machine it did it did conventional bombing which is mostly what i did in southeast asia uh it carried a nuclear load when it needed to uh and it did it did virtually everything you'd ask an airplane to do so obviously i was in training to go to southeast asia and that was going to be that was going to be conventional bombs and and weapons that type of thing and that's what we focused the training on with a fair amount of air to air because there were migs over there and something you needed to be concerned about so we we kind of mixed the training between conventional ground and air-to-air so what squadron did you start your training on f4 training was the 94th squadron at mcdeal air force base famous famous old squadron from world war one the hat in the ring squadron and uh yeah that was four or five months of that and then and then on off to southeast asia so let's talk a bit about your ground training what was it like coming from you know like the t-38 and the other aircraft you flew it was uh well it was uh it was difficult i mean it was there was a lot to learn uh most of which revolved around the weapons system obviously the the training aircraft didn't do any of that kind of thing so you didn't have to worry about it we spent an awful lot of time learning about the weaponry the bombs the bullets the rockets the gun and how to employ those things and of course we put that into practice in the air at mcdill so let's talk about your first flight what was that like and can you remember it yeah the uh yeah the first flight in the f4 was uh was pretty special i mean the t-38 was a special airplane it was a high-performance airplane but it was uh it was kind of a uh it was kind of a sports car in the skies it was it was small and sleek and all the rest of it the f4 was big and noisy and powerful and uh the kick in the butt when you plugged in the afterburners was really something to behold and it uh it was an impressive airplane from from day one so could you tell the difference like you know obviously the t38 had a reheat but could you tell the difference going on to the phantom that oh yeah yeah yeah the uh the reheat in the t-38 was was very smooth and very very controlled and you put it up there and you felt the push and it didn't did a nice job of that the phantom just kicked you in the ass and it and it really you could really tell the power that was in those j79 engines when you uh when you kicked in the afterburner and before we move on we're like what actual model were you flying was it the c or the d or um the uh the rtus uh the 94 squad and all the rtu's had e models uh in in 69. it was the hardwing e but it was a ze model with the integral gun and i didn't get into the d model until i got into combat and that was a that was a d model to do bond but uh yeah the uh the training aircraft uh even as early as 69 were in the brand spanking new shiny e models wow brilliant so let's talk about how the aircraft handled and what were its strengths and weaknesses right well strengths were power uh the ability to uh to work in the vertical with with the power of the aircraft had the weaknesses were well there weren't many but the ones that were weak were were terrifying uh in essence uh probably the thing that i most remember most f4 guys will remember is a a feature called adverse yaw and adverse yaw occurs when you uh when you are pulling g you've loaded up the airplane you're pulling hard on the airplane and because of the way the airplane is designed if you do what you would expect to do in an airplane and throw the stick over to the right with g on it to turn the airplane's going to snap to the left and it's it's going to give you the ride of your life if you're if you're lucky enough not to spend you'll live through it and you never do that again but it's a real attention getter so we had to learn and we got pretty good at it you had to learn if the airplane was loaded up if you were max max performing max maneuvering you turned with the rudder you kept the stick centered you stomped down the rudder and the airplane turned like airplanes do so let's talk about air dact or acm how did that fare you know against the tights of the time the phantom um in uh initial training and this is one of the shortcomings we had early in the southeast asia war in initial training we didn't have any dissimilar training we were f4 against f4 so what you had was a like airplane like airplane and the pilot that thought better and moved better won the day dact didn't start to come in until a little bit later on when the powers that be figured out we were we were not doing as well as we should have been against uh light wing loaded uh hard maneuvering migs so people started thinking about well maybe we ought to do a lot more of our training against airplanes like this smaller more maneuverable maybe less powerful exactly so let's talk about your first front-line squadron and obviously you've mentioned it there but going into combat what was that like yeah the first my my squadron at uh at ubon in thailand was the 435th uh the the eagle squadron we had four squadrons of f-4s in uban and what was it like it was going to war the first time and it was uh it was a it was a real baptism of fire i mean we weren't when i was over there we weren't going into north vietnam there was a bombing pause so we weren't going up to hanoi as long as some of the earlier guys had done but we were doing most of our work in laos where the ho chi minh trail came down