“The morning brief stated only, ‘Today you will be flying against an unknown threat.’ We were to attack, identify the threat, and use what the TOPGUN instructors had taught us to engage and destroy the enemy,” recalled retired two-star admiral, Jim “Rookie” Robb. “This put a great air of anticipation to the flight and as I manned the aircraft I felt an unusual level of tension, anticipation, and anxiety.” Concerned that his F-14 Tomcat might develop a mechanical fault that would prevent him from flying the sortie, Robb patted the nose of the big fighter jet. “I told it that if it broke on me now, we were through for sure.” It was the summer of 1976, and Robb was one of the first two pilots to attend the prestigious TOPGUN Navy Fighter Weapons School (FWS) in the F-14, the Navy’s hottest and newest jet fighter.
Robb and his wingman took off one at a time from Nellis AFB’s single runway, and were vectored by ground control intercept (GCI) officers to fly 30 miles northwest – straight towards Groom Lake, an airbase so secret that, save for the red hash-marked square that covered it on aeronautical charts, it did not officially exist. Pushing the throttles forward to command more thrust from the F-14’s two big TF30 afterburning turbofans, Robb accelerated the Navy’s new fleet defender to 400 knots – perhaps a little slow for the air combat that was about to happen, but not so fast that the experience would be over too quickly.
“The tension built as the mile markers ticked down. At about eight miles I could see a single spec of black through the windscreen. I was struggling to identity the dot from its outline, it was still too small.” Robb was at a clear disadvantage, even with the wings swept all the way back, his Tomcat had a 34ft wingspan. It also had a bulbous front cross section, and the sizeable 61,000lb jet could be spotted by a trained fighter pilot’s eye as far away as 10 miles. By contrast, his opponent was a diminutive little kite that weighed only 13,000lb fully loaded, and had a pencil-thin fuselage just big enough to accommodate a man and an engine.
Robb was entering a visual fight with his opponent, something that the Tomcat had not been designed for, but for which his training at TOPGUN had been intended to prepare him as a last-ditch measure. At 3 miles, he could just discern his opponent’s high “T” tail. “I knew then that it was not one of ours.”
The two jets now pointed directly at one another, and when one turned slightly to create some offset in heading, the other would adjust so that he kept pointing directly at him. It was what is known as “hot nosing.”
We continued to hot nose each other, finally passing left-to-left at about 2,000ft. It was a camouflage painted MiG-17 “Fresco” and it was all mine. I was mesmerized by the sight of it and was determined not to lose it against the desert floor. I turned hard across his tail at 7Gs, half stunned and half trying to see what he was going to do. Bleeding energy quickly as I tried to equal his turn, it became clear that I had committed to a slow speed “knife-fight” with the MiG; not the school solution to be sure. Despite my best effort to get the best turn out of the Tomcat, the MiG continued to swing behind my wing line, headed for my six.
With the Fresco sliding easily behind the Tomcat’s wing line – the defining point behind which an enemy fighter can control the fight and employ a heat-seeking missile – the TOPGUN student knew he was in trouble. “I began maneuvering defensively with all we had, but the MiG stayed glued to my turn as if it was on a piece of string attached to my jet. Soon, I heard the words, ‘We are at the hard deck [altitude limit]. Knock it off!’ The words coming out in English broke the magic of the moment and a deep sense of disappointment waved over me like coming to the end of a great ride at the amusement park. At least I didn’t have to live with the words ‘Guns kill on the F-14’ over the air, even though he could have probably made the case.”
Robb could not believe how poorly he had flown. He had “committed several deadly sins,” and knew that when he got back to Nellis he was going to have to account for each and every one in excruciating detail. He had entered the fight without a game plan or strategy; he had flown “arcing” turns that followed the predictably flat horizon; and worst of all, against all the academic advice from his instructors, he had entered a slow turning fight with a MiG-17. To top it all off, he had lost track of the hard deck.
He put it best: “my brain had clearly left my body soon after the initial vector from GCI.” What he had experienced was “Buck Fever,” a debilitating state of mind that in wartime cost fighter pilots their lives. Fortunately for Robb, the Russian-built MiG-17 had been flown not by the enemy, but by another US pilot.
Robb was no pushover: he’d got his call sign “Rookie” because in 1975, at the age of only 23, he became the first Navy pilot to fly the Tomcat straight from flight school – the others in his squadron were grizzled old salts who had been entrusted to fly the Tomcat because they were great pilots with many years of flying experience under their belts. “Rookie” had been selected to fly the new jet solely because he was a supremely gifted aviator who stood out from his peers.
The MiG-17 pilot called him over the radio and invited him to formate on him for close visual inspection, following which the two set up for another fight. Scribing imaginary circles in the sky, this time Robb entered a “two circle” fight, turning continuously through 720 degrees with the MiG, forcing it to bleed off speed before he suddenly fire-walled his throttles and used the Tomcat’s superior thrust to weight ratio to “explode into the vertical.” The MiG struggled to follow and just as Robb started to press home his advantage, both aircraft hit “bingo” fuel and disentangled themselves from the fight to head home. The MiG went north, back to Groom Lake, the Tomcat south, to Nellis. Although the ending had been inconclusive, Robb knew that the day would have been his had they just been able to continue another couple of turns.
Flying home, the realization hit him: “The enemy was just another airplane. It was just another airplane that could be beaten … if you kept your cool.” This realization was the basis for an entire USAF program. It was called CONSTANT PEG.