Interview with Jerry Beaulier on the USN F-4 Phantom

you you so Jerri when did you first become interested maybe eh well it's kind of a long story because my father had a model airplane shop and from the time I can remember we had model airplanes and then my dad did a flight course on the GI Bill but he would never take me because he was superstitious but I always wanted to fly because I'd done model airplanes for so long and it was it was good fun I liked scale models I did a lot of 172nd scale wooden models and I don't like plastic models at all I just would just always do the the wooden model and so forth and then I had a chance when I was a young sailor I was hitchhiking back from Oklahoma City to the base in Norman Oklahoma and I run into a guy who had an airfield and took me for a ride that was my first ride in an airplane that was in 1919 6:59 back in the days when it was Buddy Holly and and all of those folks and it was it was it was really good fun it was a Cessna 150 they took me up in for about a 20 30 minute ride and it never flew again until I got as a sailor flew in the back seat or in the back of the carrier on board delivery airplanes and on first on USS Lexington and then on USS Hancock so I did a number of those so I had some experience as I was an aviation electronics technician in the Navy having joined its age 17 and had a great time great time joined the Navy in 1958 just came right out of high school and July 10th 1958 that was me up and away well once I became a pilot the first aircraft that I flew in was the t-34 mentor and that was the basic trainer for the US Navy and both pipelines whether it was a jet pipeline or are many many motor or a helicopter pipeline started out in the t-34 from there I went to the t2 a which was a single-engine trainer jet and then from there I went to the t2b which is a two engine jet trainer and we used that for carrier qualifications and I did my first carrier qualification on the USS Lexington down in Pensacola Florida and that was done in about 1967 early 1967 I was well it was scary to start with but then when I'd been enlisted I'd landed on the carrier in the back of this carrier on board delivery are playing a c1 and that when we landed on it the noise the tires went pump pump pump pump pump which we had wooden teak decks and the tires were caused in the the the teak to to oscillate or vibrated when I did my first care call the first thing you did is you did a hook up to hook up passes and on the first one it went the airplane went pump pump pump pump pump and I was very comfortable from then on and then I went from basically Pensacola to advanced jet over in Kingsville Texas where I was flying the single-seat f9f because f9f eight and also the two-seat trainer as well are the two-seat fighter f9 and those were axial flow engines or excuse me so different centrifugal flow engines so they were a bit slower a little bit a little bit underpowered the t2 actually was quite good because it had axial flow engines and that was quite a nice airplane to fly for as a trainer from there I went to San Diego I was selected for fighters and went to San Diego will fly phantoms and the first thing I did is spent 26 hours flying the TA for four instrument training and that's what they did with all the pilots that came from the training command is the first thing they did is they give you an extensive upgrade on your instrument conditions and then I started flying the phantom I've flown all about 10 versions of the Phantom I started the first one I flew was an f4 a and then most of the time I was in an f4 b and then flew F four days the first cruise I was on was an f4 B's second cruise was up four days had a little bit more powerful engine I'll have a different engine had a better radar in the f4j and had the odd ten radar for for that and that was an excellent and from there I went I went in care called on the Phantom on the Ranger and from there I went to the constellation when we deployed and then I did two cruises on constellation amassing about 330 carrier landings all tall and Connie a lot of fun actually it was it was a little bit on the touchy side you had to make certain your stability augmentation was working and you had to be careful you didn't end up with what they call a Pio or a pilot induced oscillation and if you're a little ham festered ham-fisted or you didn't keep the airplane trimmed up you could get yourself into mischief with that and it just would pitch up and down quite severely but it never happened to me I always flew the airplane and trim or tried to keep it in trim and so forth and that just kept thanks it was a very very fast airplane you could do Mach 2 with a clean airplane generally we flew around 450 knots 420 knots was kind of the corner speed you could take it to maximum G at 420 and that's calibrated airspeed that they had for and it was it was just good to fly you know it's just good to fly and we generally flew around 20,000 feet 15,000 feet depending on the combat mission we were on and then do a night dive bombing that was exciting and and so forth that was VF 142 the ghost riders and my first skipper was Billy Franklin and it was a really good squadron we had 34 officers in it we had we have 14 14 aircrew pilots and 14 radar intercept officer so we had 28 aircrew as part of the squadron and then another six