How a Navy Tomcat Shot Down an Air Force Phantom During a Training Exercise

first impressions matter a lot when you're the new guy in a fighter squadron and by many accounts lieutenant junior great timothy dorsey did not make a very good one it was the summer of 1987 the uss saratoga was on deployment to the mediterranean and when lieutenant j.g dorsey joined them the ship was in port in palma de majorca the squadron had what's called an admin which is a hospitality suite in town and lieutenant j.g dorsey showed up and announced that his call sign was smoke and in response the senior aviator said no it's not now a few weeks after that port call the ship was at sea in the mediterranean off the coast of sardinia and participating in an exercise called display determination as part of the exercise dorsey was scheduled to fly on the wing of a senior pilot and the skipper in his back seat and dorsey had a senior real lieutenant commander whose call sign was dutch in his back seat now during the startup the skipper's airplane went down and so over base freak they told dorsey that he was going to launch as a solo they were scheduled to do a 2v2 against air force f-16s as part of display determination while they were sitting behind the cat ready to launch they were told by the strike controller to go up purple which is the encrypted frequency and when they did that they were given the instructions that their mission had changed and they should expect a different vector off the cat so they launched uneventfully went up strike and got a vector to head to the north to intercept an inbound raider now meanwhile this inbound raider was a u.s air force rf4 a reconnaissance version of the phantom that had launched out of aviano air base on the east coast of italy when they got feet wet on the west side of italy they hit a kc-135 and were scheduled to get 10 000 pounds of gas which would allow them to complete the mission their call sign was vodka 51 in accordance with the exercise so dorsey and dutch got the vector and they wind up joining on the wing of the rf4 as he's getting his gas from the kc-135 the weapon system officer in the back of the r4 looks over his left shoulder and sees the tomcat and reports it to the pilot there are four completes the tanking evolution backs away from the tanker and starts its simulated attack profile on the saratoga dorsey and dutch fall in trail they are behind the airplane for 15 minutes as it does its descent on the simulated attack profile towards the ship along the way dorsey's trying to lock up the phantom using his pilot acquisition modes and a lock keeps breaking partly because the rf4 is equipped with a anti-jamming pod that breaks a lock and also because they're shooting chaff out of their chaff dispenser and that's breaking the lock in fact dorsey notes to dutch that he can see the chaff coming out of the chaff bucket and dutch says yeah he probably doesn't want you to lock him up so dorsey says that's fine i don't need to lock him up i can use the sidewinder without a radar lock so along the way the tomcat crew asks for weapon status and the strike controller says red and free at that point dorsey asks rio jesus they want me to shoot him and the rio says yeah shoot him now watch this tcs slash heads-up display footage and listen to the exchange of communications both over the radio and between the cockpits [Music] there he goes one zero one strike one singularity all right let's go to the training aids as you could see and here as the rf4 starts its attack profile on the carrier in accordance with the exercise dorsey says there he goes at that point dutch the rio says simulated fox 2 simulated fox 2. so you can see on the hud the x over the sidewinder sw at the bottom of the hud sidewinder goes away which means dorsey has brought master arm on now if dutch was looking at his tid in the back seat he would have seen the sidewinder acronym at the bottom right hand corner of the tid would have glowed at that point now that's kind of a subtle thing and you have to actually be looking at it to see that so he probably wasn't looking down at his tid he was probably looking over the pilot's shoulder at the rf4 so he probably missed that you can hear that after dutch says simulated fox 2 dorsey comments over the intercom it didn't go meaning he pulled the trigger and the sidewinder didn't fire it had a rocket motor failure so at that point dutch is sort of thinking what what do you mean it didn't go but it happens super quick as you heard so what dorsey does is actually kind of tactically astute he pushes the button on the weapon select when it's on sidewinder if you push the button down it'll jump the selected station from one two eight and that's what he does tries to shoot it station one doesn't fire so he station steps to station eight and again he says it didn't go a second time as he pulls the trigger and now the sidewinder fires off of station eight short missile time of flight in fact what you see there is he gets a break x during missile time of flight which means he's inside of 2500 feet as the missile comes off so we shot