Tomcat Tales Tribute: Snort in His Own Words

on july 24th aviation lost a legend retired navy captain dale snort snodgrass was killed when the private plane he was taking off in crashed in lewiston idaho now during a live stream remembrance here on the channel the following day i mentioned that there was some great footage of snort talking about his time in the f-14 in the documentary tomcat tales and it recommended that the producers of that documentary speed and angels edit the snort content altogether and then release that well one of the producers mark viz viscara fellow tomcat guy reached out to me and gave me all of that footage together so we present that to you here now in this first segment snort talks about that famous knife edge pass that gave rise to a million internet rumors and instagram memes there's a photo out there of me doing a knife edge pass by the lso platform and there's a lot of the statements saying well i got in trouble and the pilot got in trouble it was grounded and that's not the case at all it was actually the opening move to my at seed flight demo so i got away with a lot of stuff at that time now here snort describes the first time you saw the f-14 and how was love at first sight i first met it when my father was a test pilot at grumman so when i was in high school i went out and went to grumman at bethpage and when they had a full mock-up of the f-14 and i saw it in the special lighting and hangar and everything they were trying to sell the airplane etc and i said holy [ __ ] wow what a great airplane it had the tomcat is unique it has a presence it has panache and when you see that airplane you know it's something like that has never been around and probably won't be around again so i had the joy of flying it for 24 years and wound up being the high time the high time tomcat pilot with almost 5 000 hours in it in this next clip snort talks about the legendary 1v1 he had with a marine corps fighter pilot after that guy made the mistake of bragging about the capabilities of his brand new f-18 hornet warning if you're not snort and you're not we here at the channel recommend you avoid doing these kinds of things plus new airplanes have fun suppression baked into them so things like pulling circuit breakers and manually moving the wings to a different position aren't even possible anymore but let's listen to snort i bought a brand new hornet marine guy top gun guy and they were up at the old club at oceana so these guys are talking big about the you know we'll spank the tomcat and all this stuff so i started talking to this guy and beating him and i go i tell you what we will have tomorrow we have a 2v2 scheduled ever you're in that flight i'm on that flight to tell you we'll just make it a 1v1 1v1 guns only visual split fights on on the on the tournament and i said but one engagement whoever wins assuming somebody wins then the other squadron the loser squad is going to buy all the cocktails and all the steamship round and all the shrimp we can eat on friday night at the oceano club and that's back when the oak clubs were still a lot of fun and so i take a i we go to the brief and then the next day i launch out both squadrons fill the tax range because it's on the tax rates so we go out and i go out and i and i tell them i just need to launch early to go down really what i do is i want to i went all the way down to the south end of the range in whiskey 72 and dumped i dump gas down to about 6 500 pounds and then i we do a little intercept we take apart we take a split meanwhile i'm i'm going like 300 knots and then i'm going i'm bringing i'm bringing the boards back but i manually sweep the wings back to like bomb so he thinks i'm going 450 knots so i take him out a little farther than normal fights on we turn in i got a bomb and i'm at 250 250 knots and i go and i immediately get below 225 wings come forward all the circuit breaks are out mcb circuit breaks bulldog slap circuit breakers the big boys come down and then i go to full grunt and i merge at about 325 i drive him into a one-circle fight i'm eating him up like a big dog he's at 450 knots pulling seven g's and i'm just turning and silent he and then what i hoped he would do and what he did was he got antsy and he pulled at me hard bled like you know he bled all his knots and then i went the vertical and i had plenty of smack like 100 500 knots plus over him and i go and he goes up and dies and i go i just sort of a double emblem thing came down and gunned him in 42 seconds turn it and he says you know and i said tracking tracking tracking tracking plus everybody in the tax range has seen this they're going you know and i'm at 800 feet just drilling them and and then he says okay okay let's set up another i just said no i'm bingo [Laughter] and another deal was if you if you did if you lost you had to do a straight in you couldn't go into the break so anyway so that's the things i loved about the tomcat because there was stuff you could do it you could do with that airplane to turn it into a true bfm monster particularly as you got later we got the big engines we got the b models and the d models uh then and i have a lot of time in those but it was that was an awesome airplane snort's contributions to the f-14 community extended beyond the cockpit when he was the fighter wing commander he led the effort to incorporate