Red Eagles by Steve Davies

Author:Steve Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs
ISBN: 9781849088404
Publisher: Osprey Publishing

EJECTION SEAT UNCERTAINTY

Gennin grounded the MiGs on a number of occasions soon after assuming command. Whatever the fault, when he imposed a grounding he would issue the instruction first, and then inform his chain of command. “They saw this sort of step as being positive. My job was to fly airplanes, but I wasn’t going to fly them when they were unsafe.”

On one occasion, Tittle had discovered that the SK-1 ejection seats in the MiG-21F-13s were not being inspected periodically as they should have. Since Oberle had received the reverse-engineered pyrotechnic cartridges from the Navy labs, they had been largely neglected. “That meant that the seats were questionable. Would they work if we needed to use them? The bottom line was that we didn’t know, so I grounded the fleet,” said Gennin. He returned to the Navy and asked them to test the old carts and build new ones before he would allow the older Fishbed to fly again. The more recently acquired MiG-21s, with the newer KM-1 seats, were believed to be in good working order, Geisler recalled. With the Navy labs working quickly to test the carts, there was improved confidence in the SK-1 ejection seat of the Indonesian Fishbeds. It was just one example of the Red Eagles’ commander “forcing ‘scheduled’ maintenance practices, versus some ‘hit or miss’ maintenance practices that had been ongoing until that time. It resulted in much better MiGs to fly in the long run,” Geisler concluded.

There were more examples: “I walked out onto the ramp one day and saw this MiG-21 leaking fuel,” Gennin recalled. “I asked the maintainers what was going on, and they told me that the fuel bladders on some of the MiGs routinely leaked. So, I grounded the fleet until we repaired it.” Henderson, who investigated the leaks, explained: “The fuel bladders on the MiG-17 and MiG-21 were made of rubber and they rotted out easily. We had some reverse engineered and tried to replace most of the old Soviet bladders, but their shelf life was not very long.”

These discoveries, “backed-up by documentation,” Gennin said, had led him to draw some scathing conclusions, all of which contributed to the eventual fall from grace of Ellis and some of the other senior maintainers: “I believed that the condition of the airplanes and the fact the seats had not been checked for years was definitely known to Bobby Ellis and his maintenance folks. Over the years, the level of maintenance on the seats had hit rock bottom.” Despite this criticism, Gennin was certain that an emphasis on operations – being pressured to get the MiGs ready to fly each day – was at the root of it all. “Many aircraft were flown with known malfunctions, and these aircraft should have been fixed first. This practice, to produce sorties at the risk of safe operations, would cease.” The brief groundings of the MiG-21s allowed the new commander to ensure that all of his pilots had their T-38 currencies up-to-date – they would fly instrument check rides in the Talon, for example.

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