WINGS OF FURY by ROBERT K. WILCOX

Author:ROBERT K. WILCOX
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1998-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

BOOK 3 SHIFTING SANDS

10

WHILE NELLIS WAS the epicenter of U.S. fighter activity in the 1980s, there were certainly other important centers.

For instance, the navy had Miramar on the West Coast and Oceana on the East Coast. Oceana was home to VF-43, an adversary squadron that came to be known as the “College of Spank”— spank meaning the initial humbling an adversary usually gave to fleet pilots, who were the primary recipients of adversary ACM instruction.

It was their job to keep the fleet pilots up to speed in dogfighting. They’d do so with the Fleet Fighter ACM Readiness Programs, or FFARPs, which were multiweek dogfighting practices that the adversaries brought to the fleet squadrons on a regular basis.

After the 1981 Libyan shootdown, Dale Snodgrass had joined VF-43 and become the “dean of spank,” as they kiddingly called him. He had this phrase painted above his VF-43 office door. Others on the base at that time included former Key West Detachment instructor Roy Gordon, who had transitioned from the F-4 to an F-14 Tomcat, and Joe Satrapa, both of whom became “doctors of spank.”

When Satrapa retired briefly in mid-decade, his “last” request, traditionally granted to favored sons of the Oceana air wars, was to have a final fight with Snodgrass. Guns only. Dress flight suits. Although the ACMR (air combat maneuvering range) monitoring room was overflowing with pilots and others who wanted to watch the classic match, the fight ended without resolution: Snodgrass said he let up at the last moment to allow his departing friend the victory, and Satrapa acknowledges that’s probably true.

The navy also had a rejuvenated NAS Fallon, Nevada, by mid-decade. Fallon, adjacent to the Nellis ranges, was basically a bomber base, but one that would increasingly become important to navy fighters.

Following the December 1983 carrier bombing raid on Lebanon, in which a lot of things went wrong, including the downing of two navy attack planes, resulting in the death of one of the aviators, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman resolved to upgrade the navy’s strike capability. As a consequence, the navy’s Strike Warfare Center—“Strike U,” as it’s called—was created and moved from NAS Lemoore to Fallon, where it began conducting Red Flag-like exercises for carrier air wings.

The new upgraded exercises included much of the complex integration of fighters with the bombers seen in Nellis Red Flags. Fallon fighter commanders had an electrically monitored air fighting range so they could see precisely what they were doing right and wrong, and benefitted from on-the-spot experts like the Strike U instructors—among whom, eventually, was Joe Satrapa, who ended his last tour there after he reentered the navy at the special request of Secretary Lehman.

The result was that the study and development of navy fighter tactics, which were basically the same as air force tactics except for the differences between planes and their capabilities, became as centered at Fallon as they were at Topgun, VX-4 (the navy’s operational test and evaluation squadron), and in the navy’s adversary squadrons. (Eventually, Topgun was moved to Fallon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.