In January 1983, a new member of the Red Eagles became qualified to fly the MiG-21. Maj David F. “Blazo” Bland became “Bandit 32.” As Bland got to know the ropes, Gennin continued to learn on a daily basis. Now five months into the job, there remained a number of core issues to address, but Gennin’s main challenge was that some of them he had yet to discover. “I was always concerned about what new problem was going to present itself, or what problem I had yet to learn about,” he said. To pre-empt as much of that worry as possible, he had ordered Tittle to perform no-notice inspections on the MiGs to keep the maintainers on their toes, but neither man was omnipresent or all-knowing, and some issues slipped through the net.
One of the them was the matter of fatigued or failing canopies. This had first occurred before Gennin arrived, according to Matheny: “Toast had already had a canopy start to come apart on him in the MiG-21 before he was killed in the MiG-23, but on that occasion although the canopy had started to raise, he had managed to get the MiG back down again.”
The problem wasn’t that the canopy latches were failing, but rather that the Plexiglas itself was starting to come away from the framing in which it was mounted. In addition, recalled Bucko, “Some of the canopies were getting spider web or crazing cracks all on the front canopy wind blast panel. We were worried about the things imploding, but we each knew it would happen to someone else.” That someone else was Matheny. It became standard to keep a close watch on the integrity of the canopy, but one day the former auto mechanic was involved in an incident that nearly killed him:
I was at about 18,000ft, in full afterburner, doing about 500 knots. I was doing a performance profile as an initial sortie for deployed pilots and was going to do a 180-degree turn in afterburner to show how much energy the MiG-21 bled in a turn. I was expecting to end up at about 200 knots, and the F-15 was to stay inside my turn circle to see how he could maintain it using mil power while the MiG bled airspeed like crazy. I racked the jet into the turn, and the entire canopy imploded on me.
It broke my helmet and oxygen mask off, knocked me unconscious, and cut my head up real bad. I regained consciousness headed straight down at the ground. I started hauling back on the stick, and tried to pull the throttle back, but there was a piece of Plexiglas jamming it fully open. There’s a lot of land coming up towards me and I am now supersonic heading straight down.
Thinking quickly, he reached over and pulled the Plexiglas from the throttle, and then managed to pull it to idle. He then pulled back hard on the stick to return to level flight, and started throwing the bigger pieces of canopy over the side.
Massively disorientated, unable to communicate because his flight helmet and mask were gone, covered in Plexiglas, and unable to see forward because the Fishbed’s bulletproof forward canopy had shattered, Matheny was in trouble. “I was having to stick my head out to see where I was going, but the real problem was that now the air was rushing over this unclean surface of the cockpit, a harmonic frequency began to develop. It was like somebody had taken an ice pick and stabbed it into my shoulder and then started stirring it around. It was tremendously painful.”
He decided to put the Fishbed down on a dry lakebed, and was setting up to land on “Mud Lake” in the northwest corner of the ranges. “I was concerned that I would pass out again. But then it dawned on me, ‘I can see the runway from here. Why land on a lakebed?’ So, I flew on a little and landed at Tonopah. As I was on base to land, Billy Bayer, our GCI, was able to talk the F-15 pilot’s eyes back on me. When he saw the missing canopy he communicated this to Billy who passed it on to our ops so they had a clue what the problem was. As soon as the nose wheel touched the runway, the pain in my shoulder stopped.”
Bucko was about to take-off in a MiG-23 just as Matheny landed:
He did an amazing job getting the plane on the ground and saved a very valuable asset. I was taxiing down the center of the runway to go to the far end and make a 180 turn and then take-off when I see Thug’s jet at the far end. I get there to find Jim lying on the runway with blood all over his face and people attending. Then I am cleared to make a 180, go up the runway a little and quickly take-off because we had a satellite overfly time window that I had to make. It was not very comforting to see him on the ground and it was definitely in the back of my mind ten minutes later when I was doing 800 knots trying to show a couple of F-15s that they were not going to catch me. Once again, my mindset – like most successful fatalistic fighter pilots – is, “It ain’t going to happen to me. I know this machine. I am in charge of it. It will do what I say. And if I fuck it up, I will fix it or at least look good as I hit the ground.” Another pilot in a MiG-21 taxied past the broken jet and equally broken Matheny, took one look, turned around and taxied back to parking. “He decided it was not a good day to fly!” Matheny joked.
The implosion was simply the result of age, it was later determined. “They made superb canopies that were extremely clear, but we later learned that they replaced them quite often. At the time, we didn’t know that, or if we did, we just blew it off as unimportant,” Matheny explained.
Naturally, Henderson became involved in the research and reverse engineering process for MiG canopies. A static test program on the canopies followed, and the pilots were briefed in the interim to conduct daily visual checks for early indications that a failure might be about to occur. Eventually, Henderson and Nelson located a company in southern California, Swedlow Plastics, which specialized in transparent plastics for various engineering and domestic uses. A small number of its staff signed contracts committing them to silence, and were then sent the Perspex canopies from which to make molds. The reverse-engineered copies were shipped direct to Tonopah.
Matheny had been evacuated to Nellis in one of the MU-2s.
Gen Kirby met me at the aircraft, took one look, said thanks and told the guys in the ambulance: “Get him to the emergency room ASAP!” That night all the Red Eagles got very drunk. It took quite a bit of faith to get back into the MiG again. Even when the T-38’s air conditioner would clog with ice and then clear with a sudden, loud “pop!” it would get my attention pretty quick – I found myself ducking, but I never told anyone. I think the guys all watched me closely to be sure I was OK. It was a big event – I had seen the cockpit as my office, my own personal space, and when you’re at work and in your office you don’t expect the world to cave in on you.
Matheny was awarded an Air Medal for recovering the aircraft. There was no let-up for him, though. In February, and with barely a year in the MiG-21, he was selected to start flying the MiG-23. The decision coincided with the arrival at Tonopah of Air Force Capt Stephen R. “Brownie” Brown, “Bandit 33.”
Gennin was concentrating his efforts across a range of areas. Maintenance and operations took up the bulk of that focus, but he also looked to develop further the unit’s links with the various intelligence agencies. First, he shored up his own intelligence function by building an intelligence facility on-site at Tonopah, moving his intelligence officers and enlisted personnel from Nellis to the remote airfield; then he hired additional personnel to support the intelligence mission. Next, he sent his intel officers into the intelligence communities to learn as much as they could about the MiGs. “These people didn’t volunteer this information, you had to go out and get it. My intel folks would come back with as much information as they could about operating and keeping the MiGs flying, and we would work this information into our maintenance and flight manuals.” Nelson recalled that one over-zealous intel captain had ordered new computers that not only turned out to be incompatible with each other, but also did not fit through the doorway of the purpose-built building in which they were destined to be homed.
On March 4, yet another distinguished visitor stepped out onto the Red Eagles’ ramp for a tour of the MiGs. This time it was Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger. Weinberger was just one of many, and since the arrival of the F-117 the number had increased dramatically. A VIP could now expect to tour not only the MiGs, but the mysterious-looking Stealth Fighter, too. It was the budget cycles, Gennin said, that determined who came out to see them, and the truth was that the F-117 was now the main attraction at TTR.
While most commanders believed that they spent too much of their time hosting such visits, the Red Eagles maintainers also spent time cleaning hangar floors and washing MiGs smeared with oil, grease, and hydraulic stains along their bellies and wings. Assigning a party of maintainers to clean the jets every time someone important was in town did nothing for the sortie rate of the squadron, and such distractions were unwelcome. However, Gennin wholeheartedly supported visits by these VIPs since it provided him an opportunity to show off his MiGs and obtain support and funds needed for his vision of growth and mission expansion.