from north vietnam down through laos and into south vietnam delivering goods and services and people and our job was to try and stop them this went on 24 hours a day it went on uh went on 365 days a year it involved hundreds and hundreds of airplanes of different types tankers fighters facts sar airplanes you name it the war was the war was full on uh in the air and for a 24 year old guy flying a hot fighter pilot fighter uh it was uh it was a about the best thing you could be doing with your clothes on so you weren't terrified at all oh yeah yeah there were oh yeah there were there were moments like that and anybody who tells you there weren't is is lying to you but uh you know you're trained to the point where you you kind of overcome that you do what you need to do if you're terrified you think about it a little bit later when you're back in the bar yeah was the phantom the right aircraft for this role i think it was yeah it was uh it was capable of carrying an awful lot of iron uh it it did a great job of of bombing uh which is what we were doing the interdiction role uh it was good air-to-air when it needed to be and i hastened to add it didn't need to be when i was there because the migs weren't coming over to laos and that's where i was but it was a it was a very capable airplane it lent itself as the war went on to precision guided munitions that they brought in and that kind of thing folded into it like i said very very versatile aircraft the jack of all trades so for some of our more geeky viewers what kind of weapons would you be carrying uh most of the time uh dumb bombs uh 500 pounders 750 pounders we carried a lot of cluster bombs uh cbus that split from a canister type of thing and spread little little little golf ball sides things around for people to step on or or whatever we used them a lot of anti-aircraft sites because they covered a fairly wide area and it was a pretty good way of getting even when guys were shooting at you so cbus were good so did you ever get up close with a mig uh later not in southeast asia uh during training and i'll be happy to talk about that but the migs at the time they weren't coming across the north vietnamese border into laos so we didn't see them we we heard from our our airborne command and control would call them out every now and then because on the on the north vietnam side and they'd faint in our direction then they'd turn around and go back never saw one up there so unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it i never got to tie one up with uh with with a name so steve do you have any memorable stories you can share with us on your time on the phantom oh well let's see 12 years and 2 200 hours spent a lot of time on the phantom so there were you know there were lots of things but i'll have to say and one of the reasons that i wrote the book was because what i did in the phantom primarily was nothing any different from what hundreds of other guys did in the phantom you know i i had my moments i had good missions i had missions that weren't so good i never had to step over the side uh so basically um during the whole tour i suppose the things that i did that were a little different uh was i spent six months in iran training uh the imperial iranian air force and dact dissimilar air combat tactics they put together a team an american team of f4 a couple of f4 pilots one f4 backseater a couple of f5 pilots and a tactical radar controller who sat on the ground and and orchestrated things in the air and we went over to a place called shiroki in southeast iran and spent six months there uh training their hand-picked pilots f4 and f5 pilots how to go against each other and how to develop a program and a good syllabus and a good training program it was a super experience it was really great it's a it's a shame they're no longer on our side but there you go so what were the iranian pilots like were they easy to work with were the good pilots they were an interesting crowd to work with because of their culture for a couple of reasons the middle east and the far east there's a concept called saving face and that's difficult to work around if you work under an american culture as as i did i'm used to flying a mission with guys training mission coming back down and very bluntly debriefing it uh if if if the guy screwed up i'd tell him so in no uncertain terms if you did that with an iranian in no uncertain terms he would switch off he would he would turn his brain off he'd look out the window he'd he he was not going to lose face because you were debriefing him so we had to learn very quickly that the way to debrief the iranians was very very different from the way we debrief our own so if an iranian screwed up you would have to kind of take the approach that well what she did was all right ahmed but you've got to understand that the intent here is for you not to fly out in front of the guy that you're fighting with so he can shoot you down if you say it nicely like that he would nod his head and he'd take that on board whether you learned anything or not i don't know was that frustrating for you like in the debrief it was get straight to the point yeah yeah it was but it's you know it was their ball game they were paying for us so we were the we were the folks that were providing the service additionally the other thing that we found very interesting was the the political climate and at the time the shah was doing great things for the iranian people he was bringing them into