or so officers that intelligence officer and maintenance officer and things like that and it was a it was a very progressive squadron and and we were we were well trained in the VF 120 121 which was the replacement right but we did a lot of practicing when we left San Diego on my first cruise in 68 in the June in 68 we went and did a lot of operations around Hawaii and that was really of good value well we were predominantly air-to-air our mission was on the ship was either bar cap or tar cap bar cap is barrier air combat patrol tar cap was targeted air combat control and it depend on what the mission was about 1/3 of my missions were at night a lot of 221 combat missions about a third of them were at night and about a third of them were air-to-ground some daylight mostly night here to grow dropping bombs 500 founders tickers we had mines that we would lay as well and so forth well I think that it was as good a bomber as anybody out there with just fixed sites but it really was air-to-air because we had forward-looking radar we could launch it we could launch a sparrow missile from some distance and it was good the problem was with forward-looking is you had to identify your target before you could shoot that takes the forward-looking out because you have to intercept it and make certain that they are bad guys and not good guys that aren't responding properly yes it was it was exciting but it was it was relatively easy the airplane in the landing configuration you could you could walk the throttles because we had two things if you kept it trimmed up you had very high speed responding engines and you could walk the throttles and you got two things out of it you got a little bit of extra thrust when you pushed it forward also you get boundary layer control on it so you could almost fly the airplane you know stair-step coming down and you could trim that thing up and it was just rock-solid and it was it was really good to land on the carrier they breaths when I flew with the Brits they screwed that up a bit because they took away the axial flow engines j79 engines they took those out and put in rolls-royce spey engines which were fan engines which changed the character is flying the airplane altogether especially in the landing configuration because you always seem like you'd always either have too much or too little on the throttle and as you put throttle on it there's get that inherent lag that you get in a fan engine then all of a sudden it would come on and you might climb a little bit or dropping a little bit depending whether it was on or off so but I thought that the air fork landing was excellent we were we kind of dogfight we did the dogfight modin of an ef-4 was like an easter egg and what it was was energy conservation and energy management and in comparing us with other aircraft of the day mig-21 mig-17 some of the other follow-on airplanes we actually had places where we were very very good and we had some places where we didn't want to get slow with them our low handling there's little speed handling characteristics were not that great you know below about 330 knots you were kind of struggling to get any kind of G on the airplane at all and like you say our corners velocity was around 420 indicated or calibrated and that you could pull to 7 7 plus G's in that you know so it's very good you just flew the airplane where you wanted to fly and that was one of the things we got with Top Gun Top Gun I was in the very first Top Gun class and a purpose of Top Gun was to teach you how to fight the Phantom so they sent two pilots in and two back Cedars you went through the courses about six weeks long you then went back into the squadron and you flew with all the other pilots in the squadron taking what you learn from Top Gun and showing them and getting them a higher level of proficiency as a fighter pilot in the Phantom and it worked it worked very well before Top Gun our kill ratio was four to one after Top Gun there was 11 to 1 they go they're known as doing lion that's right so Jerry can you remember your first combat mission Olivia yeah it was a daytime the way those the way we operated we would come into the out of port whether it we'd been out for a while or not but the first day out was really really good to to do because it was a day mission and we were flying fundamentally we were doing air-to-air and so it was maybe the third or fourth mission before I actually did an air-to-ground but it was it was air-to-air we're doing combat air patrol the barrier air patrol and that's what we did is we went out there and you learned all the procedures and the things like that practice tanking to make certain we were up to speed with tanking when we first started out in f4 B's we in our configuration we would fly with just a centerline tank on and so we were flying generally around an hour and a half sorties and you might do some tanking you might not later on when we went into a peace operation we had all kinds of tanks on the airplane and so you'd fly a to our mission and set up more and a half so it was but the first first missions they were it was it was really exciting because there you are you are in combat you don't know if a bad guy is gonna come out and you'd hear him on the radio they'd come out and you whenever the MiG's were airborne there would be an announcement on guard letting