that sound water at minimum range and it hits the rf4 and the r4 explodes at that point you don't hear it on the hud tape but now dutch is like wtf and he's basically losing it on dorsey meanwhile the rf4 is in a negative two and a half g dive because the tail is blown off and they eject at 550 knots almost out of the envelope they descend into the ocean only five miles away from saratoga dutch comes up on the radio says mayday mayday we have splashed the fox 4. so the ship launches its rescue helicopter an h3 and within 45 minutes they have the downed air force crew aboard saratoga so they take that crew to sickbay to give them a cursory look in terms of their well-being they've sustained some bruises but otherwise it looks like they're okay while they're in sick bay they get them out of their wet flight suits and they issue them some brand new navy khakis so they kind of look like tech reps now because they don't have any rank insignia and they're in these spanking new khaki uniforms and then they take them down to wardroom one for a meal and some ice cream a luxury that many air force guys don't have at their bases so the captain of the ship captain david frost comes down to the wardroom and asks them do you know why your airplane came apart and the pilot whose name is mike ross he's a captain guesses that they had a midair with the tomcat like did the tomcat hit us and the captain says no we shot you down and this makes no sense at first to the crew and so the captain has to repeat it twice three times yes we shot you down the pilot's like i thought we were on the same side and the captain says yeah usually we are but apparently today we weren't the wizzo is not cool with it and he actually has to be restrained because he wants to go find the pilot that shot him down dorsey and dutch have recovered aboard the ship and the maintenance crew see that they're missing a sidewinder on station 8 and there's actually a scorch mark on the weapons rail where the missile fired now the first word that they'd gotten was that the airplane that dorsey was flying had gone down so when he traps and he's missing a missile they start to piece it together and about the time the airplane shuts down the skipper comes out from the ready room and is in the catwalk and he asks one of the maintainers what's going on and the guy points to the missing sidewinder now this skipper is starting to piece it together and obviously he's not happy so in the ready room they're waiting for dorsey to show up and the way it was related to me by a guy who was there is dorsey walks in kind of like john wayne apparently unaware of the dire consequences of what he's done so the air force guys are kept away from the vf74 ready room until they go back to aviano the next day they're given some ships swag coffee mugs patches and sent on their way so as a consequence of this shoot down dorsey goes to what's called a phenab which is an acronym for field naval aviators evaluation board and at this phenab dorsey is completely unrepentant he very much believes that he is the victim and that everything he did was appropriate based on the information he had what becomes obvious from the investigation is from the moment the skipper's airplane went down and dorsey was told he was going to launch solo and he was kicked up the purple frequency for different tasking than the 2v2 dissimilar air combat training he was going to do against the f-16s is he thought that he was now no longer part of the exercise but in a real world scenario and meanwhile his rio believed that he understood that they were still operating within the confines of this exercise display determination the other things that dorsey brought up during his phenab was that while he was in the f-14 training squad in the rag during the advance phase he received a failing grade on a simulator because he did not act decisively enough after he was given a red and free weapon status and he was told by the instructor during that simulator that red and free in the real world means one thing you need to commit weapons so when he was told as they were trailing the rf4 from 4 000 feet for 15 minutes the weapon status was red and free not simulated red and free which would have been the more appropriate call under the auspices of an exercise he assumed that they were operating now under real world conditions and this rf4 was hostile and so as soon as he made that move that hostile move and as rio said simulated fox 2 which he obviously didn't hear or didn't decipher the simulated part he pulled the trigger and the station stepped to station 8 and committed a sidewinder and shot down the r4 now the other thing that dorsey used as a mitigator was the fact that the intel officers had briefed over the ship's tv before a mission brief a few days prior that there was a potential threat of rogue actors hijacking military airplanes and using them as kamikazes so he kept that in his mind and he figured that's what this is so whatever his mindset was the main thing that the board had trouble with was the fact that he had actually joined on the wing of this rf4 plugged