He and Tittle took action and established a VIP hangar in which were permanently housed one of each of the MiGs. They were the hangar queens that had been cannibalized internally for parts, or were otherwise not airworthy, and they were cleaned and re-sprayed to look brand new. They had no engines in them, but they were kept in such a condition that they could be connected to a power supply to make all of the cockpit lights come to life. That proved more than exciting enough for most of their visitors. The floor was coated in a smooth epoxy and painted a bright gloss white, making it reminiscent of the Thunderbirds’ hangar back at Nellis, and a large red star was painted on the floor in front of the MiGs. Behind hung a massive American flag. It was a visual delight.
The visitors were often politicians, and senators from defense committees with oversight for the spending on black programs were among those who frequented the base. Other times, the VIP might be a high-ranking general. Bucko had spent some time flying Marine generals into Tonopah while he was a TOPGUN IP, before he had even joined the Red Eagles. His aim was to ensure that the top brass in the Marines realized how important it was that the Corps got to participate in the program. Gennin was now using the increasing frequency and number of VIPs to help secure additional funding and support for CONSTANT PEG, investing large quantities of his time giving tours to influential figures from all the armed services. Working closely with McCloud in the Pentagon, he was able to obtain support and funding for much-needed spare parts, the expansion of existing facilities and creation of new ones, GCI capability upgrades, and additional aircraft, all of which helped to either expand or consolidate operations at Tonopah.
As part of the public relations effort, Gennin also had all of the MiGs painted with red stars in place of the standard “stars and bars” insignia common to Air Force, Marine, and Navy aircraft. The stars did not have white borders, as was common on Soviet aircraft, but had yellow borders as a small gesture of individuality. He also had several of his MiGs painted in camouflage representative of some of America’s other enemies. This soon led to the new cover story that the 4477th TES was involved in classified tests of camouflage schemes.
The VIP hangar created the added benefit of freeing up the pilots’ time for operational matters. With Gennin keen to increase the volume and diversity of the pilots being exposed to CONSTANT PEG, he revisited the Weapons Schools with a view to increasing their benefit from the MiGs. Henderson had started the process with a dedicated 1 v 1 sortie, but Gennin wanted to develop that. With that desire in mind, the Red Eagles conducted tests to evaluate the viability of routinely flying in the Weapons Schools’ GAT phase, subsequently known as the Mission Employment (ME) phase. This was another step forward for the Red Eagles and for some, like Matheny, the tests were even more exciting than taking part in Red Flag.
ME was the last ride in an FWS student’s syllabus, and it combined everything that had been taught into one sortie that they were expected to plan, brief, lead, and debrief to the exacting standards of their IPs. Crucially, there were few rules and once either Blue Air or Red Air was called “killed” it returned directly to Nellis. Passing the course and becoming an FWS graduate depended on this sortie going well. “In those days, to fail one of these rides was a huge thing,” Matheny noted.
The tests saw the FWS students and their IPs fly up to the range space near Tonopah to tangle with the MiGs. “In those early days the rules were simple: minimum altitude of 100ft, and don’t hit each other or the ground. As I recall, the body count at the end of the tests was like 11: 27, not in their favor. I think that it was an eye opener for them to see what you could do with those airplanes if you used some advanced tactics and GCI,” recalled Matheny.
Mark “Bandit” Cummings was in the first F-15 FWIC class – 87AIN – to fly against CONSTANT PEG for their ME phase. He recalled, “I can remember killing a few single-ship Fishbeds over Cedar Pass in the Kawich mountains during ME in April 1987. My two ship was capping south of Revelle Peak. It was some great training and it paid great dividends as I went on to fly in the Gulf War out of Incirlik in 1991 during my tour at Soesterberg from 1987 to 1991. At the time I was going through the FWIC, we also flew one BFM sortie against the Fishbed. It was the easiest ride in the syllabus, ‘Guns tracking kill on the bandit.’ My friend and squadron-mate in the 9TFS at Holloman, Hawk Carlisle, used to preach to us when he was the weapons officer, ‘the MiG-21 is just a shit-heap: gun his brains out.’”
At around the time of this new ME involvement, there was increasingly more emulation being flown by the Red Eagles during the early stages of their set-ups than there had been since the first CONSTANT PEG exposures in the summer of 1978. Prior to the merge, GCI directed the MiGs while the Blue Air fighters used their radars to seek them out at beyond visual range. Now the MiGs would be flown according to whichever nation they were supposed to be representing. “Russian tactics were different from some Soviet satellite tactics,” Shervanick said by way of example. “So we would fly the appropriate tactics for the guys who were visiting. If they were from PACAF, USAFE, or TAC, we would fly the airplane according to how our enemies in those parts of the world flew theirs.”
Once at the merge, the emulation ceased and the handcuffs had come off. At that point, the CONSTANT PEG pilot metamorphosed into a fearsome adversary, as the Weapons Schools had learned so brutally. “We are here to show you what it will be like to employ your airplane against the best pilot that there can be in this airplane,” Matheny would hammer home. Following the metamorphosis at the merge, ensuring that the exercise continued to offer learning points for the Blue Air pilot rested firmly with the Red Eagle. Matheny continued: “You had to know how to fly your aircraft, and know how to fly his aircraft, so well that you could make him do something that you wanted him to do. Whether that was a Yo-Yo [a maneuver into the vertical and then back down again] or a repositioning maneuver to fall into a weapons envelope, you wanted to talk to the guy and explain to him in real time over the radio exactly what was happening. If you could do that, the light would come on and he would understand what to do.”
It took incredible skill to accomplish this – to have a three-dimensional picture of the battlespace, to be flying the MiG at the same time as mentally putting yourself in the shoes of the other pilot, and all the while to be transmitting a running commentary over the radio. Matheny elaborated:
Sometimes on an initial BFM sortie you would have to tell the guy, “OK, now’s the time to get your nose down!” or to tell him when to counter the maneuver you were currently flying. It was often not a matter that the guy didn’t have the BFM skills, but that they were just enamored with actually fighting a real MiG! We all wanted them to learn and get the most out of it; they could not just have their asses handed to them by the Red Eagles. Don’t get me wrong, all the Red Eagles will admit that there were times when they got their asses kicked by a skilled pilot in a US jet, too.
Being this good was certainly made simpler by the fact that a Red Eagle pilot could sometimes fly as many as five BFM sorties a day. The permanent arrival of the T-38s meant that a pair of the Talons could fly up to Tonopah each morning, flying a quick BFM set-up on the way. “So, before you even landed to go to work you already had a BFM sortie under your belt,” Matheny concluded.
While the deaths of Brown and Postai had created two widows and two fatherless children, CONSTANT PEG brought about less obvious sacrifices in other families, too. The secrecy surrounding the program was tough for the maintainers in particular, since they were away four nights a week and their wives could not be told where they were going. An emergency contact number at Nellis was provided in the early years, allowing a message to be left with an administrative officer in case one of the men was required to attend an emergency. Eventually, calls could be patched through to Tonopah via the Nellis switchboard, but TTR remained a secret and many men would simply refer to it as “up range” or “up north” in front of their families. Of course, much depended on the temperament of the wives in question, and while it is clear that some handled their husband’s enigmatic work lives better than others, there is no doubt that sacrifices in the quality of relationships between husbands and wives, and fathers with their sons and daughters, were made.
For the pilots, things were a little different because they often returned home each evening. But other factors were at play that complicated matters, not least of all that the pilots actively had to deceive their wives and insist they were Aggressor pilots. Eventually, Nelson said, in 1981 the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a little like the USAF’s version of the FBI, called all the wives into a meeting in an auditorium at Nellis. “Your husbands are part of a classified program. You are not going to be told what that program is. If anyone asks what your husband does, you tell them he is an Aggressor.” Nelson sympathized with his wife: “She didn’t know who I was, where I was, or what I was doing! She was kind of pissed.”