us know that there was bandits bandits bullseye 22 and that give you a location as to where they were we were generally we would be holding about 30 miles 25 to 30 miles off the course and off the coast and and traditionally we would be up running just up by Hainan and on up just past Haiphong and then turning around and coming down down to probably about Vince on and then turn around so we were doing probably about 25 25 to 45 my legs depending on what was going on whether it was nighttime or daytime and so forth well we either had 500-pounders just a regular 500 pound mark 82 or we would have tickers we would have the type of 500 pounder with a with a hand on it that would allow it to hit the ground and penetrate and then any magnetic interference that would come by any trucks that would come by it would go off automatically and it was also set up very neatly that when the battery got to its halflife it would explode the bomb so we weren't leaving for future years tickers in the ground that you know people would find then the other thing we dropped on occasion depending on if we were doing flak suppression or something we'd have rock eyes you know if we were doing a bark or at our cap where we were a target combat air patrol we would have maybe rock eyes on as well as our missiles and we would have generally floor Sidewinders and two Sparrow missiles on the machine it was it was actually very good they were pretty relaxed with us you know I wore fatigues around the carrier and and we ate well too because we'd have that what they called the dirty shirt wardroom was was set up to feed you 21 hours of course it was all breakfast but but if it's still you got you could have you could eat 21 hours a day and it was it was good your accommodation when I was a junior tenant junior grade I was in a four-man bunk room and that was a great a minute I mean their antics and tricks going on all the time and and then once I made lieutenant then I was in a two-man stateroom and it's very good you know you had bunk beds you had you had your stereo I had a I had an aquarium I had a 15 gallon saltwater aquarium yeah and it but I had to get permission from the damage control central that I could have seven gallons of water that far above the metacenter of the carrier so they didn't want me destabilizing for the US Navy it was it became the main fighter we had a fates out there at the same time Crusaders but for for us in our operation was primarily the Phantom we might be operating with maybe three carriers and if we were operating with three carriers one of them might be a might have FH on him but the others were all and that was kind of unusual but at the end game it was always always only F force for fighters you had four light attack you had the Skyhawks the a4 Skyhawk and then after that we got the fa corsair ii and then we had helos on board we had trying to remember the name of them the sh3 seeking and another one a smaller one which we use for unwrapping and for sending stuff over to the kid to the destroyers and things like that we had the c2 which was the early warning aircraft radar early warning what else did we have we had the whale which was the a3 sky warrior which was a big two engine huge airplane and we had that and that was our tanker and we had the a-6 intruder and that was a that was our heavier strike airplane because they could carry I don't know 24:28 500-pounders and not even blink pretty much we were the newer we were the newer ones what the a7 was a new airplane because that was that was that came out replaced the a4 Skyhawk and the a6 was probably similar vintage to the to the the f4 and sole it was new it was that was in nineteen I went on my first cruise in 1968 the F floor had been around since the Wright 1958 it's slowly through its development cycle and so forth and then you had one very well from start to finish yeah this was on the it started around the 25th 24th of March 1970 there was a lot of activity going on the MiGs were up flying around they were coming out over the water and there was other issues going on with them chasing after the unarmed reconnaissance airplanes we had that was another airplane we had on the carriers - which was the vigilante which was they had it rigged for doing ground photographing stuff like that so anyway there was a lot of activity and Mike backseater Steve Barkley bless his heart he was the schedules officer and I kept trying to get him to schedule us on a mother thing and all the people who were going out flying were the skipper the XO the maintenance officer the ops officer they were all leading the flights and the younger guys weren't getting the chance to come out because we're setting up and there was a lot of activity we had strengthened our combat air patrol going on up in the up in the top of the Gulf and then the particular day the 28th of March the day before the 27th of March the our sister squadron of EF 143 the pukin dogs are the sands reproach they went in and they screwed up their intercept and didn't bag anything the next stage of 28th of March the closest I've got to to being up on the flight deck I was the alert five that was as close as I could get everybody else to skipper the XO everybody was airborne the maintenance officer da-da-da-da-dah know I was alert five alert five meant that I sat my airplane for two hours able