into a tanker so if you have this hijacker terrorist thing in your head do you also believe that the hijackers were still enough to tank from an air force tanker and then fly this kamikaze profile so they didn't buy his logic and as a result of this board the finding was that he could keep his wings but he was never going to fly a navy jet again now the first endorsement of this mishap investigation kind of sided with dorsey to a degree and it blamed the f-14 training squadron for the training they gave him and the absence of context they left him with and it also blamed the squadron for hanging him out in a way where he was not prepared for this situation now the endorsements above the airwing absolutely unflinchingly blame dorsey let me read you some of their findings so it says the destruction of the united states air force rfc was not the result of an accident but the consequence of a deliberate act his subsequent reaction demonstrated an absolute disregard of the known facts and circumstances so they're talking about the fact he was unrepentant in the face of all of the evidence it goes on to say he failed to utilize the decision-making process taught in replacement training and reacted in a purely mechanical manner the performance of lieutenant junior grade timothy w dorsey raises substantial doubt as to his capacity for sound judgment now that was the endorsement of the battle group commander who happened to be admiral borda emma borta as you may know went on to be the chief of naval operations and had a tragic end to his time in that job he committed suicide in the front yard of his quarters at the navy yard in washington d.c the endorsement of sixth fleet emma moranville above the battle group commander was similar to admiral borders which says we necessarily rely on the self-discipline and judgment of pilots to prevent such incidents nothing in my opinion can mitigate lieutenant dorsey's basic error in judgment so dorsey wants to fight this and he demands to be sent off the ship and the squadron and kag and everybody else have no problem with that so they send him back stateside and he gets to airland where he's now temporary active duty and he retains counsel and he tries to fight this phenab recommendation ultimately it doesn't work so in time he winds up switching from pilot to intelligence in the meantime he winds up getting a law degree on the navy's dime somehow so eventually he gets out of the navy but stays in the reserves as an intelligence officer he's working as a lawyer in his civilian capacity now turns out he's really good as an intelligence officer so fast forward 25 years it's now 2012. he's done so well as a reserve intelligence officer that he's nominated to make one star admiral now flag nominations have to go to congress for approval one former air force rf4 pilot named mike ross hears that dorsey is up for one star and he can't believe it his assumption was that dorsey was thrown out of the navy he hasn't talked to him hasn't heard from him in the 25 year sense and so he's not okay with what is happening here further captain ross has suffered a lifetime of pain he's had 32 back surgeries as a result of that ejection so he goes to his congressman and protests this nomination that congressman in turn goes to the congressman who are in charge of approving this nomination and they push back on the navy and actually the white house and say we're not going to let this guy make one store admiral because of this incident back in 1987. so dorsey does not make flag the other element here throughout is dorsey's father at the time of the incident was the commanding officer of the uss america he's also a naval aviator and apparently he also had an accidental shoot down during his career now dorsey the senior went on to be a three-star admiral so they believe the fenab allowing him to keep his wings instead of losing his wings was a function of the fact that his dad was a senior naval aviator ultimately dorsey did get the call center smoke but as is the case with most call signs it wasn't for the reason he wanted all right that'll do it for this episode if you're a first time viewer please ring the bell become a subscriber give me the likes very important comment love the comments and i try to interact as much as i can and if you want to help us take this channel to the next level please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com wardcarroll also my debut novel and channel merchandise is available at the links below so check those out and i look forward to talking to you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 109,736

Rating: 4.9773331 out of 5

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, VF-74, Smoke Dorsey, RF-4 shootdown by F-14, Display Determination, NATO, blue on blue, accidental shootdown, fighter pilot, Top Gun, DCS, USS Saratoga, Admiral Mike Boorda, FNAEB, aircraft carrier, U.S. Navy, military intelligence, military promotion, sidewinder missile, U.S. Air Force, RF-4 Phantom, Aviano Air Base, Italy, Mediterranean Sea

Id: GeGFWq0lGv8

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021