Top Gun: The Real Story Documentary

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Oh they're the best in the fleet the best in the country the best in the world but they were those at the height of the Vietnam War the US Navy was losing the battle in the sky from the ashes of defeat rose the greatest fighters school on earth and a new breed of pipe this is the real story of Top Gun April 9th 1965 a hundred years to the day after the end of the War Between the States America is about to plunge into another civil war halfway around the world on the gulf of tonkin in the South China Sea the USS Ranger launches six of the Navy's latest fighting machines the f4 phantom the mission to protect the carrier from enemy aircraft but today the Phantom's are flying in harm's way in 1965 few Americans can find Tonkin Gulf on a map but everyday they're learning more about a Southeast Asian nation called Vietnam in March 1965 the first GIS way to show most expect in one year their tour will be over and so will the water seven years from now the fighting will rage on but in the spring of 65 the US has never lost a war and the skies of Vietnam belong to America or so it seems on April 9th a surprise is waiting for the Navy fighters North Vietnamese beings the phantoms are built for long-range combat the MiG's close in for a dogfight the Phantom's tried to pull away the MiGs are more maneuver after a series of hard terms one of the Phantoms has lost precious airspeed it can't shake its pursuit America was losing the war in the air because one machine was being sent to do a job it wasn't built for I present to you the President of the United States these planes which help protect the security of the United States and the dozens of countries which are associated and allied with us all around the world which would not be free if it were not for the power and the determination of the United States the f4 phantom was introduced at the height of the Cold War amid high hopes it was so impressive that both the Navy and the Air Force boarded the plane the entire focus of both the name in the Air Force was in the late 50s and early 60s was against the Soviet bomber threat we thought that Soviets would come over and bomb Los Angeles and they built the f4 to counter that threat by 1960 for the first time I got to fly the Phantom and phantom and do things no other airplane I'd ever flown could do you know I had one up to Mach 2.38 which at that point in time everything that starts heating up and the warning lights come on you know if we get frictional heating or an airplane just she's reached her she's reached her heat limits the airplane would continue to go would it start coming apart I'd never flown anything that fast among the Navy's fighter jocks the Phantom quickly gained a reputation as a hot airplane with power to spare it could reach sixteen hundred miles per hour and soar to sixty-six thousand feet both unprecedented in a fighter there was only one thing the Navy's version lacked a gun historically and in eternal fight you need a gun the gun is fierce particularly the guns that were available that there were in the airforce Airport it had a Gatling gun 6,000 rounds a minute Gatling gun who put the fear of God and anybody you're shooting at with we never had them designed in the airport instead the Navy ordered the Phantom equipped with eight air-to-air missiles for long-range radar guided Sparrow's and for the new heat-seeking Sidewinders that honed in on the enemy's white-hot engines the weapons were so sophisticated the phantom required a second crewman to fire them called a radar intercept officer or our IO this was revolutionary a phantom pilot could hit a target he couldn't even see On June 17 1965 six f4 phantoms take off from the USS Midway to escort a wave of bombers over North Vietnam in the lead a loo page and is RI o JC Smith as the Bombers finished their run and head for home Smith spots mix on his radar I picked the contacts after about 38 miles the MiGs aren't close enough to find the Phantom's are Smith radios his wingman Jack Batson callsign Batman and I said call Judy which is lock up I said call Judy on the near target the near target we locked on to the far target there were two blips on my scope two blips and they were a mile apart I called our cordial and who's not I said shoot cute you may squeeze down and squeeze down I saw the sparrow fly right by our wingtip we get food two airplanes down that night the Navy celebrated its first kills of the Vietnam War the age of push-button warfare had arrived and the dogfight seemed a thing of the past after every major air war the engineers have moved in and said it's really silly way to fight a war airplane against airplane let's devise a weapon that obviate the necessity for one airplane to go find other plane and after the Korean War we got rid of that said you've got Sparrow missiles we've got new weapon systems will never dog try it again the day of the dog fight was over it's all going to be long range in on the sparrow missiles and and all that stuff and if I'm not mistaken that's one reason that a gun was never put in the Phantom because hey the day of the gun fights over it's all going to be standoff shoots noise to the prophets who foretold the death of the dogfight were about to be proven terribly wrong in the early days of the Vietnam War the battle in the air suddenly took a turn for the worse in the case of mistaken identity two Navy pilots were shot down by their own side in the wake of the tragedy the Pentagon ordered pilots to identify targets with the naked eye before shooting that