to launch in five minutes or less all of us on the flight deck the X hole was alleged late coming in and his airplane was on the catapult and they pushed him off and they shouted launched the alert five and that was me off and rotted joined up they asked me how my weapon was I said my weapon is sweet and then I got up and I joined what the Air Group commander as his wingman and they give us vectors in and two MiG's coming up I had four side one know I had three Sidewinders and two sparrows and three tanks and so I was burning burning two wing tanks down try to get them empty because that was the first thing that I could jettison would be my wing tanks so we were coming in at about 20,000 feet the MiGs were up around 25,000 feet I spotted them and in the flight there you can have two leaders you got a military leader in a tactical leader and one of the things they taught you in Top Gun was to be in the tactical leader and I took charge call the flight call the turns got us engaged with the MiG's I got a slow on the first turn at the top I was down around 3:30 or something and so the MIG went went past me and down I slid it down underneath him and went all the way down I got back up to around 650 knots and climbing back up into the fight and he went back up high he didn't go nearly as did speed up it nearly as much as I did so I'm coming back up and I met him at the top but coming up Barclay says tanks reach down bull the tanks up we go and there I joined them at the top the Megas coming down in a right-hand turn I'm coming in a right-hand turn and I'm sliding in behind him and as I went in behind him I think he thought I was going to overshoot and he reversed and I reversed with them got a sidewinder tone Barclays in the back seat he saw a shoot shoot shoot I shot him and in every war movie I've ever seen you shoot the guy and he blows up yeah okay the missile came off at the lead leg goes off to the inside comes back to outside comes back a big puff of gray smoke and that's what you get what the Sidewinder blows up explodes he didn't blow up the airplane the MIG didn't blow up I was devastated I went into what they call as a high yo-yo because I was overtaken I'm really fast and I shot almost at mid-range and I went right up vertical and then as I went up because now what I'm doing is I'm saving energy and saving tactical advantage because I'm not on his flight path but I'm on doing a high yo-yo he flops over and the fire is just coming out of him I came rolled over the top again and I shot him again and helpless had want to make damn certain I got so down he went and he never got out and then by now the wingman had got away and Kang was chasing the wingman and I called CAG and he says we'll arty be the cool feet wet so that was it it was over with I got my mig the only thing I could say is when we got out over to the water I said did you see him yes I'm confirming your kill it was great and that and that was it now we've got another hour and a twenty minutes before we can go back and land because the ships not ready for us because we just Swan and about and I can see that I don't quite have enough fuel to be at a minimum fuel for landing it's going to be really close so I said well we need a tanker and so they got us a tanker and we tanked we took out a couple thousand pounds and stuff and but that was it and it was a cloudy day no no low-pass on the ship anything and you just landed and it was then everything of course the whole ship is alive and the briefings and the debriefings were absolutely wonderful and the skipper of the carrier he brought up a bottle of brandy to give us we'd all had a little drink brandy and that was that was really cool and that was it and as a result of that the class it was a classic dogfight from up from a Top Gun point of view that we did everything absolutely right we shared information and so forth and they took that kill the whole details on my kill backed to Washington and they got top guns set up as a proper full command from that we went on then I got the first kill as a as a Top Gun graduate when they went back in in 1972 when Nixon sent everybody in to get the POWs loose there was five or six top gun guys that got kills in that and and we just went on to acquit ourselves and it was very very good and it's the top gun is still going today it's called fighter weapons school now but it's still Top Gun yeah and it was very good in the movie of course the movie all of the flying that people don't often realize if they've never been in the game all in the flying that they were doing with maverick in and they're maneuvering against one another that's real not flying upside-down over over the bad guy that's not real okay but but the rest of the stuff was for real the maneuver that he where he pulled up in Top Gun and reduced power and lost his speed that's a kill self maneuver if that doesn't work you've just given away all your energy yeah and the guys still behind you and he's just gonna shoot you easier you know so it's one of those things that yeah that's one of the two that the flying upside down over the top of the bad guy and then that maneuver to push the guy ahead of you those are the two bad things in that in that tire movie I said it looks good until oh I did two and a half terms so it turns with the guy I'd say probably six or maybe seven minutes oh