the larynpod onto the airplane and that gave the airplane a bunch of capabilities that increased its lethality manifold using the lantern pod the f-14 did deep strike in the early phases of the war in afghanistan and led the hunt to find saddam hussein in the war in iraq in this segment you'll hear snort describe the rapid prototyping and developmental tests that they did out at china lake and also what he did using his understanding of how the pentagon works to find the money to fund this effort i use the lantern pod on my final deployment and in my mind this is snort's greatest legacy so let's listen to him here i'm the fight wing commander and i'm brand new guy at the desk and they talked me about putting a lantern pod on the tomcat they tell me how we're gonna do this and i said absolutely i'm all in in six months we went from a concept to dropping an hop lgbt hop away good radar track on the item on profile 3.2 to target two miles to target good energy one mile to target and mark impacts are laser safe please and then uh and a lot of things fell in our favor one was uh we put a new pt in the back cockpits but a big new display a 12 by 12 display and the magnification of the lander pod was is is directly proportional to the size of the display the same display in a in a uh in a strike eagle with an eight by eight display was eight power we had 12 power so the magnification and had a lot of pixels in the new display so the clarity was awesome so we went out with that and then the second thing was gps because we were an analog airplane we didn't have we had an ins but we couldn't we couldn't talk to the thing and the pod needed to be a digital event so we weren't a 1553 bus type airplane then so and we couldn't tie the radar we didn't have a ground mapping radar we didn't have a radar that we could layer layer into the into the feed information to the lander pods so we can say okay point the pod over here i said you know can we put like a gps unit in the thing and he went wow that's a good idea in literally in a week they figured it out they got a a gps unit that was on the off the shelf that was going into patchy helicopters embedded it in the lantern pod which was awesome because it stabilized the lantern pod you didn't have to have it ins and all that we did that and then we made it work and it's amazing i dropped the first live gbu from the bombing range and blew up a tank and then the a6 was going away and the hornets just had the nighthawk pod and that was not very good so this air this brought a brand new capability and so we just won a couple things happened to turn out and turn the airplane into the national asset at the end and you know for a guy who was a fighter pilot and i don't want to never drop a bomb then i became the true believer and and i believe i truly helped bring this along so so we got the project and we had to pay for it so i go up and i talked to pma242 up there and i go up there okay what's it gonna cost us like a billion dollars a lot of money to integrate this whole thing across the board and i go well what do we have in the books well we're on the process of spending almost that amount of money to put amram an airplane and i go we don't need that man i got feeney bombs i got sparrows i've been trying to shoot down somebody with a missile for my whole life and it's not happening i said we need to go kill people on the ground let's take the one billion dollars and put it on in the lantern pot forget abram i go see all the four stars and i give them the brief and the last thing they say that's awesome sort how we going to pay for it and i told them how to pay we're going to pay 400. and so they every sink called washington said make this happen now and so we did this fleet prototyping thing as opposed to normal acquisition process so we went from a handshake on the on trying to make it happen as at firewing two days after i took over to one year later deployed it with uh bf-103 and that was in my opinion the coolest thing i ever did made me i go to bed at night oh that's good so that was a thrill to have that happen and then and then and then became it proved to be an awesome air airplane we turned we turned into fak a's we turned into you know fak a machines and uh our guys in the squadrons got we became the platform of choice we became pathfinders for hornet squadrons we even had one tomcat go out with three hornets or four horns to go there's your target and then they use a laser spot designator to laser spot tracker to find that and they go that i got it i got it i got it and then the tomcat would pick its own so amazing amazing story that the tomcat really turned into a true national asset at the end of its life so thanks for vis for providing this content and here's to snort continuing to influence the next generation of military aviators as he did while he walked among us we miss you snort rest in peace [Music] you

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 41,795

Rating: 4.9907455 out of 5

Keywords: Ward Carroll, Captain Dale Snort Snodgrass, fighter pilot, F-14 Tomcat, airshows, Top Gun, F/A-18 Hornet, Marine Corps fighter pilot, Top Gun instructor, LANTIRN Pod, precision guided bombs, dogfighting techniques, Tomcat Tales, Speed and Angels, Mark Viz VIzcarra, DCS, DCS World

Id: jWqam0MTOhY

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021