changed everything along comes Vietnam and we're trying to fight make 17s instead of Soviet bombers and the f4 was thrown into a role that was never envisioned for it the f4 sparrow missile was designed to be fired from at least one mile but now it was being fired much closer in late 1967 phantoms launched 55 sparrows without a single hit worse the phantom smoky engines made it easy to spot the most powerful machine in the air had suddenly become fair game for the cheap agile little Mik the ladies kill ratio plummeted to a dismal two to one it was still shooting down twice as many planes as the enemy was but every time one phantom went down two crewmen were killed or captured in the history of American aviation never had so many sacrificed so much for so little 1967 I was out there own enterprise and to put a real perspective something I think everybody will understand is we lost 17 guys in 11 days the problem was devastatingly simple maybe pilots were forced to fight at close quarters but the Phantom was built for fighting at long range you had to get him close with him you have to identify him therefore you're interested naturally and you better be trained in her account Avenue the ability to dogfight the airplane just like everybody's done in every major engagement with airplane since World War one and we hadn't been trained to do that when World War 1 began both sides were using the biplane simply for spine enemy pilots would pass each other without exchanging more than a way but on October 5th 1940 that chain the French flyer the weaken our open fire on a German plane with a machine gun Konoe recorded history's first air-to-air kill by early 1915 the Germans began sending their planes out in packs of four to ambush lone Allied Pilots in response Britain's Royal Flying Corps issued a landmark or reconnaissance aircraft are at all times to be escorted by three combat aircraft flying in close formation you it was the dawn of the dogfight Amil hero appeared in the skies of Europe the ace in 1916 the German ace Oswald polka wrote the book on air combat the principles he outline still ring truth secure all possible advantage before attacking if you initiate an attack follow it through fire only at close range keep your eye on your opponent attack your opponent from behind if your opponent dives to attack you turn to medium always remember your line of retreat fight in groups of 4 to 6 and avoid several aircraft attacking the same target bucum at his feet after colliding with another german plane as they both go for the same target he died ignoring his own advice within a generation the fighter made a quantum leap forward time itself change in World War one two enemies who were two miles apart met in half a minute in World War two it was ten seconds at the outbreak of the war the Germans ruled the skies with their swift Messerschmitt I'm Telekom up against the English Spitfire the Japanese zero met its match in the American Peter as one side gained the upper hand with machines the other compensated with maneuvers like the barrel roll and the yo-yo the barrel roll was used against an anime that could turn more easily the attacker would simply turn the other way then roll toward his target the yo-yo kept an attacker from overshooting his time when the enemy turned the attackers simply pulled up rolled slightly and dough for the kill by the Vietnam War the lessons of dogfighting were 50 years old but no one was teaching I'd seen 11 months of that war and saw that what they were training us for it was not what was going on on the other side of the pond we were cast in a war that whether we liked it or not there was a lot of fighting and not much winning but America's losing streak was about to come to an end early in 1968 all hell broke loose in Vietnam the North Vietnamese launched the greatest attack of the war the Tet Offensive they struck a hundred cities throughout South Vietnam and fought in the very streets of Saigon by the end of the Tet Offensive most Americans wanted to end the war to help bring North Vietnam to the peace table the Pentagon ordered its pilots not to fire unless fired upon for the mating the order was a welcome reprieve its fighters were dropping like flies in May as Tet was winding down five Navy phantoms jumped to mig-21 the Phantom's launched three sparrows without a hit although outnumbered the MiGs managed to shoot down a phantom the Americans ejected to safety the next encounter wouldn't be so lucky the following month a phantom from the USS America was shot down one crewman was killed the other became a POWs it became apparent that the thing that we had considered to be the number one threat in Vietnam namely anti-aircraft fire was being supplanted by fighter kills captain Frank bolt skipper the carrier Coral Sea knew just how bad things were in two years his pilots had failed to shoot down a single MIG bolt also knew what was wrong I decided that what we needed was what I you for mystical II called a womb to tomb approach let's look at this system not just the weapon not just the airplane but the whole system the pilot they are playing the weapon womb to tomb from the day it's conceived it goes on the drawing board of the industry until finally we send it back for overhaul after firing off one memo after another alt was summoned by two Admirals to explain himself when I was called in and March of 68 I thought not knowing what was the purpose of the meeting that I was being called in to be given hell for rocking the boat and I was quick to bolster my case for all of my arguments and found I'd stepped right into the hole these