no no I had bruises on both hips I'm jumping up and down afterwards but it it just seemed so fast and we'd practice that stuff and Steve Barkley and I had practice a lot engagements and stuff and so our our crew discipline was very good no shouting nothing you know it just very calm you take we've been doing it a hundred times instead of just the first time but they were really really disciplined and the voice listening to voice tapes afterwards very calm you wouldn't know that we were right in the middle of a dogfight for the first time in my whole life so and it was just it's just all because of the practices because a Top Gun because of the practice and then maybe some just without sounding too cocky just a good mental state and discipline you know but it was a it was a marvelous day 28th of March 1970 No and Steve and I exchanged emails or telephone calls on that day teacher actually was a very good airplane mig-21s a Mach 2 airplane as well they one of the drawbacks from it was is that it had a delta wing and if you lost the speed it took more time to get the speed back on the second thing was is that it the visibility out of the back of the the main gate was terrible and if you ever look at it because they've got them in museums around and something to look at what imagine sitting in the cockpit and trying to turn and you couldn't look more than about just past 90 degrees into the tail section or is it the Phantom you could reach forward grab on to a mirror and pull yourself around and see almost directly into your 6 mm it was me phantom would have been better if we hadn't worried so much about going Mach 2 and then put a little bit of a bubble canopy on the thing and you could see six we are two months ago three months ago now I flew the two-seat Spitfire and that's got kind of a bubble canopy on it so you could sit and look right back and see your tail you can look dead into your six o'clock and it was it was wonderful wonderful 221 220 and F fours and one in an O v10 on ov-10 I went down to Danang and went out with one of the air the for air controllers out and they were calling in strikes in and went out in the backseat of a Novi tend to have a look at at that it was a fun airplane I went later on in tax River I went on to fly the ov-10 quite a bit not quite enjoyed flying it I wouldn't want to do it in combat because they do it was a little under under powered if you have loaded up with a lot of ordnance it was underpowered all right one of the things that Top Gun this was I think is really important because it was brand new and what we were flying we were flying our own airplanes we were flying the for my case I was flying the F for B and we were flying against a lot of different other kinds of airplanes and although we'd had dissimilar engagements in the past this was much more realistic because you had very high caliber pilots flying the agressor airplanes and so we were flying against all different kinds of things the a4 Skyhawk was very much like a MIG 17 and they had the the f5 which was much like the mig-21 in terms of performance and reactions and stuff at that so you fool against those things and then folks that come down would go fight against the a-sixes and we'd fight against anybody that would come out and play the f8 we were flight fighting all the time and then the airforce sometimes would send airplanes down phantoms from March and f1 hundreds and things from around the bazaars and we get a chance to fight against them too and that was good but also within Top Gun we put everything on the airplane that the airplane could carry it you'd do different missions we were doing strafing missions so we had we had a General Electric Gatling gun on the belly in place to the centerline tank and we did some air-to-air against the drone or against a towed banner and see if we were any good at just eyeballing it and shooting that and that was good and then we shot every kind of missile that you can imagine and then we had missile shoots as well I'm probably shot 2025 Sidewinders and about eight nine Sparrow missiles you know so and the day I got got the mega shot - you know if I'd had four of him or not - and it still had a chance on a shot off for him into him you know but it was but the Top Gun when also it was the strategies it was a changing philosophy to make certainly understood energy management and energy conservation because both of those are critical for fighting your airplane against any other airplane whether it's a high performance or it's a low performance and you wanted to make certainly if there was a low performance all you did was slashing attacks you can then get yourself out of it and not fall into the trap trying to do a low-speed hassle with them because they were gonna eat your lunch that was six weeks the first one was six weeks I'm not certain how long they are no I think that they run about four weeks yeah and I think that's the that's the current schedule but it was the first one was six weeks long and we flew every day we'd have lectures in the morning fly in the afternoon or fly in the morning for lectures in the afternoons it's very intense yeah very good very good I loved it and it every now and then you'd flight would fly with one of the instructor our radar intercept officer and they they came to the table they were very very experienced and they