For some of the pilots, their egos wrecked or threatened to ruin their marriages. “Being picked as an Aggressor and then as a MiG pilot made you feel like you were the best,” said one. “I became a person different to the one that my wife had married, and I wasn’t the father or the husband that my family wanted in their lives. My wife tells me now that she hated me then. Despite this, she knew she was my rock, and that she would wait for the real me to return one day.” Then there was the buzz, the addition of excitement, hits of adrenalin and the sense of importance in what they were doing: “It was so thrilling, and so exciting, that I couldn’t say no to any of this. One part of you has doubts and fears, but my alter ego – the part of me with a call sign – is just so fucking excited about it that I don’t care.”
In March Bucko left the Red Eagles for his first ground tour since joining the Corps. He had accumulated 246 MiG sorties: “I would say that the split was about 100 in the MiG-23 and 146 in the MiG-21. Those are like dog years and should be times by ten for all the challenges we lived with. I was really pissed off that they were going to send me to Japan for a ground tour. I was the most qualified pilot in the Marines: I had flown every airplane that the Navy, Marines, and Air Force had, plus I had flown two types of MiGs! But I had had three exchange tours and I had to pay my dues.”
Bucko’s fini flight had angered Gennin. It had actually taken place sometime prior to March: given the Flogger’s terrible serviceability, he had been advised to take the opportunity to mark his last sortie in the MiG-23 while there was still one that was actually flyable. Things had become so bad, Bucko said, that he had flown the MiG-23 hardly at all for the last six months of his time with the Red Eagles.
From a few miles out, he had descended down to 100ft, swept the Flogger’s wings all the way back and thundered over the base just below the speed of sound, ensuring that everyone who could would come out to celebrate his final flight with him. He circled the base, repeated the pass and this time pulled up and then put the wings forward to 45 degrees – their mid position – before tucking the nose back under in a 70-degree break to align with the runway. This maneuver was prohibited as the Flogger pilots had stopped “pitching out” in the circuit some time before. Bucko had landed and parked the MiG, and then proceeded to strip naked before being sprayed by foam and water in a manner that was traditional for the Air Force. As the fire trucks opened up their hoses, Bucko ran into the crowd to ensure they got soaked, too.
The display upset Gennin so much that he couldn’t even look at the Marine for 30 minutes. “It was totally against all of TAC’s regs. I had seen a young pilot kill himself performing a similar maneuver upon returning from his last mission over Vietnam. He pitched out too fast and lost control of the airplane. Those regs were there for a reason.” The next morning, Gennin told his pilots: “If I hear about or see anyone doing that kind of thing again, you will be gone from this squadron. And I will do my best to take away your wings at the same time.”
Upon leaving, Bucko was awarded an Air Force medal in recognition of his work at Tonopah and his participation in overland ACM week from Miramar prior. “It was presented to me later on by a Marine Corps general who said to me: ‘I do not know what this is for and I know the Air Force gives everybody medals for just about anything, so here it is.’ I wanted to choke the bastard because he had no clue what I had done for my country. He also gave me shit for being away from the Marine Corps for three years and said that it was time to come back to work and stop playing around. There were many, many times that I just wanted to tell somebody what I had done and how valuable it was but it just could not be done. I still have trouble talking about it but it is the most important thing that I have accomplished in my life.”
Bucko was replaced by Air Force pilot John B. Saxman, “Bandit 34,” in March 1983. A former 64th Aggressor Squadron pilot, Saxman had been exposed to the MiGs on two different assignments. The first, as a young lieutenant, he’d flown a sortie in which he’d caught the smallest glimpse of one: “it was just a glint; a flash as it passed by me,” but his first full exposure happened years later when he was assigned to the Aggressors at Nellis, with a tour of the Red Eagles following later when he’d diverted to Tonopah with his wingman.
I got my orders [to join the Red Eagles] late one Friday night at the Nellis Officers Club, in the restroom, standing at the urinal. George Gennin walked in, greeted me with a drawn out “Saaaxxxxmmmaaannnn” in that Mississippi accent of his, and rolled into the urinal beside me. At some point in the process of relieving himself, he looked over at me (at eye level I might add) and said “How would you like to come work for me at Tonopah?” Now I was faced with a predicament … not about whether or not to take the job, but the proper protocol for accepting it while taking a leak. Since I was already doing a little “shaking,” I didn’t think dropping what I was doing and extending my hand was the best thing to do at this point … so I simply gave him a shit-eating grin and asked “When do I start?” Most memorable piss that I’ve ever taken … and I’ve taken quite a few!
As was usual, Saxman initially flew the MiG-21. “I love that airplane. I was impressed with it, and unlike some of the fighters I flew in my career, you very seldom had technical problems when you went to fly. It was fun to fly.” Later he’d fly the MiG-23, recalling: “You loved every day you turned up to fly the FISHBED, but when you were about to leave the squadron having spent time flying only the FLOGGER, you loved knowing that you were never going to have to fly that airplane again.”
In April “Bandit 35,” another former Aggressor, Maj Francis “Paco” Geisler, arrived. Geisler had been picked by the Red Eagles after Buffalo had recommended him as his eventual replacement. Myers checked him out in the MiG-21 and had explained to him how Gennin was changing the squadron. “He was looking to increase our exposure to the TAFs. We were going to start to pick two squadrons to come on TAC-directed TDYs to Nellis. They were going to arrive on a Sunday, and we were going to fly against them all week long. On Friday night we were going to have a big debrief, and then the next week we were going to start over with two new squadrons. We were going to train everybody.” Like Myers, Geisler would fly the MiGs for four days a week, but would fly the Eagle and schedule the FWS students’ exposures one day per week.
Geisler, who is loath to be addressed by any form of his Christian name, had joined the Air Force not because he had an enduring dream of flight since childhood, but as a last resort when he couldn’t find employment as a football coach in his Florida hometown. With his major in physical education, he had been told that if he joined the Air Force he could well be assigned to coach the Air Force’s football team. He agreed to join, ostensibly to go to UPT and become a pilot, but he had it in mind that he would expedite his transfer to the coaching bench of the “Falcons” by filing a “self-induced elimination” at UPT as soon as he arrived at Reece AFB, Texas. Luckily, his IP there, Capt Dwaine Hutchins, persuaded him to give it a shot. He agreed. A legendary fighter pilot and story-teller was in the making.
In May LtCdr Bud Taylor left the squadron at the same time as Capt Michael C. Roy, “Bandit 36,” and Marine Corps major George C. “Cajun” Tullos, “Bandit 37,” were qualifying to fly the MiG-21. Tullos was the Marines’ replacement for Bucko.
As the two new pilots went through the checkout process, C Flight in particular was singled out by Gennin for additional responsibilities. The gold wings had been largely left to their own devices by previous commanders, but Gennin recognized that the Navy and Marines could not afford to send anyone but their best and brightest, and that these men were valuable assets to the 4477th TES that should be utilized to their fullest potential.
Gennin used the men to help formalize the squadron’s documentation, and to thereby improve safety in the process. He looked to C Flight and a number of Air Force pilots to re-write the manuals for both the MiG-21 and MiG-23. “The Dash 1s, STAN/EVAL, and the formal training program needed to be documented to the standards TAC expected.” Gennin explained. He assigned Prins and Green with the responsibility of writing the flight and weapons manuals for the Fishbed; and Nathman and Matheny were ordered to take a rough translation of a Cyrillic version of the MiG-23 manual, and to make sense of it.
