Interview with Jeff Guinn on the F-111 Aardvark

[Music] welcome to aircrew interview I'm Mike and this episode we chat with Jeff Quinn on flying the f-111 aardvark Jeff gives some great technical details personal flying stories and also recounts his time in Desert Storm so if you like what we do here it'll be the patron calm for a slash aircrew interview to help us out for as little as $1 month we're also now a part of the Amazon affiliate program so have you ever seen the links in the description box please click if you're gonna buy because it helps us out and it cost you nothing so please enjoy [Music] my very first exposure to aviation was three years old I got taken up in a Piper Cub on a windy day in the mountains and screamed my lungs out according my mother non-stop well I started pilot training in early 1978 and at that at that time everybody wants you through the same path stored on the t37 for about four months you do instrument basic contact flying solo then instruments aerobatic and formation pretty aggressive formation flying and then we all went to the t-38 which is one of the neatest airplanes every that's not an airplane you get into it's an airplane you put on you wear it like a like a suit it's just that that need anyway extremely high performance airplane even now and just a blast to fly but that got more and in a more aggressive flying certainly faster and more demanding but because the earth the Air Force was training people for any airplane at the time it really didn't specialize a lot like it could have done and towards the end of pilot training they would separate us into two groups and one at one group being a fighter attack or reconnaissance qualified so if you're gonna go to a fighter type airplane or be an instructor pilot after pilot training you had to be a fair qualified and if you if you were a fiower qualified you could ask to fly anything if you weren't at they are qualified you couldn't ask to fly that the fighters etc and so I was fortunate enough to get put into that fighter group and I sort of expected I was going to get an F for probably not an f15 there was only gonna be one coming down to our class and while I did pretty well a guy we called Vaughn boost pump he was clearly number one guy in the class he was going to get he was going at the f-15 and so there were only two or three other guys who if they are qualified and we expected yet F floors and one guy did get an RF four and then these two f-111s came down out of the blue they were nobody said they're available there was no hint of them it had been years since an f1 11 had ever been assigned to anybody out of pilot training and at the time when we went into that airplane when I got that assignment up until that time the Air Force required a thousand hours of fighter time to be in the left seat of the f-111 and there were two ways to get that either you get your thousand hours and an f4 f-105 f100 something like that whatever was flying at the time and then you get assigned to an f1 11 unit or for a few guys they would get assigned to the right seat of the f-111 and be called pilot whiz o--'s now most of the whiz O's weapons system officers they came out of nab school they were the top grads out of nav school they'd go to the right seat of 111 ten percent of them were guys out of pilot training who would fill junior officer pilot required slots in f1 11 units but not actually be the pilot you'd have to look across cockpit at the flight instruments but it had its own you know throttles and a stick and you could tell the guy in the left seat to swing the wings and get the gear down if you really had to you could reach across and get it the cockpit wasn't that big and so but ultimately the Air Force could not effectively man the system with that thousand hour requirement and so they didn't want to do it Arif where corporate Air Force didn't want to do it but I finally said we got to see if we can put people out of UPT and the left seat of this airplane and at the air time that airplane was pretty dangerous in fact it always was a dangerous airplane to fly and very complicated airplane and that's why they wanted all that time and so there are about seven seven of us from three different pilot training bases that went to Cannon another seven that went to Mountain Home is the very first group of guys so ground school I took about two I'm gonna say two or three weeks fighters are not compared to airliners they're not really as complicated we don't have three you know we only have two systems in most cases sometimes only one the basic hydraulics electrics and all that stuff are pretty reasonably simple where things departed for the f-111 it was the obvious thing that the variable-geometry wing which added a lot of a lot to it in terms of complication and performance the terrain-following radar which was unique and the flight controls actually the f-111 pioneered four different types of systems variable geometry wing first operational airplane to have that afterburning fan jet engine before that all afterburning engines were turbo jets the TFR and what was effectively fly-by-wire flight controls now not actually in the sense that like an f-16 really has no physical connection between the stick and the flight controls the f-111 did but when the system was operating normally when the flight control computers were working normally you would move the stick so you moved the stick aft that far and that would tell the flight control computer that you wanted a 2g to G's of load on the airplane and so based on the airplanes sense of air mass speed it would position the elephant's colmillo Vons because they work both in roll and pitch so ailerons and elevators and then position the elephant's to give what the flight control computers think is going to be to G's and then reposition is required to produce to G's so you're really you're telling a flight control computer what to do with this and then it goes out and does it and that's essentially what a fly-by-wire system does whereas a conventional fly of conventional flight control says you're telling the flight controls what you want and then you're modifying the inputs as required to get the response out of the airplane so so that was we're really pioneering for different technologies on the airplane and so that the flight controls were pretty complicated TFR was complicated very demanding system to even check out there's almost like launching a space shuttle so the about three weeks in the ground school and then it followed the basic pattern of almost pilot training and went on did you know contact members or just kind of fly the airplane around get used to it demonstrate something handling qualities of the airplane I remember one of my early sorties big thing about the airplane as wing sweep completely manual a little trombone handle that was under the left window sill of the airplane and it tucked up like this and you reach your hand up pull it down and it released it from it's geared toothed rack so you could move it forward back and then you just did whatever just like a trombone you just moved it to wherever you thought it need to be there was a wing