the uh at that point the 20th century uh and but he was on a knife edge there were an awful lot of people that wanted him gone there were an awful lot of people that didn't like what he was doing there were an awful lot of uh folks that wanted to remain in the stone age were where a lot of them were and in essence he had to control his activities with an iron fist consequently he farmed out a lot of people in different walks of life that were there to make sure that everybody was going in the right direction in the fighter business uh they had a there there was an organization called the savak which was the shah's uh secret police basically and uh it was rumored although nobody ever said so that every every squadron had at least one member of the savak qualified pilot guy that did the job but he was there kind of to look over everybody's shoulder and make sure they weren't saying the wrong things and make sure they weren't going in the wrong direction so this was a challenge because a lot of their brighter fighter pilots and there were a lot of them they had some great ideas they like american fighter russian fighter pilots anybody else they had great ideas and and they would they would suggest if they could they would suggest well why don't we do it this way or that way or the other way but they couldn't because any kind of independent thinking was kind of looked at as a little bit of a deviation and they called attention to themselves so if you were talking to one of these guys one on one and there's nobody else around he might he might give out to you and he might talk about these kind of things but any other iranians around they were straight down the line oh yeah it's really strange it looks really frustrating for you it was very very strange but again it's something we learned to live with and we understood why and we knew that that they couldn't afford to step out of line you mentioned uh you went to the weapons school earlier so tell us about that and how you got into that program ah well that was a that's an interesting story the uh the weapons school just to give you a little preface is uh what the air force weapons school it's not the top gun not that not the movie version but the air force weapons school is probably the the top and most challenging training program aviation training program in the world it's also the most prestigious if you come out the other end of it you are you are afforded a certain amount of respect because you have been there and you always wear a patch that shows you've been there most everyone wants to go there are some people who don't want to put in the effort but most everyone wants to go and i was an instructor pilot an f4 instructor pilot at homestead in in near miami in florida and at the time they came out as they did about every six months they come out and they'd say we have we have six slots in the next weapon school class so my boss my boss says my squadron commander dick fisher and my operations officer duke terry uh decided they'd pushed me for this job which i was most grateful for and the way it worked out it's kind of a funny story but there were there were two of us in the wing another guy a little a little younger than i was who was also he's a very talented guy but we were kind of competing for this right and the way this came out was my boss and and my office officer and his boss and his ops officers the different squadron went to the wing commander's office and they sat down with the case of beer and they all talked about uh you know steve's advantages what why steve ought to go on why bill or bob or fred or whoever was ought to go and this went on for most of the day fueled by the beer while we sat around and wondered who was going to get the nod well i got the nod i got a call that night from duke and uh i kind of blustered over the phone because i couldn't think of anything to say but man was i happy so i went in the next day and i cornered the two of them and i said you know thanks so much for pushing me i do appreciate it i said what which of my many talents uh won me the job and dick fischer laughed at me said you're old and i said i'm old i haven't hit 30 yet he said well he said it's relative and what happens is to get into the weapons school there was a cut-off date so many years as a rated pilot i was rapidly approaching that point seven years rated and the other guy was a couple years behind me and he said i managed to sell the wing commander on the fact that you needed to do this right now he could do it later wow boom you were right take it the way i can get it so it must have been a lot of hard work though it was yeah the weapon school was the toughest six months of my life and uh but but uh tough i say yes but rewarding also and the academic program uh once again we got a little bit of it when we went to replacement training union we went into the nuts and bolts of it and very very deep into the weapons and tactics at the weapons school six months half a day of academics half a day of flying and it was it was unrelenting you know it never it never backed off never eased off you never got much time to take a deep breath and enjoy it go ahead's in the books all the time heads in the books or or in the cockpit and the flying all be albeit the best flying in the world trending flying i think in nellis out of las vegas and uh northern nevada the flying was just as difficult and the the stress level was just as high now i alluded to the one instance out there that