Until then, according to Matheny, a lot of learning was still being passed on by word of mouth. “We wrote manuals for how to employ the MiG-23 and how to take-off and land. Before that, if you wanted to fly the MiG-23 you would climb up into the cockpit and I would sit on the canopy rail next to you, and we’d start talking about it. You’d spend the night before your checkout at the bar, talking about the academics and trying to understand how to interpret the Russian “cumquat” gauges when you were used to English ones. Actually, it didn’t really matter what system the gauge was calibrated in, so long as the needle was pointing where it was supposed to!” The term cumquats is a play on the Russian measurement system of kilograms / square centimetre.
The translation he and Nathman had to work with was peculiar because it had been done by computer, probably using the USAF’s Air Technical Intelligence Center’s (the predecessor to the National Air Intelligence Center) automated translation computer that had first been developed by the FTD. The latest FTD system at that time was an IBM 360 Systran mainframe computer. It analyzed the Russian text sentence-by-sentence to provide improved grammar and syntax. Integrated into the IBM 360 in October 1982 was an “optical character reader” that could read original documents and convert them into digital Cyrillic characters for translation. It was all very clever, but it wasn’t perfect and the end product, that which Nathman and Matheny now had to work with, required more than a little human interpretation: Matheny revealed: “You would get sentences like: ‘The pilot from when descending to earth from altitude.’ It took some interpretation. So we did a lot of writing and re-writing of Dash 1s for the airplane. Nathman was superb at this with his test pilot background. I could barely spell ‘performance’ let alone explain it.”
Gennin had a very organized personality and was never afraid to knock heads together or fire people if they underperformed or got in the way. Those traits made him ideally suited to bringing the unit back in line with TAC standards. “The previous commanders all did a great job and played their part in taking funny airplanes and a difficult maintenance function and creating what turned out to be a great squadron,” Gennin applauded, but every commander of the Red Eagles would leave their mark, and reorganizing and firing were two of Gennin’s. Scott explicated: “The early commanders took the program forward, but some were required to stop, tighten the reins, and look at how things were done. Then there were guys who had to formalize, move it forward again, and keep it going. George Gennin was one of those: he knew what to do, and how to tell people how to do it. He was the one who made our program ‘no-kidding formal.’ Books done, manuals done in the correct Air Force- and TAC-approved methodology.”
As the Dash 1s and training manuals started to more closely resemble the TAC standard, Gennin put Shervanick to work on creating a tactics manual for the Flogger: “I wrote it in the same style as a US tactics manual. I took a compilation of many different tactics that we had seen, heard about, exploited, or obtained from other sources, and I put them into this manual with pictures and diagrams to explain them all. These were real world tactics that had been exploited from other countries.” Shervanick had been to Germany to observe the GCI tapes, and had visited a number of intelligence agencies in order to compile the manual. This was by now a standard technique, and his source material included that gathered via ELINT (electronic intelligence) and COMMINT (communications intelligence). That meant he had detailed information on the Soviet use of electronic systems such as radars, radar modes, electronic jamming and so on; and intercepted communications between the Soviet pilots and their GCI controllers. Shervanick was also able to call upon HUMINT – human intelligence – in the form of Soviet defectors. He also visited Scandinavia and Berlin on “cloak and dagger” trips that he cannot talk about to this day.
In the midst of this research effort, Shervanick had spent time in London, discussing Soviet tactics with intelligence experts from Britain’s Ministry of Defence. The trip to England was actually part of a two-way exchange of information (organized by the CIA or DIA), and he would later return to London with another Red Eagle pilot to give “one-on-one briefings on the MiG-23 to two defense experts.” Neither man was required to explain how they had such a good working knowledge of the jet – it was just “understood,” he said. “They were asking questions that were very specific. They wanted to know about the human aspect of flying the MiG-23. You can get a lot of information through observation and electronic means, but sometimes it’s important to understand what someone is actually doing when they operate the aircraft.”
He had been involved in and exposed to HAVE IDEA as an Aggressor, and was one of a small handful of pilots like Press, Scott, McCloud, and Sheffield, who were sent on special fact-gathering TDYs. When they returned with new intelligence, they would share it with the others, but they were not always permitted to tell even their fellow squadron mates how they knew. “It was just accepted. You would return and tell them: ‘This is what I learned, and this is how they do things.’ It was part of being in the black world and everybody in that world understands. It was all about being the best fighter pilot; how you got the information didn’t matter.” Most of these TDYs were organized by the CIA or DIA, and some even included sending maintainers to pick through MiG crash sites for parts, or pack up discarded MiGs in crates overnight. Then, of course, there were the TDYs that involved flying, like the Somalia trip in 1982.
The “squids” often looked at the way the Air Force operated, and noted how rigid it was in the style it ran its flying operations. By comparison, Navy and Marine units were a great deal more relaxed. There was some truth in the old saying that the Air Force had a book for all the things you were allowed to do in the air, and anything not specifically written down was prohibited; whereas the Navy’s rule book contained all the things you were not allowed to do, and anything not written down was perfectly legal.
The differences worked in the favor of the likes of Nathman, who was the Navy Officer in Charge under Gennin. “I could make a phone call and get a jet up to Tonopah to fight a MiG the same day. So, we took advantage of the rigidity in the way they scheduled things. If they had a jet abort at Nellis, they couldn’t replace it as quickly as I could call for a jet from Miramar, or Yuma or Lemoore [Naval Air Stations]. I could get a new guy in a new jet within about three hours. We felt that we could leverage that system to take advantage for the Navy guys. We weren’t trying to get ahead of the Air Force, but we wanted to maximize the opportunities. If there was a flyable MiG but no one to expose it to, then we lost a mission, and that was a waste.”
To permit this sort of flexibility with such a highly classified program, the Navy had taken to pre-briefing its young fighter pilots – reading them into CONSTANT PEG before they were even diarized to fly up to TTR for their first exposure. “We were pretty liberal about it,” explained Nathman. “These guys were all deserving of the experience, so we didn’t limit it [to] just the guys who we knew were coming. We would lean forward and take advantage of the rules so that we briefed guys we thought were likely to get exposed in the future. We’d brief the greatest number of people in a squadron that we were permitted to. In doing this, we had these guys who were pre-alerted and all we had to do was call them up and tell them to jump in a jet.”
Blue Air pilots of all three services were benefiting from Gennin’s influence and the change in attitudes that he had instilled. Nathman explained that previously sorties would be cancelled if the forecasted winds over TTR’s runway were too high. Gennin had put an end to speculative practices such as that, and instead based his decision on actual winds and weather. That meant more sorties were flown, and therefore more exposures were created.
Gennin’s biggest priority was to get as many frontline TAF pilots exposed to CONSTANT PEG as he possibly could, and 1983 was the year in which that would happen. The biggest factor influencing the number of pilots that had so far been exposed was an administrative one. Pairs of pilots from a squadron visiting Red Flag might have been pulled aside each day and read in on the program for an exposure the next day, but in a squadron of 30 pilots, there were always some who would leave the exercise without having seen the MiGs. To resolve that, TAC started ordering entire squadrons on TDY to Nellis for seven days specifically to be exposed, as opposed to just six jets and eight pilots, which had typically been the case until now. “They would get a call telling them to go to Nellis to participate in a classified program, and that they would get more information when they arrived,” Geisler explained. For these squadron-sized exposures, it become standard practice to pair up a visiting squadron with a Red Eagle whose background was in their jet fighter.
It became clear to Paco that some things would never change. When the Aggressors and Weapons School aircrews had been exposed to IDEA in the 1970s, their IPs knew as they briefed their students throughout Monday that Tuesday “was going to suck,” said Geisler. “Wednesday would get better, and Thursday and Friday they were going to be kicking their asses. It took time, and it didn’t matter how well someone briefed you on the MiGs, or how much advice they gave you on how to beat it; the first time you went out there and flew against them, you would fuck it up.”