sweep indicator up there that would tell you one telltale tell you where you're positioned the handle and then the needle the show where the where the wing sweep was in relation to that but it was completely manual and and we positioned the wings based on kind of what you were going to do with the airplane if I have a if I'm a low-level and I'm going 580 knots and I don't have any turns coming up and I'm just really just scooting along well I'm gonna have the wings back at 60 72 degrees mostly day low-level maneuvering you'd been doing tactical formation where we could do it so I won't go any big details but we could keep a formation line abreast based on the maneuvers that lead was doing in order to provide geometry for to to be in position well that requires a lot more maneuvering so in that case would probably be 35 to 54 degrees and if a turns coming up you know it turns coming up then the wings had come forward because what we're doing it the airplane does we're managing angle of attack and the real reason for a sweep for sweep wings is to manage drag and as the wings get further aft the flow airflow hits the wing and it spills off to the side and so in the transonic region where drag really builds up we would have less drag substantially less drag than an F for going the same speed even though the f4 is a much smaller airplane and in fact where the wings get aft enough that the f-111 wing is not a supersonic wing because even at supersonic speeds the effective airflow over the wing is always subsonic yeah yeah so it's really it's really a function of trigonometry so that's that's why the the drag is so control that and we didn't go fast cuz we had a lot of power we didn't certainly not the the f-111 II I think had 18,000 pounds normal trim full afterburner per engine so we're taking a take off for 36,000 pounds of thrust and training lates it's an 80,000 pound airplane and we were like point four to one so that's not a lot we weren't getting to high speed because we had a lot of power we got to high speed because we could control the drag and ultimately and we wouldn't get up there very fast and those who used afterburner but that's how we could do four hundred and eighty five hundred and fifty knots on the deck and cold power was because we had a lot of it just we didn't know we had very little drag one of the demonstrations why'd you get slow get about 300 knots or so get the wings back to 72 and roll the plane upside down and then just hold level flight now having done that roll it right side up again wouldn't do it you take the stick all the way to one side and the airplane would just ever ever so slowly roll well let's go stood with the wings back with wings forward of 54 degrees 52 54 there were spoilers on each wing that would go up to spoil lift in the down going wing when you're going into a turn in addition to the elephant's doing this or whatever you see a lot of pictures you see if one eleventh you'll see the tailplane is well that's but when the wings all the way aft the spoilers are locked out because they're not doing any good and the only thing you have is role surfaces are very close to the center of the airplane so they don't have a lot of leverage and on top of that the airplane since it's a high angle of attack and upside down you have your big old engines back here and you're trying to roll those engines trying to lift them as you're turning the airplane airplane just didn't have enough roll Authority available under the circumstances to do it you really had to get in some rudder relax it or get off the G that's the other thing I do just unload the airplane that start go down and then it would come out and where this comes into play is if you've got slow and the airplane because it was so heavily winged loaded that you could be doing 600 knots and you start maneuvering the airplane and you the airplane would lose 50 knots a second so two seconds you're down to five hundred four seconds you're down to four hundred six seconds you're down to three hundred knots of doing this and if you're not paying attention what will happen is you'll be on the Sam range at red flag and you're getting lit up so you start maneuvering to to break the Sam locks and you're slowing down and you don't notice it and you come up to a mountain and as we our Ridge crossing day time was typically you'd pull to clear the Ridge and as you're approaching the top of the ridge you'd roll upside down to use the pot of a positive G to keep your gap over the ridge as small as possible because if you ballooned over the ridge we call that the oven thanks you very much maneuver because back at the day the only missiles that were effective against us were ir missiles radar missiles couldn't pick us out of the in fact radars couldn't pick us out of ground clutter at all that was before pulse doppler radar z' so to avoid the Ivan thank you very much maneuver roll upside-down and pull and then roll out you see where I'm going with this that crew never came out of it and upside down right in the ground because they forgot that this airplane will kill you you know you do it during the day and it's all well and good you see it it was and it would take you down to 200 feet and it would had rides between two hundred feet in a thousand feet and ride qualities that would be soft medium and hard the hard ride would take you to an obstacle up until the point where it required 4 G's of pull to clear it and zero G's would to stop the climate would never command less you know more downward than zero G's so it was pretty aggressive and what a lot of guys would do is they'd leave it on the medium ride to get a more gradual pull because what you didn't want to balloon over a ridge we didn't want to said be a medium approach the top of the climb could go too hard get the zero-g push it over and then back down the other side so during the day it was okay they had ham flight a lot lower than then the airplane can but at night that was a different deal and I never got used to it the very one of the first missions I had done a Canada New Mexico we're scooting along I think it's at 400 feet and I think oh my God we're there's an airplane out there we're going to hit it low on an airplane there's a car on a road on a ridgeline above us that's sort of thing dude you don't get used to and then then the other thing about the TF is now talking back to the adaptive flight controls there was a low-level route we had where it is kind of up on high terrain goes over a mountain and then comes down very very steep down on about four or five thousand six thousand feet until it reaches a valley floor going out the other side so we'd lose some airspeed going up and then come over the top maybe at 460 knots and then the airplane and start picking up airspeed going down so now the airplane is going from Florida faster and from air this thinner thicker and the flight control gains couldn't keep up with the and their analog flight control computers they couldn't keep up with it so they're putting in stab inputs to control pitch and they're always too much because they're controlling for an air mass it's five six seconds ago and it's not the