that i i consider probably the the peak of my training career uh we had been in we have been in academics looking at uh soviet equipment soviet aircraft mig-21s mig-17s 19s that kind of thing in depth what do they do what are they good at what are they bad at what are their strengths and weaknesses and so on and so forth and uh you know it was a it was it was a good academic program well the the boss called us all in the class called us all in on the one late thursday afternoon i think it was we were all bitching and moaning because we got a long day and we wanted to go out and have a beer and nevertheless we sat down in the auditorium and this guy he was the operations officer of the the weapon school he uh he got up on the stage major larry keith was his name and he had a picture behind him of a big 21 big 17. and he said gentlemen he said for the past week you've been studying the capabilities of these aircraft you've been uh you've been involved in what they do and how they do it and how well they do it and we're all sitting there saying oh yeah okay come on we'd like a beer it's nice nice time to go to the bar yeah one of those and he paused a little bit and he said starting tomorrow you will fly against these airplanes that must have been a shock it was a shock jaws hit the floor the bitching ceased because none of us had any idea how this could come about why it was coming about what the what the deal was it turned out that our class thanks to the efforts of major keith and those guys our class was included in a department of defense program called have idea and the have idea program was the exploitation of soviet aircraft it started out with mig-21 mig-17 and moved on to 23s later on and the uh the classification level was open your mouth yeah you're out of here you know that kind of thing it was declassified i i hastily pointed out in 2006 so i can talk about it now but in essence what it was was an opportunity for us during our tactical training to fly dacm against mig-21s mig-17s and glean all the information that you could out of that kind of activity and we started right off with it it was great we would go out we would brief a mission up to the tactical ranges up north of north of las vegas we'd head on up there and at some point one of them would jump us or two of them to jump us and we just tie it up standard nellis rules you you could do pretty much whatever you needed to do in the air and and we had some great great missions against the migs we thought about this of course we didn't have a chance to well we briefed them but we briefed them over the phone and we wondered who were flying these things yeah who were flying these airplanes and it turned out that they were all uh air force navy marine fighter pilots that had been secretly recruited they came to nellis every morning uh every morning they'd climb on a 727 that took off to the north and went up to the famous area 51. and it landed there and all these guys would get out and they'd do their day job flying migs then in the evening they'd climb back on the 727 come back to las vegas and go home well they couldn't talk to their wives about what they were doing they couldn't say anything to anybody but it was the it was the best kept secret i ever saw in the air force i never ever saw a word of it slip out but the training evolved into we had it the best we didn't have any uh sorting limitations we we flew as many as we could during that period of time when they were there i had five or six i think against the migs but the training program evolved into a follow-on program called constant peg where almost all the fighter pilots well enough a lot of them anyway would get one sortie against the mig at some point in the career chance to look at him but uh we were part of the program we had the best of it that was the uh it was the pinnacle of my time in the weapons school no doubt about it and before we wrap up this phantom part of your interview uh how did the actual phantom fare against the migs as we learned it fared better and that this bore itself out uh it was born out in in southeast asia because right at first when we were going north and the migs were up they were kicking our butts pretty good and that's because as i mentioned before basic training we didn't have any dissimilar we were all f4 against f4 we were used to an airplane that performed the same way ours did but the first guys to go up early guys to go up against the migs discovered that they turned better uh they they they did a lot of things that the the phantom was not taking advantage of because we hadn't trained for it yeah the dissimilar idea that came out of this and that also went with the migs is the fact we started realizing that you used your power and you're vertical maneuvering and you could beat this guy and you could beat him badly uh and and and and we started doing that during the latter parts of the war because uh because we had been trained to do that our pilots had been trained and dare i say it our pilots were better of course of course so how many hours did you get on the phantom stage i got 2 200 hours on the phantom in in 12 years wow and you know the airline pilots watching this will say that's not very much but when you think about it at about an hour a time average pretty impressive that's a lot of that's a lot of flying [Music] you

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Length: 33min 45sec (2025 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021