That applied to everyone, including Geisler. Flying had come so naturally to him that he was shocked when a classmate was removed from flying training. “When a guy washed out, I looked at him and thought that he just didn’t want to do it” – he could not get his head around the fact that some just did not have the innate talent that he did. His IP in T-37s, Capt Hutchins, had flown F-4s in Vietnam and roomed at Reece with another Phantom jockey from Vietnam, Capt John Alexander. Geisler was expected to graduate near the top of his class, and would almost certainly get to fly whatever he wanted. He sat down with two vets at the bar one evening and they asked him what he wanted to fly. “You know,” he told them, “I have been looking at some books, and I really like that B-52. What a beautiful airplane.” The two fighter jocks were aghast. “They told me, ‘No, that is not going to happen. You are going to take an F-4 or an F-105, but we didn’t spend this time teaching you for you to take something just because it looks good!’” A decade later, he had finished a tour with the F-15 Weapons School as their youngest ever IP and was now teaching TAF pilots how to fight real MiGs.
“The F-15 community had been just brutal: the rules, the briefings, and the debriefing. Those years in the Eagle would set the tone for the rest of my Air Force career,” Geisler stated. Now he would apply that same honesty and candidness to his Red Eagle briefings.
I would brief a visiting Eagle squadron when they arrived on a Sunday. I would tell them, “I have over 2,000 hours in the F-15 and I know what your airplane can do, and I know what my airplane can do. I am not going to give you any breaks, but I am going to tell you how to beat me in the MiG. This is how you do it…” They’d go out there on Monday and they’d fuck it up. At the debrief, they’d all have their heads held low. You’d tell them, “Yep, it was ugly.” But then you start over again the next day and you would repeat what you had told them the day before. Now they started getting better.
As the week-long deployments for entire squadrons became more common, the operational tempo became so high that it was impossible to conduct face-to-face debriefs every time. When this was the case, the debriefings would occur over the phone. Eventually, Geisler said, it became the norm for the Red Eagles to conduct the welcome brief on the Sunday and then not meet the visiting pilots again until the big debrief the following Friday. Creech had mandated that the Red Eagles did face-to-face briefings with every pilot due to be exposed, and whilst a mass briefing at the start of the week was not what he’d had in mind, this briefing still satisfied the rule.
Individual sortie debriefs occurred on the phone after the sortie, as Geisler explained: “All of our sorties used the call sign, ‘Bandit,’ followed by the sortie number for the day. A guy at Nellis could phone up and say, ‘It’s Nickel 22 calling to phone debrief with Bandit 5.’ We would talk about the lessons learned within the limits of the unsecure area he was working in.”
To ensure that the schedule remained synchronized, the Red Eagles would call the squadron at Nellis each morning to check for changes. Geisler clarified:
Sometimes they would change the pilot for a particular sortie, and that could mean that he needed a different sortie from us, or to be exposed to a different type of asset. At Tonopah, we would then conduct our briefings – “Thug, you’re flying against Nickel 21 and he needs a MiG-23 sortie with a defensive set-up. Wiley, you’re going up against Nickel 22, and he needs a MiG-21 PP.” It could be awkward for them at first, because they were used to having face-to-face debriefs, but we just didn’t have time. They would get a four-hour in brief on the Sunday, but we couldn’t then spend another two hours face-to-face debriefing and briefing every 20-minute hop.
For the TAF pilots who had never been exposed before, the actual experience could be intimidating and some required a little coaxing before they would join up in close formation for the PP. The PP had changed only slightly over the years. It consisted of ten steps, as documented by the enigmatic kneeboard checklists that Geisler drew up for flying the MiG-21:
Sit Ht/Restraint Sys/SP Brakes
Blind Cone
Roll Rate
AB Acel [sic] – 550 Kts – 10K’ 15K’
Sustained Turn – 15K’
Instantaneous Turn – AB 450 Kts
Pitch 60 [degrees] – Slow Speed Demo
Split “S” – 250 Kts 20K’ – MIL
Lead-Lag-Lead
Tail Chase
Geisler explains more about how the exposure developed in the air:
I always had him join up, fly formation with me and get a good look at the MiG. I wanted him to know how low I sat in the cockpit, how restrained I was in the seat, and see the speed brakes deployed. Lead-lag-lead was where I would get behind him about 6,000ft and I would show him the “pursuit curves.” I called out ranges as I closed and would show him when I was pure pursuit, nose pointed straight at him for a missile shot; lead pursuit, pulling my nose ahead of him for a gun solution; and lag pursuit, when I was nose-off and just trying to preserve energy and not immediately threatening to shoot something at him.
For the tail chase, the Blue Air pilot would be able to track the MiG in his gunsight, and use his AIM-9 Sidewinder to track the heat signature of the MiG’s engine.
Day two of the week-long deployment would introduce BFM, defensive as well as offensive; followed the day after by a 2 v 2 ACM set-up. The ACM setup was the only time that the Red Eagles would emulate Soviet tactics for this particular type of CONSTANT PEG exposure (they still emulated pre-merge for the FWS), and this sortie was all about allowing the Blue Air to practice its two-ship tactics in a beyond-visual-range environment.
The deck was stacked in the two Red Eagles’ favor, Geisler explained: “We knew F-15 tactics, so we knew what he was doing at 30 miles, and we knew that at 15 miles the two of them would be taking their final lock-ons. So, we would fly this very close formation, and at exactly the right times we would maneuver. One of us might turn one way while the other guy dived in an opposite direction. Then we would wait for GCI to tell us who they were going after. If it was me, I would drag them while the other Bandit came back into the fight.”
Once these set-ups were complete, the four aircraft would split back into 1 v 1, and the real fun would begin, Geisler said: “We would then fly from 0 knots to 800 knots, maneuvering from very low altitude up to 50,000ft plus. We flew those airplanes as hard as we could. We gave them as difficult an opponent as we could.” The rationale for such overt aggressiveness was understandable when you considered the threat, as Geisler pointed out:
They made around 18,000 MiG-21s, of which about 15,000 were exported. In the mid 1980s there were 32 different countries flying it and they [the TAF] might have had to fight the MiG-21 anywhere in the world.
Our charter was not to do things half assed, and we were going to give them the full spectrum. The two squadrons would turn up on a Sunday and you would stand in front of them, and you knew that some of them were assholes and that some were pretty good guys. But it didn’t matter which one they were when we told them: “We are not here to emulate. We are going to try and give you the toughest fight we can.” That resulted in wing commanders arriving at Nellis who did not want to participate in CONSTANT PEG. They thought it was dangerous. The commanders did not want to lose a jet and were terrified by the idea. Sometimes, they would even call us up and tell us they were not coming, and TAC had to call these people up and tell them: “You are going to do this shit whether you like it or not.” But every single time they finished the program they would tell us it was the best training they had ever had.
The new computers that Gennin had bought were particularly useful for tracking the training records of the TAF pilots. The Red Eagles could peruse a database that contained the name of every pilot to have received an exposure, seeing instantly which types he had flown against, and which boxes had been ticked or remained blank for each type.
If a TAF pilot was lucky enough to be exposed to CONSTANT PEG twice (because he had changed squadrons, for example), then his training could be picked up right where it had left off. Automation and computerization like that is the norm today, but it wasn’t for most Air Force units in 1983. Dedicated points of contact – usually wing weapons officers – in every TAF wing would keep a duplicate set of these records so that the CONSTANT PEG program manager at TAC HQ, or someone from within the 4477th TES, could work with them to plan future TDYs.