were basically fighters as well and they could they could tell you you're turning wrong you did you need you need to tighten up and and and so forth and it's just good it's just good yeah I started off flying in VF 142 and then the second cruise I was on the afternoons it's after Top Gun we got a new lieutenant commander to come in who had been a test pilot and he said to me one day he's at bold he ought to become a test pilot he says you're a good pilot we can use you got a good engineering background and so forth so I applied for and was selected for that Dannette gentleman's naming he went on to become an admiral was Larry blows and unfortunately he died a cancer some years ago but was very good I'd put me forward and he he basically grandfathered me in in 50 PS so I went the TPS DPS we had 13 airplanes 14 airplanes we had helicopters I flew I flew a very old was it's like an f-86 it was a t1 a single-engine jet straight wings but we could do some really wild out of control flight with it you could go up and what we were looking at and what we were being taught and then I went on to teach and when I came back as an instructor which was yaw roll pitch coupling inertia coupling through the three axis and we would do that generally at a lower speed but inertia lacks a an inertia coupling can take place at very high speeds as well and so you have to be really careful recognize what causes it and so forth then that was a t t t1 a and then we had the XT 26 powered glider which was a Schweitzer 236 glider which and I ended up at the end the only one who would fly it it was a had very had a wooden propeller and it had a continental old 200 engine in it and had five fan belts we used to buy from Western Auto to connect the engine to the propeller and if you put up the power on too fast too hard it would start squeaking like fan belts do on cars and you had to take all the power off and very gently put it back on again so that was that was the x26 that we flew and the next thing we had was had to t2 and we did certain things in the t2 we had the t a4 Skyhawk we had the corsair we had the ov-10 had the ov-1 mohawk had t28 had the otter and the beaver and I loved flying the otter and the beaver but especially the beaver it's an old tail dragger he pumped the flaps down you've pumped it to get it started and stuff like that it was really really cool and we used that for towing gliders as we also had regular gliders that we fluent to the wide variety of airplanes was was so that we could see different airplane characteristics every all airplanes demonstrate the same characteristics some more prominent than others a glider you get a lot of adverse yaw when you roll an airplane you put the aileron in you get a lot of adverse yaw so you see it the effect I'm using their dues and rudders and things like that the otter was an interesting thing at 60 knots you could put in left rudder to make the airplane roll to the left is they would normally what they would do but it would roll to the right it would roll opposite the t2 was similar if you get up close to V Max and the t2 you could put in right stick and it would roll left instead of rolling right and the reason for that was is that the deflection of the aileron on the other wing was causing the wing to bend adversely and you would roll the wrong way so it's just things like that that that you you had all these different kinds of airplanes that you learn the characteristics in a single biggest thing I think more than anything else is you learn yourself and how to take yourself out of the equation so that what you're looking at is pure airplane response and not you jiggery-pokery doing something so it's it's just that sort of thing it's very it was very very interesting and very challenging I like doing it and and I I went and did ordnance separation after TPS but then they Sakana me back to the school as a flight instructor after two years and so I did two years on the staff at at TPS then when I finished my tour with the Royal Navy in 1976 I had orders to War College and another department head job before I screamed for command and when I laid out all of this to my new bride and said I'm gonna be at sea for the next four to five years plus you're not gonna see much of me while I'm going to morkul as good as a grind she said well maybe we need that they ain't gonna work for her and maybe we need to look at something else so I said well I can retire on 20 years and I'm quite happy to do that and and have a life and we wanted to have a family which we eventually had a daughter and so I told a Navy I was going to retire at 20 years and so they sent me to the Air Force test pilot school as the Navy flight instructor and that was an interesting thing and there I got a chance to fly everything of who have 15 I flew the f100 I flew all the century series fighters except the the 105 it was down the day I was meant to fly it and then I flew the the Phantom the t-38 the eighth thirty-seven and anything I could get my hands on I flew yeah and all told in my career I've phoned 69 different types and kinds of airplanes and all but two models of the Phantom but never flew the German version of it I did fly the Iranian version of it and I never flew the Japanese version of the Phantom all the rest of my flew and it was good some of the RF for the the RFC the rfb which was