guys had dug for me which was if you know so much about it why don't you go out there and solve the problem alt made 242 recommendations to solve the problem his findings became known as the alt report one of the worst problems was the treatment of the Phantoms missiles a highly technical 20th century weapon was being manhandled like a medieval cannonball what happened to it got the aircraft carrier was pretty horrifying for example the great American sailor figured that the wings of the missile were to knock the tail fins in place and we got ship loads and missiles which were damaged merely by physical hand they found out that that sparrows and Sidewinders were put on aircraft and they come in 225-250 landings at a time before they're taken off the airplane and even even taken down to the shop to analyze and two or three landings you know it's enough to bang a jar loose the electronics capability in the sparrows or the Sidewinders to negate its capability of firing even if the missiles weren't dunce pilots weren't always prepared to fire them we had pilots that were trying to fire missiles and their armament switches were not armed most of all pilots weren't trained for the kind of close quarters fighting they ran into and be about the solution lay in the most important recommendation in the alt report a new school for Navy pilots we had to happen I mean it's totally different deal it wasn't something that we built a whole board we're going to Train we're going to change something here boy put the big feather and hat that wasn't it we had to do it because too many people were dying we couldn't lose another friend we were dealing in human life this had a sense of urgency beyond anything I've ever done in my life when the OLT report was issued Dan Patterson was training rookie pilots at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego the job of forming this new school fell into his lap fella named Sam Leeds who was a contemporary of mine in the squadron came to me and he said I got something to show you and he gave me the all report and I read it and he said how would you like to take charge and put together the graduate school that's defined in here Petterson had flown with some of the Navy's best pilots from them he hadn't picked his instructions one was the pilot who made the first MIG kill of the war JC Smith we sat down and looked at that report and he said let's develop some tactics or a school let's get it built where we can change this around and save lives pilots would go back to basics to relearn lessons from the heyday of dogfight but Patterson had no airplanes no budget no textbook he didn't even have a classroom but he had an ace-in-the-hole named Steve Smith come to a point I thought Steve go find a place for the school to set up offices in a ready room to teach out of and get us going he came back about an hour later he said the base is full there's nothing yeah Steve was the kind of guy it's a true story I said I know where there are some double-wide trailers not the modern ones but an old government double-wide trailer and I said I wanted over here he said his Saturday okay as it turned out it took me two cases of beer and a Saturday and by Monday morning a building was there and there was a guy painting it for us from an old trailer and a few gallons of paint a rose a new school of air come back Top Gun 1969 Top Gun was a Quonset hut Top Gun was half a dozen small tables and chairs Top Gun was was cruise coming into the school full of enthusiasm full of passion it was instructors of the same age or younger full of that same passion that same enthusiasm and one other element which was combat experience Patterson and his instructors were flying by the seat of their pants they had only three months to figure out what their pilots needed to know and how to teach it one of the toughest jobs was simply attracting students to a school that hadn't proven it's worth we had to go around talk to the squadron CEO and we said okay what we want though we want you to send your airplane we don't have an airplane we want you to send your maintenance crew to keep these airplanes turning and your best young pilots they frequently weren't thrilled about participating in that so I would have to have suggest that they would call their Air Wing Commander and he would explain to them why they really wanted to do what I was asking him to do welcome to the best five weeks your flying career when class began at Top Gun the first lesson was the oldest rule in the book know your enemy we went back and we reviewed all the encounters our intelligence officer reviewed all the encounters that had been made to date in in Vietnam and we looked at what the makes had done and we started flying that way when Top Gun got its hands on a catch it MIG 17 the instructors could not only tell their students how deadly it was they could show them it was a sobering sight to a man the people that came up and flew against the first hop everybody said I've never seen an airplane turn like that in my life better they should see that in the western United States than over Hanoi in the Nevada skies students and instructors alike made a startling discovery the mick had a blind spot it's pilot couldn't see what was under his own nose because the MiGs jet intake was so large it gave us a real appreciation for the reliability what we're up against the fact in real life when I could look over in an instant literally an instant say he can't see me and I knew melee said he can't see me Ron McKuen would remember this lesson from the Nevada desert one afternoon in the skies over the it Nam