Geisler and the other MiG-21 pilots had a number of tricks up their sleeves that probably exceeded anything that most Russian, Soviet, or Soviet-trained MiG pilots – usually tightly controlled by GCI and discouraged from exploring the full envelope of their jets – would attempt by a considerable margin. Getting slow with the MiG-21 when flying an F-5E may been acceptable, but the same could not be said of the F-15. Geisler’s 2,000 hours in the Eagle gave him a true appreciation for this. Slowing down the fight when he flew the MiG-21 was his first line of attack:
The first thing I would do is try and get the fight below 150 knots. Even if I could get them in a position where they were below their corner velocity [the given speed at which a fighter can generate the maximum sustained turn rate], I was putting them in a position where they were not playing to their strength. I would use a lot of rudder, and sit there with my nose up at 70 knots. I would already have told them that trying to fight me below 250 knots was going to be like trying to fight a kite, and that I knew it even better than they did because I’d flown their airplane, too. Now, they might have been able to gun an Ethiopian MiG-21 pilot in a slow-speed fight, but I was no Ethiopian.
Getting slow in the MiG-21 was easy, he explained: “Its corner velocity was about 380 knots. If I was between that and 400 knots and I went to a max G turn, I would lose 70 knots per second. From 500 knots I could be down to 70 knots of airspeed in less than 90 degrees of turn. There was not another airplane in the world that could do that – the other guy is going to overshoot you with a great deal of speed, and with absolutely no warning that you are going to still be able to point at him for a tracking shot with the gun.” Drake recalled a significantly different figure of a little over 1 knot per degree of turn: “270 degrees of turn would cost you 300 knots,” he said. Whichever figure is accurate, both agreed that the airspeed bleed rate of the Fishbed was higher than any other fighter they’d flown.
Next, he would feign a loss of pitch authority by allowing the Fishbed’s nose to suddenly drop:
They would see that and think that even though they were low-speed, they now had the advantage. When they tried to point at me, I would wait until I got back up to 90 knots and then I would point the nose back up and disappear into the sun. They would fly right by, and I would then roll in right behind them. They knew all this stuff because I had told them it in the brief, but they still let it happen.
Then we would repeat the same thing every day until they quit doing it. I’d sit there with afterburner plugged in and flaps down, sitting on my tail and still able to pull my nose up. When I told them to get slow and bury the stick in their lap, their nose was just not going to come up.
Geisler explained to them that much of the difference in nose authority at slow speed was to do with the fact that the MiG-21’s radar and nose cone weighed only 70lb, whereas the F-15’s radar and nose cone came in at 325lb. It was a lesson of importance that could be taught only because America had the MiGs.
Blue Air F-15 pilots soon learned to “extend” out of the flight by flying away from the MiG, rather than being drawn into a series of speed-sapping turns known as the scissors. Extending from the fight meant that they could re-enter the fight with lots of airspeed and use the vertical maneuvering plane and their superior thrust-to-weight ratio. The Fishbed would be unable to follow them, and they would be able to gun it or shoot a missile at it.
Keeping the Blue Air pilots on their toes throughout the remaining few days of the week was important. As they gained confidence, the level of difficulty would increase accordingly. To help keep things unpredictable, sometimes Geisler would take-off in the opposite direction than Blue Air was expecting, climb in afterburner to 50,000ft, and then make a 180-degree turn back towards his opponents. “Then you were really reliant on GCI to tell you where they were, but you would look down and see these F-15s the size of your fingernail. He doesn’t know where you are, and you come down at him doing 800 knots. You were in his stuff before he had any idea what was happening. We’d also often tell them to turn up ‘clean,’ without any external fuel tanks. ‘Come looking as though you are ready to do something! Don’t come looking as though you’re about to do a cross-country,’ we would brief.”
In June 1983, Scott left the Red Eagles. The next month he started a staff tour at TAC HQ, Langley. “I became the Aggressor manager, and the manager of the CONSTANT PEG program.” He would stay in this role, helping to grease the Red Eagles’ wheels, for two-and-a-half years.
One of the things that Scott did at Langley was find money for training aspects to CONSTANT PEG. He recalled that Dee Wilmoth was the civilian who looked after the black world money:
He was the Tonopah money guy who was responsible for the money for us and the F-117. He was very helpful to me and to the Red Eagles program from both a training perspective and an operational perspective. In order for units to come out and participate in CONSTANT PEG, they had to utilize their own funds. Likewise, when the Aggressors needed these units to come in so that they could train their new F-5E pilots, and the Weapons School needed them to visit Nellis so that they could conduct their own syllabus [using the visiting units as Red Air], the units also had to use their own funds. Well, having been integrally involved in utilization of the Nellis ranges and scheduling while I was at Nellis, I had a big picture of the requirements of all these people. So, when a unit started blocking – a wing commander started saying he couldn’t afford to spend money to come out and support the Aggressor and Weapons School syllabi, and how they should be paying him to turn up at Nellis – I would say, “Well, coming out to visit the Red Eagles would be in your interests, right?” I was then able to negotiate with Dee to get a little extra money to pay for folks to come out and fly against the Red Eagles and then stay an extra week to support the Aggressors or Weapons School.
Scott had managed to negotiate a solution that benefited both black and white worlds simultaneously. Dee was the prime player who provided the funds that enabled units to deploy to Nellis and participate in CONSTANT PEG, as well as support the Aggressor and FWIC syllabi. “He was always easy to deal with, and he always found the money.”
Scott was also heavily involved in working with Geisler to put together a good schedule to take advantage of the extra money that Wilmoth had secured. “Paco would talk to the weapons officers at the different units and would create what he thought was a good plan. Then I would promulgate a message to all the different commands, including USAFE, saying that we had openings that we wanted to schedule them to visit us. I’ll always be proud of what Paco and I achieved while I was at Langley and he was out at TTR, in terms of providing training and getting people ready to employ their jets.”
In September, LtCdr “Rookie” Robb became “Bandit 38.” He joined the 4477th TES off of the back of three consecutive tours flying the F-14. His place on the Air Force squadron was sponsored by TOPGUN, which had by now fully incorporated CONSTANT PEG into its training program. The TOPGUN brief was still as mysterious as it had been when he had flown against HAVE IDEA some eight years earlier. “They told the student that they were going to go on an operational sortie, but not what they were going to come up against.” By keeping the nature of the opponent a mystery, the Navy were further enhancing the “gee whiz” factor that caused Buck Fever.
Robb went through the same hoops as most of the other Navy and Marine pilots before he arrived at Tonopah; he arrived at the remote airstrip as a qualified TOPGUN IP and Air Force Aggressor. As an overachiever – first in his pilot training class, the first pilot to go straight to the F-14 from pilot training, and one of only two pilots in the first TOPGUN class for the F-14 – none of this posed him much of a problem. In fact, the Navy pilots being sent to the USAF’s Aggressor IP school were so good that they were exempt from the internal gunnery and air-to-air competitions that the Aggressors used to encourage excellence. “Nathman was one of the causes for this: when they added up his gun kills, it was incredibly high. They just decided that it was unfair [on the Air Force Aggressors],” explained Robb.
Robb explained his feelings on entering the 4477th TES:
Joining the Red Eagles was a great thrill for me. My job as the senior Navy guy was to manage the planning and execution of the flying we did against Navy and Marine Corps units, who would typically be allocated about one third of the bandit sorties available to be flown. The 4477th TES bore some similarities to a Navy squadron in that it maintained its own aircraft – usually, a separate Air Force squadron would maintain the aircraft. Having Navy and Marine guys inside an Air Force squadron was a good thing: we were more than ready to challenge the Air Force’s way of thinking, and we benefited from having a little more standardization put upon us. In the end, the “jointness” of this program helped all three services operate together.
Having qualified to fly the Fishbed, Robb spent another four weeks upgrading as an IP. He quickly became involved in helping to develop new threat emulations. “Since the enemy reacted to new capabilities that we had with new tactics of their own, that was an ongoing thing. It was most important to make sure that we were doing the right emulation of pre-merge tactics and so on. We were very strong at representing this pre-merge threat.”