the marine person and that was me you know the C to D the e the F that didn't fly the F but the Iranian version and so forth I've got three airplanes are loved I love the Phantom for combat I love the ov-10 for low-level messing around and the beaver for just dinking just that I just would go back to the Phantom and I love flying the ov-10 low-level out there in the Chesapeake over in the far side of the Chesapeake Bay when I was at Patuxent River and there's there'd be just creeks and stuff that you just fly down I'd be fine about 10 15 feet off the water yeah can you tell us about your exchange with the royal house well when I was getting ready to leave Patuxent River I'd been a landing signal officer in my squadron VF 142 controlling the flight deck and I liked doing that but they were gonna send me to the Saratoga on the East Coast and Saratoga I didn't I didn't like the way they did the Ellis old platform on that and I was gonna be Cagle a soul for a tag six or something there came five and I said I didn't really want to do that and they said well we've got a great exchange Duty with the Royal Navy flying phantoms they have four case and I said be delighted to do that and so I got selected for that went to culture school and yeah they've got to say we've got four weeks of culture training how to deal with people of different cultures what to do what not to do and it was well worth doing it was fun too you know so I came over in fluid with 892 squadron here at Leuchars and then aboard HMS Ark Royal and Ark Royal was a real treat because they had a bar and you're gonna have wine with dinner well maybe pretty much as a flying club everybody knew everybody because we're down to about three carriers and and not that many aviators and stuff like that and the fighter pilots they were a very limited number we only had one squadron of fighters left when I joined of the of the Phantom and it was just basically a flying club and very relaxed rules weren't very aggressive we could do low levels we could go beat up other ships and stuff like that and and it's nobody mind as long as you were in a subsonic when you went by there's much blow windows out of the bridge u.s. models and the British models with the spirit well the what I felt more than anything is that the Spay engine because it's a fan engine really wasn't good for the Phantom because it made it made the airplane more difficult to land on a carrier because you'd put on power and it would hesitate and it would come on and you always seem like you were choo-choo and you were putting too much on take it too much off also because the Phantom had had boundary layer control we blow blue high-pressure air over the wing over the flaps that give us more and lift that allowed us to fly slower but when you put power on you got more lift you took power off you got less lift so with the fan engine that inherent delay just seemed like it aggravated the smoothness that you had with the American Phantom you could trim that thing up just trim it and just walk the throttles and it was absolutely beautiful on the carrier you know especially at night it was just took a lot of sweat and worry on a landing to carry her head thank you well it kind of when they made up their mind they were gonna fly in the Royal Navy they were gonna fly come hell or high water and it I spent more time holding because we launched on the second flight and the first flight couldn't get back onboard the ship or I was in the first flight and I couldn't get back onboard the ship because something wrong with the ship and they would just once they decided they were going to do that that was it another thing that was really fun is we had cocktail parties when we pulled into port with the ark royal we'd have all these people would come on board and it was it was a gas and the rest of it in terms of how we flew pretty much the same pretty much the same the tactics pretty much the same you know we did more air-to-ground and more low-level in the British Phantom than we did an American Phantom and that's because of the weather patterns here in Scotland and Europe and so forth and in there say their their area that we're gonna have to do if they were doing something in East Germany or someplace like that whether factored the weather tends to be lower and so you had a little bit different air-to-ground mode as well different Rockets as well so oh yeah yeah when I with both in both instances both when I was in the US Navy flying against other people and then also in the in the Royal Navy when we made an American cruise we operated off of Oceana and we would go and fight with the aggressor squadrons and that was that was really interesting and they could tell when you had your stuff together when you didn't have any stuff together but it was good it was good and the thing was the RAF we had RAF pilots is part of our squadron and they were good young people and they were the young stock that we're coming in you know the rest of us role you know older been around for a while two and a half years and I enjoyed the pieces we still they have in October of each year down in Wales we have the cash hands thrash which is all the rascals show up and we this last one last October we had about 50 people that showed up and we do a two-day thing we do some seminars and we and we have a - hands dinner the both nights