one they're in now or speed they're going now so it's so be oh it's too much this way too much the other way too much this and you would be getting bang bang bang I mean it was seriously 4G zero G's 4G sergey's just getting hammered well it was kind of uncomfortable you get used to it after a while I bet you go okay I know here's the part of this ride where we work it's exciting anyway so I'm back to what the training was the day low level then the night low level range work to practice weapons delivery aerial refueling and that took about four months all done until they're fully ready to go Jim politic and ESET uh we did well in red flag we did I flew in a special program I think I can probably talk about I was in fighter weapons school we flew against some aircraft that perhaps might have been maybe Soviet types maybe Ivan for legal reasons they weren't but they might have been you screwed up your eyes a lot and the the lesson we learned was the the really the only game in town in the f-111 was if somebody jumped what do they teach you in fighter weapons or fighter leading training you know for us hair on fire lieutenants that were coming out of that so your red flag is at fifteen comes at you and what you want to do is turn and put some angles on as if because an f-15 couple nine GS and and if we're pulling more than about three or four we're slowing down in a big hurry so all you're doing is reducing the amount of time it's going to take for him to get into a solution to kill you that's all so the only thing we could do was Oh with the actually thing you don't weren't taught to do in basic fighter maneuvering you see a guy coming in on you want to put your tail on because now if you've picked them up say ten twelve thousand feet out and you're going co speed which yet and some of the red flag ranges were subsonic that means you're super you can't go faster the Maquis can't either so he's not catching up to you well if you stagnate him more than about eight or nine thousand feet out no missile he has has enough energy to catch you it can't cover that distance and still have propellant left when it shows up if it doesn't have any overtaking the V sub C as they call it a zero well then you go to the supersonic regime see ya there just light him up gone because we do I think the fastest I saw on the deck at red flag was nine hundred and thirty knots I got to have red flags lieutenant and one of the missions we had had was the Navy Navy was there a six is a seven-day force yeah so they had a Navy guy running the mission and his plan you're attacking an airfield complex if you see if I can think backwards here okay so this is Southwest part of their Nellis ranges and you have place called dreamland which is area 51 we couldn't go on that so would be coming in from here from the east Nellis is down here and his plan was we'd kind of work our way through just north of dreamland because we couldn't have to worry about enemy air coming from that side and then we'd go to attack this airfield complex now the roll them often the mission for the f-111 this scenario was suppression of enemy air defenses we were to go in and knock out the triple-a the SAM sites and all that stuff's that the other granite that the more vulnerable ground attack airplanes the slower ones had less to deal with so his idea was well first we gonna compress tio T's because we want to get as many airplanes through in the shortest possible time and because you guys unless 111 you're gonna do suppression and everybody net the air defense doesn't make do any good to show up last you got to show up first no by the way your in-flight Samer we are well typically if you know that scenario we'd enter from further north and kind of come around because we're going so much faster than anybody else that well that's what this Navy guy wanted and that's what he got so we were going through just north of dreamland it was about time we left lat to get there first all basically the same black line there's a bad time we get north of dreamland we start catching up these airplanes and they are like they're hung from the sky by strings the flight code the flight lead on that mission he the leader of the two of us he was flying his last red flag is retiring as a base vice Wing Commander and he told me during the flight brief that when we hit the supersonic line I'm gonna go full afterburner and whether you can hang on or not I really don't care okay I'm just going fully beat I'm going as fast as I can for as long as I can got it yes sir got it so now if we hit the we hit the supersonic line ready now boom and so here we go and way up in front and now the airplanes really going to as we're as we're passing by and then up front there's a couple of ei sixes that are laying down some Tron's to kind of protect the package behind them and they get jumped by some red air and they go into and they're at about 500 feet they go into a defensive turn like this because what they're trying to do is to you know I say yeah they would go to the right the defensive turn to the right and what they're trying to do is to get if the enemy air guy he's got to worry about defending against the other dude alright so now there this is kind of defensive tack formation that you'd go to make the other guys break off so he's goes in with a turn so he's about 90 degrees to me now his speed relative me is he's irrelevant you know I'm going this way he's not going this way at all he's going that way and I looked at him like well geez I'm gonna be the guy on the right he's at 500 feet he's not going down I don't know where he's gonna I know what he's gonna do with his altitude but I know he's not going down that's not on so I'm gonna go underneath him second lieutenant what can you say so I went underneath him as he's like this and I'm down it now about 50 or 100 feet going like a bullet because weird that mission were carrying mark 84 so that was slick weapons we could carry those supersonic so now we're 1.1 1.2 just haulin ass and would go right under him and off and we'd do the rest of our mission come back so that's where we did dact was primarily red flag we learned that and that's really at that time it was kind of a dumb thing for us to be doing because our primary mission was night night bad weather nobody's doing the a CT then and I will probably talk a few times about some of the institutional negligence of the Air Force they did one night red flag ever as far as I know at least during that era and that happened to be when I was there so we did a night red flag and it failed to glorify air to air in the Air Force at the time was all about glorifying air-to-air well if it's not glorifying air-to-air we're not gonna do it right we don't we don't care about the rest of the stuff we don't care really care about the 111 what we care about is air-to-air well guess what we have a whole weapon system designed for environment that the Air Force decided not to realistically trained in which had payback later on or could have easily I mean there was some luck that kept it but but we were training for an environment which we were certainly almost certainly never going to get