As Robb came in, out went the Air Force falconer. In October, Gennin terminated the military bird control program and contracted the responsibility for clearing the runway of the larks to REECo, which established a civilian bird control program “on a limited basis.” Meanwhile, Corder was leaving the unit, to be replaced as ops officer by Myers. Corder’s departure left a vacancy that was filled by Capt Robert J. “Z Man” Zettel, who became “Bandit 39” and the first of Gennin’s hires to come from an organization other than Nellis – he was taken straight from the 26th TFTS at Clark. Zettel had been a Clarke Aggressor prior to being hired, working for “Brows” Holden – the man who had helped Peck check Tonopah’s suitability as an operating field all those years before. His arrival heralded a new way of hiring: Gennin had earlier visited the Military Personnel Center (MPC) at Randolph AFB, Texas, and had already given them a list of people that he wanted to work for him. He had also left them with instructions to be on the lookout for other good candidates, particularly from the FWS and other regular AF units.
Meetings at the MPC became a regular event, and were essential in what he saw as a key move to balance CONSTANT PEG’s pilots with talent from outside of Nellis. This, he said, “Was a real uphill battle. It took time to get even the generals to agree to that.”
More controversial was his decision to make it mandatory for “pilots to leave the squadron after three years, and for maintainers to leave after a similar time.” Some of the maintainers had been on the squadron or working black projects like CONSTANT PEG and HAVE programs for more than eight years, but to Gennin’s mind this was unhealthy. “It created great corporate knowledge,” he said, “but I didn’t want that. I wanted written procedures, written manuals, and maintenance checks.”
Henderson shared Gennin’s concerns over documenting the knowledge the maintainers had accrued, but he was just one of many who thought that his decision to limit a maintainer’s tour to three years was a mistake:
I could almost never get Bobby to write anything down, and there was a scary amount of information in his cranium – procedures, background data, points of contact, future plans etc. I worried all the time about his “only man” control. If something ever happened to him we would have been left floundering in the dark for a considerable amount of time. But it was critical to hold onto the experience that had been gained by years of work on systems that had no tech orders, had no major aircraft company engineers to consult, and had very limited spare parts. Those assets – the maintainers – were priceless.
Gennin was ruling with a fist of iron, with no silk glove in sight. He had designated a number of “bad actors” in the maintenance department as persona non grata, and got rid of them by transferring them to other units. “The bad actors were the ones who told me how to do my job. Or that my selection of maintenance officer was not very good,” he clarified. One of them was Ellis.
Of all of the changes that followed Gennin’s arrival at TTR, the biggest was yet to come. Gennin got rid of Ellis. “He told me that he ran maintenance. Well, he didn’t. I did. He was unwilling to conform to TAC standards, so I removed him.” Ellis’ departure had been on the cards for some time. When Gennin first arrived, he had attended a squadron function at Lake Mead. He had only been at Tonopah for a week, yet this party was enough to show him that the officers and enlisted were mixing together in a way that he believed was inappropriate – the maintainers were even calling the pilots by their first names. This, he explained, was a fundamental breach of military etiquette the world over. “You lose respect for the officer. If you go out and get drunk with the enlisted troops, you start to lose their respect. And respect is something you need to be an officer.” It was also one of the three main issues that Creech had highlighted to the new commander when he had visited Langley for the TAC commander’s approval.
The week after the party, Gennin had made it very clear that there would be no more fraternization. “Unless I said so, there were not to be any more mixed (officers and enlisted) parties. I met with the ops guys and told them, and then I met with the maintainers, and told them. They did not like it one little bit.” The maintainers moaned collectively, but one voice was louder than the rest. “Bobby Ellis’ wife called my wife and told her how I had screwed up the squadron. Then she came and visited me in my office at Nellis to tell me how I had messed it up. I told her, ‘Mrs Ellis, I appreciate your input, but I want you to understand something: I am the commander of this outfit. Your husband is not.’” It was an absurd situation; Ellis and his wife had overstepped the mark, and Gennin ran out of what little patience remained.
Removing Ellis was probably the only way that he could ever have begun to turn the maintenance function around – “Daddy” was so highly revered that the maintainers answered only to him, and certainly not to the commander. Bucko had noted this fact early on, and it was obvious to him that whatever Gibbs or Gennin had instructed a maintainer to do was given a polite nod and a “Yes, Sir,” but the maintainer would check first with Ellis before actually carrying out the order. Brad Fisher, one of the maintainers, had told me that “Ellis, not anyone else, owned the MiGs” while he was there.
This intransigence and complete break-down in the chain of command was not lost on the new commander: “When I turned up, the maintenance officer was Capt David Stringer. I was told by many that he wasn’t really in charge; Bobby Ellis was running the show. That told me all I needed to know.” Gennin had given Ellis the choice of either being fired, or retiring from the Air Force. Ellis took the latter.
There were two sides to Ellis, Henderson revealed:
Bobby Ellis was a very complex man. He had a brilliant mind with incredible retention of voluminous information. He was a walking encyclopaedia of Soviet aircraft, and he was the equivalent of having ten Russian technical representatives on site to provide support. He could tell you that a hydraulic accumulator fitting on a Su-7 would fit a MiG-17 engine fuel supply line but not on a MiG-21. He knew all MiG-17 and MiG-21 engine variants and the differences in sight and sound. He knew every single MiG spare part we had on hand at Tonopah on first name basis. He knew everyone in the US who could reverse engineer everything from fuel bladders to disk brakes. All this, without referring to a single written word, it was all in his head.
But Bobby was bull headed and nearly impossible to steer in any direction. He frustrated me more often and in more ways than any other squadron member with his independence. Even when he would appear to be compliant with a plan or proposal, I often was left with doubts about whether he truly did what I wanted. He was crafty and elusive enough to work the system and leave no visible trace.
This was Gennin’s concern – that in many instances the chief was the sole knowledge available to resolve maintenance issues, and he was unwilling to document his knowledge and experiences. Gennin said: ‘“I wanted maintenance procedures formalized and written down. I was willing to take a chance on losing some of Ellis’ knowledge to achieve that goal. The 4477th TES benefited in the long run by the departure of Ellis – a formal maintenance organization was established under Tittle that could withstand the trials of time.”
In any case, “Ellis was approaching mandatory retirement after 30 years of service,” Henderson concluded. “Tom Gibbs had asked me for help getting an Excepted Service (civilian) position approved for Ellis so he could stay on and work as the chief of maintenance. It took me several months to get it written and approved, but it never got implemented because Ellis went to work for IMI, owned by Bob Faye and Gerry Huff [who by now had presumably tempered his principles with the prospect of making great quantities of money]. Ellis went on to be a wheeling-dealing international arms dealer and was their main source of income.” Although IMI was never awarded the maintenance contract, Henderson had thought it warranted discussion. “I thought the idea of outsourcing the maintenance for the MiGs was an excellent idea and I said so in my evaluation of IMI’s unsolicited proposal. Gibbs had concurred and sent it forward to ACC manpower. It languished there well into the Gennin era and I never heard the final reason that was given for not pursuing.”
Gennin’s personal vision for the Red Eagles was to make it a “mini Weapons School. I wanted the best instructors, and I wanted guys who knew everything about our airplanes. The best instructors were at the Weapons School and TOPGUN teaching about tactics and weapons. These guys, guys like Nathman, were the best placed to write weapons and tactics manuals.”
The Red Eagles’ longest-serving FWS influence was its new ops officer, Myers. By now, he had been the squadron’s MiG-23 FCF pilot for some time, but would still marvel at its raw power every day he flew it: “Most American airplanes that I flew couldn’t go faster than the placarded limits, but every single MiG-23 I flew could go faster than the top speed allowed simply because they had so much power. In fact, the limiting factor was not power, but that the canopies would implode if you allowed the airplane to get too fast.”
