nonregulation Aussie hats for the same reason.
Horner’s initiation into the Skinny Innis leadership style came on the day of his first mission at Lakenheath.
That morning, he looked out the window at fog thick enough to cut with a knife. Believing that prudence was a wise course for junior officers, he reported to Major Innis in a military manner and calmly informed him that since he had never flown in actual weather, let alone the kind of fog they had outside, the major might consider finding someone else to take the mission. Major Innis looked up from the paper he was reading, glared at Horner, and snapped, “Get your ass in the air. You don’t think I’m going to fly in shit like this, do you?”
It was a case of learn or die, and he learned.
As it turned out, after Horner had been in the squadron a couple of months and proved he could hack it, Skinny let him know that he had gone to high school in Iowa with his cousin Bill Miles and had been one of his closest friends. They had both joined the Air Corps together, and gone on to get their wings.
Years later, in 1964, Innis — now a colonel — was in Saigon flying old, broken-down B-26s over South Vietnam. In those days, the U.S. government was pretending that Innis and the other Air Force people in the country were “advising” the VNAF, though, in fact, they were doing much of the fighting. Some of Skinny’s friends loved being there, because that was where the action was, and when Chuck Horner heard about that, he did what he could to get himself into the war.
When he wrote Innis to ask for his help, however, Skinny advised him to stay as far away from Vietnam as he could. Even then, Innis realized the war was destined to collapse into disaster.
? The mission of the 48th TFW was primarily nuclear strike, backed up by conventional air-to-ground and air-to-air. That meant that the pilots primarily trained in the delivery of nuclear weapons and sat alert in the European version of the SIOP (the Single Integrated Operations Plan for conducting a one-day nuclear war), just as SAC pilots did in bombers back in the States. In order to qualify in nuclear weapons delivery, they had to drop a certain number of practice bombs every six months and certify on their target. They also had to describe to a board how the weapon worked, talk through their mission, and know command and control cold — that is, they had to know who could release them to go on the mission, what procedures had to be followed in order to arm the bomb, what kind of code words they could expect, and so on.
Each training period, pilots also flew a few air-to-air and air-to-ground conventional-weapons training sorties, but they were only required to be familiar in those events — they didn’t have to qualify by achieving a specific bomb score average.
? This is how a typical nuclear delivery training sortie might go — a two-ship air-to-ground:
The lead and the wingman brief two hours before takeoff, check the weather and notices, suit up, and step to the jets about twenty minutes before start engine, which is twenty minutes before takeoff time (which is predicated on range time). After preflighting the jet and starting and checking out the systems, the two taxi to the arming area at the end of the runway. There the weapons troops take out the safety pins on the practice bomb dispenser and arm the guns by rotating a live round into the chamber and connecting the electrical plug that provides current to the bullet primer. From there the two taxi onto the runway and close the canopies. After a head nod, the brakes are released. After a second head nod, they light the afterburners and take off. A third head nod is the signal for gear up, followed by flaps up. They then turn out of traffic on the air traffic control frequency and fly a departure route, climbing to 1,000 feet on top (that is, in the clear on top of the overcast).
Since the lead planned a low level in France, they now head for the let-down point. In the meantime, the lead moves his wingman out to about 4,000 to 6,000 feet, meaning that the lead is not looking into the sun and he can clear his wingman’s six o’clock (his tail) without himself having to squint into the light. After he reaches the let-down point, he rocks his wings, which signals the wingman to join up on his wing. The wingman lines up the light on the lead’s wingtip with the star on the lead’s fuselage in order to maintain forward and aft reference, and down the two go into the weather.
The lead breaks out at 1,000 feet above the ground and kicks his wingman out by fluttering the rudder. The wingman then takes up a chase position off to one side and slightly high, about 500 feet aft of the lead’s jet. From there he can look through the lead to clear the air for other airplanes that might appear in his path. The lead’s job, meanwhile, is to fly the route and arrive at the range at the scheduled range time.
The navigation is not easy. The lead must maintain the planned speed and heading, while using a map to locate an identifiable point on the ground. If it comes into view at the precise time and the precise place that had been planned, then they are not lost. (They must not try it the other way. That is, they must not find a point on the ground and then try to find it on the map. Doing that means they are lost.)
At the Initial Point (IP) to the range, the lead switches the flight over to range frequency and calls the range officer for clearance. The wingman now splits off and makes a 360-degree turn, which will leave him about two minutes spacing on the lead’s aircraft for a nuclear over-the-shoulder delivery. Meanwhile, the lead arms his switches, gets clearance, pushes up to delivery speed, and heads toward the range.
What follows is a variation on what he practiced earlier at Nellis:
The bull’s-eye is a set of concentric circles on the ground: the outer circle is 2,000 feet in radius, the next is 1,000 feet, the next is 500, and the smallest is 100. The lead’s immediate task is to fly over a spot upwind from the bull’s-eye. For example, if he has a wind from the northeast at 20 knots and he is heading north on the run-in, he lines up his jet over the ground to the right of the bull’s-eye, waits until he is past the bull’s-eye at the prescribed offset point, lights the afterburner, and presses the pickle (the bomb-release button on top of the stick). At that point, he starts an Immelmann. At a preset angle, nose up (which primarily depends on the outside temperature and wind velocity at release point), the bomb is automatically released. Sometimes this is a twenty-five-pound practice bomb, but often it is a 2,000-pound bomb shaped like a nuclear weapon (when he releases one, his aircraft bounds like a kangaroo). The bomb then climbs to more than 30,000 feet above the ground, runs out of speed, and turns around and heads to earth. When it strikes the ground, a shotgun shell filled with white phosphorus puts out a large puff of smoke. This allows the range crew to score the hit by referencing it to the circles. Since the pilot is dropping a simulated nuclear weapon, a satisfactory score is well over 1,000 feet.
Meanwhile, at release he calls, “Off on top wet,” which means that a release light lit in his cockpit, and the bomb is in the air headed for the ground. He then rolls out so his wingman can start his run. As he comes off on top, they both enter the bombing and strafe pattern. After they expend all their bombs and bullets, they join up and start for home.
As they cross the Channel, the lead checks in with the British, so the cousins don’t scramble a fighter on them, and enter the holding pattern at Hopton beacon on the English coast (which served as the initial fix for airfields in East Anglia), until the expected approach clearance time, EAC.
When control informs him that he is cleared to penetrate, the lead switches to the Lakenheath GCA frequency and contacts the controller, who talks him down. He breaks out into the fog at 300 feet above the ground a half mile off the end of the runway, touches down, deploys his drag chute, and gingerly steps on the brakes as the jet slips and slides on the always wet runway. He turns off on the end and jettisons his drag chute. The armorers then disconnect the gun plugs and put safety pins in any remaining bombs. About this time, the wingman lands. The lead waits for him to get safetied, and then he taxis back to the ramp in front of the squadron, shuts down the jet, climbs out, and stops by maintenance debriefing. Then he goes back to the squadron and stows his gear.
After that, he and his wingman spend maybe half an hour debriefing the flight: what went right, what went wrong, why the bombs were good or bad.
No small part of the discipline of a fighter pilot derives from the debriefings after a mission.
Since these can be brutal, the lead makes
Debriefings in operational units often involve heated debate, for the stakes are incredibly high, and the participants have strong and differing opinions about what will survive and work in combat and what is just fanciful thinking. On the other hand, the debriefings in combat crew training units tend to be much more structured and much less heated. The students do not have the experience to know what is functional and dysfunctional, and the missions themselves are usually very structured. However, since every mission includes unexpected events, there is