employed in so yeah how long you spend that kind I was only there about a year and a half I write about the 14 month point I was taking some tests for my checkride and examiner came to say that personnel people want to talk to you like I'm a lieutenant what do they want to talk to me I meant seriously I'm a lieutenant who wants talk to me well there was a personnel center saying hey would you like to go to upper hayford England I wasn't married time so I yet the only person I had to ask was myself and I looked around me at Clovis oh so far from heaven I was so close to Texas New Mexico if you know what I'm saying and it gave that about a nano seconds worth of thought and said yep I'm your man so I showed up in February to Clovis New Mexico I mean to upper Heyford in February of 1981 back when there were only three TV stations no internet telephone to the States was prohibitively expensive you'd send me yeah well yeah it wasn't me you could call but it was gonna be expensive or you could arrange it arranges that they'd give us a line but you have to make reservations for that letters took two weeks round-trip brilli that life existed I know I know you're saying no way why do people even want to live but somehow he did and so I showed up there as a lieutenant but I was already mission ready up until then the lieutenant's they got were fresh out of the replacement training unit at upper it Mountain home so they really didn't know what to do with me at first it's like he might neither fish nor fowl I came right into an exercise and then they they put me in the mission planning cell at first and they go well wait a minute what are we putting a guy in a mission planning selfie he's already been to red flag we haven't been a red flag so I'm pretty quickly went to flying in here it's worth talking about a difference between flying in the US and flying in Europe in the US was very canned you would get a low-level route you grabbable you're assigned to this route they'd already played pre-plan you're gonna fly the route this is your range time if there was a tanker available you're going to this tanker at this track at this time and then you will come back and do some bounces here or maybe Boise or Twin Falls we you know we go there civilian airports we can use them it's a very canned get to Europe you want to boil down to was we want the airplane back in two and a half hours in a reusable condition and no phone calls now we have some rules here you certain low fly areas you can use you can only go down to 250 feet in some of these areas you know so there were some low fly rules you can't go blundering through civil airspace without talking to the right controls so there were some rules but basically day to day you showed up spread up maps picked a target did the planning for the mission whatever you know whether you had two or four airplanes or was just yourself so you do the mission planning all from scratch and then you'd go out there and one time out of three of the weather it sucked because England or even more so Scotland what's that's where we did most most of our flying and well if the weather sucked where you wanted to go well I'll just go find a range somewhere and so we basically every mission we would make up from scratch and then we'd be flexible so you'd never really know where the heck you know you might end up and if we heard there was a tanker as an opportune time current and or our refuelling track eight we'd pop up and say hey we got a flight at two you have you know can you take and we just sometimes the drive hookups you take a couple thousand pounds we do opportunity tanking to keep our squares filled there so it's much more environment there which was far better than in those days we probably flew between about twenty-five and thirty-five hours a month which doesn't sound like very much but in an airplane like the 111 the each day you flew is really demanding if your flower flying a four ship and we didn't have any computer to help us at this point you are planning a mission for four airplanes which means you're picking a target or a specific target you're going to attack from four different directions with compressed EO T's and escape manoeuvres for weapons effects you're ripping Maps putting the black lines on in the headings in the distances and somebody's cranking the flight plan so you because we had inertial nav z' inertial navigation systems in the airplane but there are analog and some I forgot to mention the f-111 II used ancient well-worn hand-tooled flying techniques because the avionics were that primitive we had an analog I&S that was just as happy to put on its tennis shoes and run away to Philadelphia as anything it wasn't like the f-111 F which had digital and paved tack and all that stuff it was an entirely different operation so we're doing all this stuff by hand well you we had to show up five hours before takeoff to get all that stuff done in order to get the briefing done when you get the flight briefings going to take a while because it's complicated mission to get out to the airplane and fly two and a half hour mission and get back in debrief it now you're talking a 10-hour day one flight 10 hour day two and a half hour flight ten hours gone and we all had our separate ground duties you know if somebody might be a scheduler or in the weapons tactics division or the radar radar film division you know whatever y'all you had additional dudes you had to do and so and we had a 12-hour day we were not allowed your you had to get out of the squadron no later than 12 hours before your showtime on a flying day so really we can only fly about mostly about three times a week if you're an instructor pilot you'd be on as I was I became instructor pilot pretty early to ship flight lead right at the first opportunity for ship flight lead to the first opportunity and then instructor pilot I was instructor pilot before I penned on captain which is pretty fast and so the instructor pilots and for ship flight leads they'd be trying to get you try and get on the schedule all the time because just have very many and so I there I think there was one month where I flew 50 hours and almost killed me I mean it was it was seriously exhausting so how long I was and I was in the UK for four years from March of 81 in March of 84 and then I got out of the Air Force actually for a couple years I went to work with a friend of mine who started his own electrical engineering company and that was all well and good did some interesting stuff there but ultimately I missed not only the flying but the people I really missed I really missed the people that in the Air Force yeah so in 1984 there was a big hiring wave going on in the airlines and there's one guy swimming against that current against that wave trying to get back in so I'm that one guy you know recruiters going I walk in recruiting offices hey I'm a you know I was Air Force by a couple till a couple years ago how do I get back in any guys look at me like seriously I did get a recommend letter recommendation from a colonel I knew well and they said okay you're you're back in so I went up so after a lot of less than two and a