Myers was an F-4 combat veteran who had been in several MiG engagements over North Vietnam, but had no confirmed kills. A graduate of the F-4 FWS, he was in the initial cadre of instructors for the F-15 FWS, and had also been in the very first F-15 Eagle class at Luke AFB, Arizona, in 1975. He had therefore built up a wealth of experience in the Eagle. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he was assigned from the 4477th TES direct to an F-15 squadron in Alaska. At Tonopah he had flown 317 MiG-21 sorties and 23 MiG-23 sorties. While Geisler had already been brought on board in advance of his former FWIC IP’s departure, Gennin went straight to the F-15 FWS to further bolster the numbers, hiring Maj Paul “Stook” Stucky.
Stucky, whom Geisler called the brother he never had, was one of the Holloman Eagle pilots who had flown the AIM-9P tests against the 4477th TEF in 1978. The two had first met when they were both assigned to the 49th TFW, and he had followed Geisler to the Weapons School first as a student in May 1980, and then as an IP in June 1981. He arrived at the Weapons School in less than jovial circumstances, as the replacement for an IP and friend of Geisler, Bobby “Hostile Man” Ellis (no relation to the 4477th TES maintainer), who had been killed over the Nellis ranges following a mid-air collision with an F-5E.
Stucky had graduated pilot training in 1975 and gone to the F-4E, first being stationed at Clark AB with the 90th TFS, where he’d met some of the original members of the 26th TFTS, including Henderson (who was attached to the unit), and had roomed with Mike Scott. He’d returned to America to be sent to the 49th TFW, and six months later the wing converted to the F-15 Eagle. This was great news for the young captain, not least of all because he already had his sights set on flying the Eagle.
As a student at the F-15 Weapons School, he had bumped into Henderson at Nellis, and had been invited to spend a day at Tonopah. He had agreed without hesitation, and Henderson had personally flown him to the base in one of the Cessnas. “It really got me pumped about the program and made me want to be part of it,” Stucky recalled.
Stucky had later learned that Gennin was looking for more Weapons School IPs to come and fly with the Red Eagles: “He wanted guys who could come in and keep one foot in both worlds.” He already knew Myers, since he had been a student of his, and the big man soon introduced him to Gennin. Before long, Stucky became “Bandit 40” and the third F-15 Eagle pilot to join CONSTANT PEG.
While Gennin looked to the Weapons Schools and further afield for fresh blood, he also started analyzing the make-up of CONSTANT PEG exposures. He was happy with the initial PP on the first sortie, but reached the conclusion that the second sortie was being flown with too much aggression and that there was room to introduce complex ACM and BFM maneuvers more gradually. “We were flying limited number of national resources: we could not afford to be hotdogs when we flew these airplanes,” he stated. To that end, he would regularly review the 4477th TES’ GCI radar tapes to ensure his pilots were not showboating. He did so blatantly, in order that they knew he was not spying on them, but that he certainly was keeping a watchful eye out.
To bring the Red Eagles further in line with TAC standards, Gennin made two more important decisions early in 1983. He revoked permission for his Flogger pilots to revert to MiG-21 when the MiG-23 was grounded and, later, put an end to the previous practice of Red Eagles pilots being attached to the Aggressors, although Myers and three other F-15 and F-16 FWS IPs who would later join were permitted to continue to fly with the Weapons Schools.27
Gennin took away the dual MiG currencies purely in the interest of safety: “I did not want my pilots getting confused and crashing and killing themselves.” It was a decision that some of the MiG-23 pilots took badly, despite the dangers inherent in flipping back and forth between two foreign aircraft. The main consideration was the impact the decision would have on the quantity of Blue Air exposures, an impact Gennin had judged correctly to be minimal. This was the case because Gennin not only had an additional Fishbed and three new MiG-23s available (for a total of 15 MiGs), but also because his changes and new leadership were producing results: the 4477th TES was increasing the number of sorties it flew each month.
Eradicating his pilots’ attachments to the Aggressors was motivated completely by his desire to instill a sense of unity and discipline that was commensurate with that found in almost any TAC fighter squadron. “The days of flying for the Aggressors and showing up at Tonopah whenever it suited you were over. From now on, you were to turn up at Tonopah whether you were flying or not, and when you weren’t flying, you were to do normal squadron duties: training, STAN/EVAL, and so on.”
At the very beginning, Creech had told Gennin that he was concerned about the risk of another MiG loss, but he had noticeably “lightened up” about the prospect, Gennin said, when he saw that the 4477th TES was beginning to conform to TAC standards. Yet he still continued to call regularly, Gennin recalled. “He would ask me if I needed anything and would check on the way things were going. Since I flew back to Nellis every night, Gregory would be waiting for me.” “What in the hell have you been doing talking to Creech?” the TFWC commander would quiz him, to which he would respond, “Sir, he called me. I had to talk to him!” Later, Kirby, the 57th FWW commander, would accost him, asking, “What in the hell have you been doing talking to Creech and Gregory?” to which he would respond without hint of a smile: “Sir, Gen Creech called me and Gen Gregory met me at the airplane, so I had to talk to them.”
While he had to contend with the politics associated with his commanders, he also had to maintain a solid grip on his subordinates. On one occasion he awoke to find that his alarm clock had failed to go off and that he had missed the 0500hrs MU-2 flight out to Tonopah. No one from the squadron had called him, and the MU-2’s pilot, his newly appointed ops officer, Watley, had left without him. “I was not amused. I called Monroe up at Tonopah and told him that I wanted to see him before the end of the day. I got word that he was more nervous than a cat on a hot tin roof. Needless to say, he didn’t do it again! But Monroe was a great guy and an excellent ops officer.”
As of December 1983, the 4477th TES had a complement of nine MiG-21s (six MiG-21F-13, three MiG-21MF), six MiG-23s (two MiG-23BN Flogger Fs, serial numbers 22 and 19; and four MiG-23MS Flogger Es, serial numbers 26, 28, 31, and 32, according to Shervanick) and had flown 1,198 sorties, generating 666 exposures. The arrival of more Floggers, presumably those Egyptian examples that had been retained by the Red Hats for exploitation, had the welcome effect of helping to improve the availability of spares and an increased in-sortie ratio.
Bucko had watched two of the Floggers arrive. “I remember seeing them with their ventral fin ground-off, and I wondered aloud, ‘What kind of bad pilot would ever do that?’ If you look at a picture of the Flogger in flight, you will see that the ventral fin underneath the fuselage sticks out almost like a reflection of the vertical tail. The fin helps reduce yaw, which in turn keeps the ‘roll due to yaw issues’ at a minimum. Above Mach 2, this can be a problem.” The MiG-23’s ventral fin was so large that it would prevent the pilot from landing unless it was hydraulically folded prior to touchdown. While “Gabby” Drake, who would join the unit in March 1984, recalled that this was an automated process, Bucko was nonetheless critical of whoever had ground down the fins on the Red Eagles’ “new” jets:
Six months later, when landing the airplane in a high crosswind, I came in flat and fast and landed in a sort of three-point landing attitude. I bounced into the air a little, applied a little forward stick and got into a PIO [pilot induced oscillation] that caused me to hit the tail on the ground and grind off the fin a little even though it had folded up like it was supposed to. During the landing and PIO, one wing came really close to hitting the ground also as the crosswind got underneath it. It was a real close call and I felt for a moment like I was going to ground loop the airplane, which is hard to do on a tricycle landing gear airplane doing 150 knots!
At least he now understood how the other two Floggers had ended up in the same condition. “The Flogger was a real handful and I always treated it like a tail dragger insofar as I always tried to stay on top of the situation: I flew it from chock to chock. It kept you on the edge of your seat with excitement.”