and it's and it's good fun I've put together different view you know different slide programs or or videos that could run on the on the camera all the time you know so we had and I had stuff from Ark Royal I had stuff from other carriers and I just put it all on along with American stuff as well so it's very good very good I did I enjoyed it very much I have been back and I did a little bit of flying in testifying when I was worked for company out in Washington State developing some of the algorithms for the combat or for the ground proximity warning systems for military airplanes so I helped develop some of that and did some training with those guys teaching their test pilots how to fly combat missions so that was good I've often I was going on when I turned 50 I was gonna buy a war bird and my wife bless her heart said can we afford it I said yeah we'll sell one of our flats and I'll biotin and I can afford it what would you get what I need to get a piece p-38 lightning or a p-40 Warhawk fancy that or if I could get one and I could afford it I'd get a f4u Corsair that was always one of my favorite airplanes anyway the Gullwing the then she says what would you do with it I said why don't fly in some air shows and stuff and you know they'll pay me put the fuel in for me to come down and fly in the air show nothing nothing dramatic just high-speed pass making lots of noise do some loops and aileron rolls and you don't have to do that much and she says well how many people will it carry and I said one she said yep we don't need one then and that was the end of my warbird ID I like golf I do woodworking I make boxes and things like that you know make those from scratch so that you know make you hand-cut dovetails and things like that I know I but I'm a member of rotary so that's kind of like a hobby and two years ago I started a group called tourism st. Andrews and I was the chair for that for two years I just gave that up and what I'm doing now is I'm doing Beach wheelchair program for the West Sands and st. Andrew's for disabled people it's uh yesterday I did a photo shoot with two two machines and took pictures of of disabled people in my beach wheelchairs and I got a thousand pounds Wow from donation from East East nook wheelchair appeal I got earlier in the week I got a thousand pounds from a friend of mine who's got a foundation and Jim Leishman who's the provost for for flyff he gave me the marrying Leishman Foundation has given me 2,000 pounds so I'm slowly but surely filling up and I've got another group that's promised me a wheelchair for free in Seoul where I'm at now is I think that for coming this summer I'm gonna have at least two wheelchairs in hand and from doing beach wheelchairs there's on the 3rd of June there's chariots of fire race here on the beach in West sense and what I'm going to do is bring my wheelchairs down to that I may do part of a little bit bit of a race but just to have them there you know so it's it's it's a so that's that's a hobby but it's not a hobby it's it has such good things to do and I'm just so excited about doing it and we're getting support from everybody it's just a case of getting our funding together and work in that and it's about forty five thousand pounds I need to get started for the next two years so well there's a probably two or three I would have liked I would have liked to Florida I don't like to flown the Raptor the the f-22 I would have liked to have flown that because they were testing that when I was at Edwards and I could never figure out how to get my fingers into that there's maybe one or two stealth things I would have liked to have flown just as just to see to look at the flight characteristics of them and and I would like to fly a tornado on down a tornado but a I've flown the tornado simulator but fly the typhoon yeah and I see that you know yeah they come down no Lucas become an army base they come down from from Lossiemouth and shoot approaches so you can see up down here not really my wife when I went on the two-seat Spitfire but I didn't realize they had a a camera that was videoing my face for the entire flight and afterwards what they did is they give me the camera or the the video to the flight there was about a week later when we were back home that I actually put him on my computer and ran him and I called my wife in and what I hadn't didn't realize when I was flying the airplane so I never stopped moving my head my head was all over the place looking up looking down sideways and so forth and I sent to her I said look at this I said I've never stopped moving my head and she says you never stopped talking either ha ha ha so no I never tire talking about aviation it's just good fun well thank you very much for coming up take care [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 48,226

Rating: 4.9283018 out of 5

Keywords: F-4 phantom, f-4 phantom takeoff, f-4 phantom low pass, pilot interview, vietnam war, f-4 phantom vietnam, f-4 phantom documentary, f-4 phantom carrier takeoff, vietnam war documentary, aircraft carrier, aircraft carrier takeoff, aircraft carrier landing, top gun documentary, top gun, vietnam navy, f-4 vietnam action, vietnam air wars, f-105 thunderchief, phantom pharewell, us navy documentary

Id: h-inVs-Y-Nw

Length: 52min 35sec (3155 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2018