half years I was back up in Mountain Home Idaho and they put me right back into the left seat of the f-111 as an instructor pilot had to go through recurrency training but I started off as an IP teaching new guys in the 111 and I did that for about a 80 so I got there in 86 and [Music] early 87 they sent me to fighter what they asked me if I want to go you want to go to fight federal weapon school and fighter weapons school happened to be at Mountain home mostly it's at Nellis but for our airplane cos here we had so much range we could have the school at Mountain home and do all the stuff we had to do in the ranges down at red fly again come back we do you know I don't think we needed tanker for that so I did fighter weapons school and then I had to be on base minimum of two years so in so two years so June of 1988 I headed back to Upper Hayford and I was there from June of 88 to 92 and went back to the same squadron I'd been in before the 79th Fighter Squadron which for reasons I can't begin to fathom has more camaraderie we know the other squadrons I've been in to does regular reunions guys don't really keep in touch with each other but that squadron had just a huge amount of camaraderie both times I was there so it was really a lot of fun so I came back to Upper hayford the second time and it was pretty much just an extension of the first I dunno I was doing higher-level jobs cuz I was more senior in rank than I'd been before but basically for shift light lead flight its director how it's done what made that tour that time most memorable is Saddam we one of the things we we had issues with almost all the ranges in England were over water ranges and they're very artificial but to overcome that artificiality we would we would deploy to Angela Turkey once a year for three weeks and Konya range is an overland range so we would do our low levels to Konya and then operate over level low low over an overland range and get some real more realistic training and it was then one of our deployments there we just happened to be a ninja like when Saddam invaded Kuwait just for there we were the only forces in the region just there by accident the next day as seen on CNN was video of our airplanes taxiing for takeoff implying but not quite saying we had deployed overnight from without actually saying it but that was really the very first video that came out of any American forces over there were our f1 Elevens taxing it ends early and they kept us there for our normal rotation and then the next squadron 77th I think came in and replaced us and then I was an instructor they have a lot of us around so they kept I stayed another two weeks of the 77th and then I came back home and then I think that 55th and then another squadron rotated in and they had to decide what to do now we're getting into October issue I think and I don't know why they made this decision or why they picked us but they said 79th deployed it in Zurich and you were there until it's over however it ends you're there until it's done perhaps the reason they picked us is that for reasons I don't know why the 79th had four fighter weapons school grads the other squadrons laid one each and also now I got again I have no idea if this would've had any bearing it or not I was the highest time pilot on the base at the time so I had more hours in the airplane I think perhaps got a higher experience level in the other two squadrons or the Wing Commander just did that patch these guys I have no idea so we went down and our goal we got down in October and so what we had to do at that point is work up to presume combat operations and and so we started out by pairing up crews so we flew exclusively with another guy the guy flew with was Clyde called him John frame probably the best one of the best Wizards in the squadron really really good so they paired me up with Clyde and well you know ed we all got paired up so we all flew exclusive together because the night low-level regime you really got to kind of be synched up with the other guy if you're doing it for real my first night on preflighting the airplane and remember I mentioned earlier about the TFRs being very complex to check and if you've got once it's wrong or a sequence a little bit wrong it just wouldn't work then you go back and redo it because now you don't know if it's not working because it's new to you or it's busted well of course then I'm not ashamed to admit it I was I was pretty much paying like a well hit 3-wood in a tile shower and so that it failed three times in a row and finally I call maintenance and I say I think this thing is gonna end up and I think I knew what it was we had the neural reference was the primary reference that's inertial platform then we had an aux reference gyro that lived over here just behind just in front of the intake on that side of the left side of the airplane and if it went bad then it there was no check against the inertial platform to see whether the vector it was getting was good and so sure enough it was the aux flight well there was an amplifier than a gyro there's a panel with like 800 must be 800 fasteners on it so they got their speed wrenches on again of these fasteners off as fast as they can I'm sitting there with one engine running they get the panel off they do the easy thing to pull a on fire out put it back in I do the checks again fails checks okay amplifier comes out aux gyro comes out Fox driver goes in amplifier goes in it works yay but time doing what it does had gone right on and we were reaching our no later than takeoff time and that was a time that where we could take off go as fast as we could without burning too much fuel and catch up to the rest of the package in such a way to make our t ot so I'm leading us leading a four-ship leading a flight of four into this target area so I had to be the first my t ot was first one up now we're running up close against the no later than takeoff time and it got so close that I had the armourers pull all of our weapon ordinarily there's a last chance out right next to the runway so even as the maintenance guys are buttoning the thing up had the armourers pull all up safing pins off the weapons and then as soon as that panel was done I ran up the right engine which was still running pull the chocks and then that did a bunch of things you don't ever do I started the other engine on the roll you never single-engine taxing f-111 started the other engine on the roll and the only way we're about it was a pretty long taxi we're from where the airplanes were parked up to the runway our taxi speed limit was 30 knots I was doing 75 because I had to get down that drag to get to the runway to get off cuz I'm on the last plane everybody else is you know it's thundering heard boy over the horizon and told tower just you know give us a green light tell us the rock stomping we can't stop otherwise you're not gonna make it so slam on the brakes make the corner make the corner of green light but off we go so one of the first things that happens is we almost hit a tanker remember I said things were kind of chaotic and screwed up we're not going to like seven or eight thousand feet and these tanker