the first class to enroll in Top Gun learned a crucial lesson about their plane The Phantom wasn't being outgun it was being outmaneuvered your first line of defense is to is to put your airplane position where he can't shoot you your second line of defense is to put your airplane in position where you can't shoot him the trick with an f4 is you might be able to get behind somebody but you have to get far enough behind him so that you have range to use your missiles and if you're too far behind him he'll be able to turn so that you're not behind him anymore in the skies of Nevada Top Gun pilots learned the MiG could turn faster than the family but the Phantom could climb faster than the MiG and keep climbing until the pilots circled over and came up behind the myth Top Gun devised a tactic to exploit the phantom strength and the MiGs weakness it was as simple as the egg you're fighting ground is shaped like an egg you go up into the vertical you come back over you can get nose tail you just don't get slow with this make we knew we could out-climb e so take advantage of what you got to there new discovery about the mig top gun added an old lesson from the days of dogfighting fight in pairs loose dues formation as we call it two airplanes flying side by side you can maneuver out of that formation in place or you can cross turn a lot of things you can do we didn't develop them that had been done before if you were an adversary trying to attack this body you as you approached you had to rapidly pick one or the other well once you committed to one you became vulnerable to the other so now we begin to work in unison and one may actually be set himself up to be a target and as the adversary would attack him the other would roll in and take advantage of that situation it's like boxing is one of the fighters kept the pressure on him and kept in turn and horizontally down on the bottom of the egg while the other guys up in the vertical top of the egg watching the fight and we just take turns go in and make a pass on him try and shooting in April 1969 after five weeks of intense training nine pilots graduated from the first class of Top Gun the first test of our real success was the reaction of the the air crews that came through the first four teams that came through they were enthusiastic bottom line question is did you learn more what did you learn it wasn't good was it good enough just learn fly the airplane like this is good the rest of it will come over in Vietnam no one knew whether Top Gun had passed the test the Navy was keeping pilots on a short leash as the peace talks dragged on a year went by and dozens of top gun graduates waited to prove themselves there were no engagements and so there was no real litmus test of whether the graduates were doing doing well or not there on March 28 1970 the test came lieutenant Gerry Bertier and his wingman were on patrol over North Vietnam when Billy a suddenly spotted tube leaning dots in the Sun makes holy a swing man took off after one day Oh da dough for the other and began the Eggman ooh the MiG fire the shot went wild the MiG tried to shake will you but he kept circling in the egg now he was looking down the MiGs tailpipe the next shot finished the mega Gerry Bodi a was a graduate of the first class of Top Gun and the first message that came out when he got his MIG was right back to Top Gun and to the rest of the Navy giving fighter weapons school credit for his MIG he didn't even take credit for himself and I've never met a fighter pilot that gave anybody else credit for anything was Top Gun truly a good school with Jerry bully a simply a great pilot or was North Vietnam just having up that day the years dragged by and the war dragged on then in December 1971 the peace talks deadlocked to break the impasse America resumed the bombing April 15 1972 mucks McEwen takes off to protect a squadron of bombers in minutes his radar intercept officer picks up a report bad news we had no more crossed the coast and we got a vector for bandits at bullet flight this is Oswald vector 2 7 8 75 miles for bandits well bogeys has unidentified bandit as confirmed hostile so I said to my ro I said did he say bandits okay he said bandits ask him again Jack I don't think he said dammit and so Jack confirmed bandits he said I confirm bandits well this is it the moment of your lifetime the defining moment of a fighter pilot thing this is it and you're saying here is it 6 o'clock in the afternoon we're going west we're going to be looking into the Sun we're going into right down town close to Hanoi but it's better than no fight at all and you kept taking the vectors from the controller steering us toward the bandits and finally about ten or twelve miles away I finally started picking up a contact right there bug spots the makers mugs called out Tallyho on the nose six eight miles something like that and he saw the glint offered the wings and they came right down between us and we we damn near had a mid-air with one of the 17 s it just canopy the canopy Jack said oh my god it's raining and I looked up and there at four make Seventeen's ring house all of a sudden there was one that Jack said 4:30 and he's gun and do your pilot stuff and I looked up and sure enough there was a guy for 30 was shooting and I can see the tracers going by mugs turned very hard into the make to try to break his tracking solution and the mig-17 had a much better turning radius than the f4 and this guy just turned his nose up like this and just as we were turning he just kept turning inside of us like that the mick now made a fatal mistake as his nose turn