goes right over our head like where the hell did that come he's so close to concede of the the Director position director lights underneath it and then so now we're climbing out starting to catch up and I notice that the standby attitude indicator is starting to tilt a little bit and that could be because the standby dad stood indicators drifting or that oxlike reference gyro which gives the attitude for that thing is going to hell again well there's a way to check that and that is if you if you move the switch from IRS to aux if it nails that gyro back up again then you know it's the problem with that stupid thing you can just wreak agent otherwise if it's not it's your ox references going bad again we just have to turn around go home okay a little bit of backstory here the 111 had a chaff and flare switch that was in front of the throttles and it was kind of a long run wasn't a very big Reese which about that big and it was weighed down in front of the throttle so it was kind of a reach forward for chaff back for back for flare back for chaff forward for chaff and flare and some maintenance guy noticed because we were complaining about this some maintenance guy noticed hey we have these tubes that we take oil out of the engines after each flight to do an analyze them see if the OFC if the oil if there's anything in the oil it shouldn't be there well a tube fit perfect interference fit right over the switch so he looks guys well geez if I cut that tube and slip that thing over the switch then they can reach it brilliant idea okay we're talking guys here and if two inches good three inches is better and six inches and you're on your way so pretty soon these panels started spouting these plastic tubes were like this fricking long well we so I'm reaching forward to move this switch and unbeknownst to me because I'm wearing a glove I've actually caught this plastic tube which doesn't have any friction against my glove and because the lever arm is so long it doesn't have any force and as I'm reaching for it I push that switch forward and we punch off a flare flares that we were not allowed to use in training because they might burn up the airplane or some step we weren't allowed to use them we had never trained with him I'd never dropped a flare in my life I had no idea what it would look like or feel like well if flare comes out of a channel right here this little you can see the little faired shape right there there's a channel just to the right of the each inch and right rights of the right engine left the left engine and it would punch a flare out and the goal of the flare is to be a shiny thing for a heat-seeking missile and so the missile sees shiny thing and follows it well in order to be shinier than the engine it has to it has to light up right here right next to the engine to swamp the fire sensor field of view and then pull away well it has to be hot it's big thermal shock it's got to be close to the airplane well what happens when you punch one of these things off is the airplane gets a right good thump because it's happening right under the horizontal stabilizer that shockwave hits it and really jolts the airplane and the other thing that happens is lights of sky up like there's no freaking tomorrow right it is our official sunrise well go 1:11 on occasion woodshed turbine blades and the turbine blades are right about here and there's an off side all tanked that is between the engines and invariably if it said turbine blades those turbine blades to go through the saddle tank and so the first thing we get is a fire light which is agent discharge and discharge switch arm fire push button to press that was a bold face for an engine fire and it was really a three-step bold face because his agent destruct switch arm fire pushed out but in the past thousand one thousand handle squeeze and pull because the airplane was turning into a roman candle never survived that ever well one of them survived long enough to make it to a runway and then burn up on the runway so skylights a big thump in the airplane and my rights here and were like we're okay which engine is that which engine just blew up and we're sitting there like five minutes just dumb and fine I don't think we'd ever figured out except my Whizzer we'd still be thinking about except the Wizzle notice that our flare somehow you know it's Clyde notice of the flare counter went down one says aw we just punched off the flare because of that thing they put on there because two inches is good six inches is way better so that was okay now we're we haven't even caught up with the guys yet know how we think we've blown up an engine and then we come up to a line of thunderstorms and we start getting saying almost fire like I've never seen before so Lee's about the size of tennis balls would form on the pitot tube and slowly roll up the radome up the nose the airplane right up to the gunsight on my side there was I didn't have one and would reach where the corner gun side got really close to the glass you could roll really slowly up and go right through the glass into that frame gone as soon as it did that and everyone rolled up I mean when there was lightning I mean could hear the Sturm and Drang the just vogner going on so lots of atmospheric seas were showing up and then a gentleman who shall remain nameless anybody and my friends who were there will know exactly who I'm talking about David Letterman had a character at the time kakuka Ken so we called this guy kicker ken had already headed south for their target for the Western targets awacs is calling picture clear meaning no enemy here in the vicinity and then the weasels had code word the Magnum they said Magnum they were launching one of their harms and those harms were big frickin Rockets they would go up to 80,000 feet to get loiter time because what would happen oftentimes is a enemy would blink their radars and turn them on try to get a target and go shut down before they could get hit well the harms were smarter than that they they'd launch and if the target blink they'd go up it takes a lot of motor to do that it was light up the sky you to make this happen and so they'd always call Magnum to let anybody in the local area know that is getting ready to happen so AO axe is calling picture clear f/4g calls Magnum launches a rocket and kakuka ken decides he's being jumped by a MIG even though there aren't any and Magnum probably means that that missile that just came off a rail isn't going anywhere near him so he's up at 20,000 feet goes into a hard turn 90 degree Bank turn he's heavy airplane heavy 111 at 20,000 feet carrying eight CBU canisters high drag configure raishin for us and starts coming out of the sky like a grease safe so he goes to full afterburner so he's going this all the way forward on here and catches that tube sticking up punches off a flare which he's never seen before thinks he's been hit calls Mayday Mayday Mayday and punches his stores off stole over turkey so you see he hits the emergency stores jettison button now wait there were very strict limits for that because the airflow around the wings they had they found if you weren't really wings level 250 knots wings all the way forward that what would happen is those doors would back up and they the airflow would cause him to do this and they they try to take off the stabilizer they had it happen with fuel tanks to stabilize just sheared the fuel tanks in half him on film so very Strickland us for using emergency storage and the only reason we can figure out that the airplane wasn't destroyed was that he was pulling hard enough that the the racks actually went between the wing up between the wing and horizontal stabilizer so now he's coming out this guy like this death spiral coming out Scott's bomb turkey or friends and the wizzo had to recover the airplane so he's the first guy home I'm gonna try and wrap this up here pretty soon so we we went to the eastern end of the border with between Syria and Iran if there's ran Iraq and Syria all meet at a point on on the east of the eastern border between Syria and Iraq Iran Syria and Turkey Iraq and Turkey there we go so we started heading south there and now we're done going down because we would step down to stay below the radar now we're in low-level and we do her first week low-level by far the most stressful part of flying in combat was doing actual no joke low level in a route you'd never seen before during the day rugged terrain I mean it was it was operating the thing and that was far more stressful to me shot at it was I wouldn't have thought that it had like fun flying the airplane I'd almost you know three thousand hours in the airplane at this point I've flown TFR before nobody was a big deal so we're going down this valley Clyde's doing the left and break down this air in this value which we can't I can't see I really can't see what's going cease he has a hood that he's looking in because it would drown the cockpit light but he had so he has a hood he's looking in so I can't see what he's showing me I can't really interest taking his word for it I have no idea what's around us can't see and suddenly this light just being the swings around comes right at us and I thought we're dead we've just been shot oh no we're not dead that's just a truck on the road above us that came around a hairpin corner around the ridge that's where you see the light coming around and so this guy's just miners own frickin business driving this truck on this night road and we went by him about a hundred feet below and about fifty or sixty feet to the right at about 600 knots I mean I can't even imagine what that was like because you don't hear it come the airplane going that fast won't Levin going that fast you had no idea you couldn't hear it you know until it was too late and suddenly I mean it's just all hell must be broken loose so we got through delivered our weapons and on the way out we didn't know because Intel people really didn't often give us useful information that our black line was planned right over one of Saddam's nuclear research facilities had no idea there were a lot of guns there but every bullet that comes out of the barrels were red hot and so quad 23 it's you know there may be shooting a tracer every eight something like that is what they have loaded well you're seeing the seven bullets in between that eight you know tracer red red red red a tracer ready and the s60 is a bigger the higher caliber weapons they didn't do traces at all but it's a big shell and you can see so you can see a lot more stuff then then the camera could and there was really a lot of stuff on this place that we've picked to egress on we couldn't go as fast as we wanted to cuz clear desert air you'd go more than men a B you're just like this giant roman candle the honey I think one of the pictures do you put on shows that how long that burner flame is even during the day and so that's not that doesn't work for us at night so we could go min a B and min a B would take us a tune them up to combat specs for the engines not so much change in life more power trade-off there we got about six hundred sixty knots in min a B so we push up min a B well the whole burner plume is contained inside the engine there it gets six sixty and then pull it back to meal power and slowly roll back to 600 so we six sixty six hundred and there and there's just giant curtain of Triple A so the only thing for it because they all can only depress the guns so far and what they did was they tried to interleave the fire like if they depress too far they just shoot each other so the guns are about like this and you picked a dark spot between guns set it down to two hundred feet and went I mean like not three hundred feet away I can still see in my mind four guys working the CSU twenty-three because I can see them from all that muzzle flashes as we go by of course they're there it's all over us so it was very interesting visually it really is not much of a threat because they just could depress the guns to get down where we were and we go home I swear I'm gonna wrap this up soon now we have this giant wall of airplanes coming back to injure look and everybody's doing their check ride best radio calls and oh my god it just swamped you can't be reading back clearances you really can't only have 60 airplanes coming back at once so the radio I think the wrapkin controllers just they just don't under their desks really I'm because it was just fortunately the weather was good I mean when I put some people in the mid if it weather wasn't because I don't see alright so I just put myself the field and looked for a gap and my mind thinking as I'll just keep going out until I see a gap and I'll turn it and put myself on final no other way to do it and I see a gap and I'm it's pretty close to run away and make a dive for it die for the gap roll out on final maybe five six miles out on final in the ILS entire says hey you've got a kc-135 at two miles yeah I'm visual it's like no nothing out there well there was kc-135 God turned his lights on so what I thought was a gap was really a tanker and now I'm thinking now what do you do well one thing you can do is you can break out and go all the way out to the end of the conga line or think mmm the gap wasn't real small I know what I'll do like not about thousand feet I'll just go go to afterburner six degrees of bankers do a six degree bank turn on a short final that'll give me enough room to make them and that was that was my first combat mission [Laughter] so Jeff just moving on a bit so what happened to you in your career after Desert Storm uh well the war ended and they moved us out I think about two weeks later I went back to hayford and the fifty-fifth flying squadron did not have fighter squadron did not have I'd have a Frick guy didn't invite enough ip's and much to my regret they pulled me out of the semi and I thought and put me in the fifty-fifth I mean 50th a great squadron great guys but really my home was a 79 so I spent the last six months at upper Heyford in this 55th and by that time I'm I'm a kind of a senior major and it's time for me to his staff to her so I went to intermediate service school for a year and then did three years the Pentagon which was very interesting learned a lot there did a lot of stuff went some places I wouldn't gone