the Phantom disappeared right into the blind spot Ron McKuen discovered at Top Gun I looked up and said he can't see me from there and over I know good and well McEwen hit the brakes and that was all it took I came out of burner and pushed forward stick and just flew by out in front of me in the shadow at that instant another MIG was hot on the tail of their wing mayor and so I maneuvered him around and came round chef getting off the six o'clock the battle still wasn't over yet another Mick was closing in on mugs and Jack this one back here at 8 o'clock has become a threat and I'm calling for him to do something do some of that pilot stuff up there because you know we've got a guy back here at our eight o'clock so he comes back looks like that and he agreed with my assessment of it that yes this guy was threat using the egg maneuver he learned the top gun Ron went into a steep climb and circled behind the MiG the MiG fled for home I'm sure he went back in the bar that night and said I don't know about you guys but I fought King Kong outnumbered three to one The Phantom scored two kills in one day after years of fair the Navy finally had caused to rejoice Top Gun at last had proof its lessons worked but even greater proof was yet to come early morning April 22nd 1972 waning days of the Vietnam War in the gulf of tonkin two war planes take off from the USS Hancock to protect bombers striking the Mekong Delta suddenly the Hancock's air traffic controller picks up enemy planes and vectors the Phantom's for an intercept in minutes lieutenant Gary Tucker spots a low-flying mig-17 in a flawless example of the egg maneuver Tucker pulls up into a steep climb and rolls in behind the MiG the mick is a sitting duck then the unprecedented happens the mig pilot ejects he rather lose his plane than lose his life the MiGs adversary was a graduate of top gun Franco the man who rocked the Navy's boat and gambled on Top Gun and won I had no trouble at all buying the idea that this was a way to go the greatest converts were the commanders who once fought sending their best pilots to an untested school I saw what they learned and what they could teach the rest of the people in the squadron I don't think a single one didn't come back and say thank you you did a heck of a job for us as encounters between MiG's and phantoms rose lady killed sword I think 32 aircraft were shot down and 30 of those were shot down by graduates of the school among these were killed by aces Randy Cunningham and Willie Driscoll both graduates of the first top gun class of their five kills three came on a single day one of the real values of Top Gun is is their ability to take the the air crew that they train and get them prepared in such a way that when they walk out the door they have this real sense in their heart that no matter what and we mean no matter what as I'm talking about life or death hanging in the balance they can do it after I went through Top Gun there I never thought that I was going to go up and lose that it gave you the confidence that no matter who you met that your training was going to carry you through the day Willie and I wouldn't be alive today if it hadn't been for Top Gun once we sent top 10 graduates back to Vietnam they did very very well and the ratio change from 2 to 1 to 13 to 1 we were able to show in combat where it really mattered not just studies in classrooms we were able to take the ultra poor turn it into instructors that put people out the front door that dramatically improved the kill ratios in air-to-air combat Vietnam if you say was it worth it did we do the job the kill ratio at the end of the war ended up 12 to 1 in the latter 14 months in the eight-year vietnam war but a kill ratio where Navy had a kill ratio over 21 to 1 that speaks for itself what began as a seat-of-the-pants crash course has developed into the world's best air combat school but lessons are always in danger of being forgotten it's been as long since Vietnam as it was between World War one and World War two we have aviators who have spent an entire career and never been shot it I'm not going to make a judgement but you know historically we'll relearn again things that we've forgotten it's going to take innovative for setting thinking and people continue reminding us that when it comes on to work sooner or later airplanes are going to look at airplanes in the air and they got to shoot each other down the greatest lesson Top Gun taught was that the machine could never replace the man today it's much more tracker to say we have and I got your record that says I got young guy blows up but we still have never dealt with developed that machine we don't have that type of doomsday machine I don't believe we ever will the same tactics that we learn from from the earlier error engagements of history we're still germane they will win again it is never the machine it's the minute you

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Channel: mikesobola

Views: 693,942

Rating: 4.7631454 out of 5

Keywords: Top Gun, Jets, F-4, Phantom jet, Vietnam War (Military Conflict), Combat Documentary, Story, Top Gun Documentary, McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II (Aircraft Model), Mike Sobola, Brian J. Kelly, Michael A. Sobola, DC Area Video Production, DC Video Production, Dan Pederson, Pederson, Navy Fighter Weapons School, Fightertown USA, An American Story, Dan Pederson Book

Id: 16z2wqAVtkc

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 48min 4sec (2884 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 27 2015

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