otherwise at the end of my career when a possibility would have been to go back to the Pentagon I'd have opened all my veins I don't know I can't explain to you how but the thought of going back there just filled me with dread even though I had a great three years there so I did three years Pentagon above which we all talk no more at this point I decided I had every bit as much of seeing every bit as much being a colonel or a general as I ever wanted to see and I'd never been promoted early so I wasn't really I would probably make I'm a toad six for sure full colonel but never general that's so I'm thinking okay what I really want to do is go back to flying this is after the end of the Cold War so were drawn down I'm not going to go back to an operational squadron I would have loved to have flown the f-15e really would have loved to do that I found that Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio Texas not a place people wanted to go and the personnel people were suffering losses because they tell a guy who's like a mid-level captain okay your your next tour is going to be an alpha tour for you it's going to be an instructor pilot pilot training and you're going to Del Rio and they go no I'm not I'm going bye-bye well there were some of us they call grade beards who were perfectly happy to do a captain's job and I found out that they would be willing to take me to because I was if I had been a fighter pilot so I could go fly 38 and the new specialized undergraduate pilot training which was now very much tactically focused because I had the t-one business jet kind of thing to do the training for the guys were going to a bigger point the reason they wanted me there was because they needed they had no fighter pilots in the squadron and so they were missing a big there was a big gap there in background and expertise to make sure the training was conducted in such a way that were preparing people selecting the right people and preparing people to go to the t-38 yeah and I got another call from the Wing Commander been on base now about 13 14 months and he says I would like you to go to na s whiting field and be a squadron commander there and I'm looking at the phone like it's gonna it's suddenly gone schizo so I got it sir and he asked Naval Air Station what am I missing here there was a big gap between where I am and where you want me to go that I just don't get well I didn't know because I'm in my own little world that we were actually conducting joint training with the Navy that we had a squadron advanced air force base in Oklahoma where every other squadron commander was from the other service Navy and half these students and half the instructors were from the Navy there's a corresponding squadron down it down at whiting field which is near Pensacola I had no idea so I go there to fly the t-34 which is a turboprop 450 shaft horsepower turbo prop hung off the front of a Beechcraft Bonanza airframe that's been beefed up to do 5.55 you know six G front back seating the basic is a bonanza airframe with 450 horsepower in front of kind of fun little airplane to fly and so I ended my career my Air Force career was a navy squadron commander ultimately I got a job offer from Northwest Airlines late Northwest Airlines so I left the Air Force in the Navy in March of chain command ceremony in March of 2000 on a Friday and on Monday I was in Minneapolis Minnesota at the Northwest training center starting training to be in the right state of the dc-9 so did the dc9 a320 at Northwest then that horrible event happened 9/11 and things started rolling downhill and then so about in October of 2002 I was ushered off the property got furlough furloughed for about two and a half years I worked as a software engineer at Ford for a while during that time so it wasn't it wasn't too traumatic an event for us but I did have to sling satellite dishes at the sides of houses in a Michigan winter for about four months making about nine pounds an hour but you got to do what you got to do kids want to eat and about four months later I managed to land a position at Ford and then things we're pretty pretty good after that I got recalled in March of oh five I kept my job at Ford while I flew my wife didn't like that but thought I was a genius ultimately when seven months later I got furloughed again furloughed the second time in the end of October of 2005 and decided out I was done that this I'm an existing co-op I've got a database background I can I can get a good job doing that I'm so sick and tired of this airline nonsense interviewed at FedEx in February of 2006 hired in June went straight to the right seat of the md-11 up in Anchorage flew out of Anchorage for the next eight nearly eight and a half years short break to the right seat of the 727 involved in there and then a couple years of two and a half years ago bid to come over to be based in Germany we have a we fly 757s out of Paris pilot bases in Cologne and so I've been flying the 757 out of Europe since then since April of 2015 and I upgraded to the left seat so I'm captain 275 now and so we're we're over here for five years and we're loving it having a great any hobbies I am a gearhead like I mentioned earlier if I could be my hero when I was kid was Jim Clark I know if you know who he is that's one of the most famous racing drivers ever I love working on cars so I have a lot of tools I do all the maintenance on our cars and that's really pretty much my only hobby I think the t-38 is probably the favorite the I got a backseat ride once a fighter weapons school I got a backseat ride in the f15 at 15 d yeah yeah the D is two-seater and that airplane is spectacular just amazing performance airplane extremely easy to fly i fly i mean what 11 is 20 times harder to fly than f-15 is what do you think no because there's so many great stories there are so many stories out that that you know that it's such a thrilling environment that it makes a lot of memories there are a lot of significant motion events you know some couple times almost got killed just the visuals the sensations the people the stuff I got to do I mean it's like no I never get tired of it and we we had a squadron reunion on a cruise ship last year ago not quite a year ago at 79th reunion and we all got there and we spent the whole time we never got off the boat all we did was sit by the pool and drink and tell stories flowing story well I'm really really honored that you asked me to do it great time and I can't wait well I'm afraid I'll be embarrassed when I see this my friends will ridicule me but I will love watching the other stuff you thanks very much [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 151,515

Keywords: f-111, f-111 dump and burn, f-111 documentary, f-111 aardvark, f-111 ejection, f-111 upper heyford, f-111 fuel dump, f-111 air show, f-111 australia, t-38 talon, t-38 talon documentary, usaf dopcumentary, f-111 cockpit, gulf war footage, desert storm tornado, gulf war documentary, gulf war 1991, operation desert storm, f-111 flyby, f-111 low pass, f-111 high speed pass

Id: A-hrrMlksNA

Length: 65min 36sec (3936 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2017