On November 13, 2006, the US Air Force officially declassified CONSTANT PEG at a press conference attended by former commanders Peck, Henderson, Manclark, and Scott. Sitting anonymously in the audience was Mike Coyle, the former MiG-21 expert from the FTD from whom the Red Eagles had learned so much. CONSTANT PEG was anything but a secret by this time, having been outed publicly first by Aviation Week & Space Technology in the mid 1980s. On the evening of the last sorties, recalls Pyatt, “We had a Dead Eagles party at Boma’s house. That day, the headline of a Las Vegas paper was about a MiG squadron. We all laughed about it, because it was supposed to be classified, and although the paper didn’t quite get it right, the wives were all ‘What the hell? Is this what you’ve been doing?!’ Of course, we couldn’t really tell them.” Next came author Robert Wilcox’s account of the squadron in his 1994 book, Screaming Eagles. A flurry of articles in the aviation press followed, but none that I read attempted to delve below the surface to find the real secrets that had been hidden all along – who, how, and why. During my interview with Gail Peck, he told me that CONSTANT PEG had been a well-kept secret, and in a sense he was actually right – the presence of MiGs at Tonopah was well known even by the time the 4477th TES shut down, but who formed the unit, how it had sourced the assets and why the idea had even come to fruition from the start had remained cloaked in secrecy.
For some of the pilots, the secret of what they had done was allowed to slip gently in the years that followed the cessation of CONSTANT PEG. In 1992, Denny Phelan received an email from an Aggressor he did not know, asking him if he had seen his “F-5” recently. He ignored the email initially, but when several more came through, he responded. The sender instructed him to check out the MiG-21 on display at Offutt AFB, where the SAC museum was located. Two years later, Phelan, his two children, and his wife visited the museum:
I was on a mission to find this MiG-21, but I told my family that we were going to drop by the museum on the way to visit one of my daughter’s friends – that was my cover story. As we walked around, I spotted this tired old MiG amongst a group of other fighters. On one side was my name, and on the other was my crew chief’s! Someone had not sanitized this airplane. I asked my family, “Do you notice anything special about this airplane?” They said, “No, it’s just an airplane.” “OK, what about the names on the side?” Then my daughter said, “Oh my God! It says ‘Major Phelan’ on the side. Is that you, Daddy?” I sort of shrugged, smiled, and said, “Hmmm. Maybe!” Later my wife said to me, “You knew that airplane was there all along, didn’t you? Is that what you were doing all those years?” I shrugged and smiled, “Hmmm. Maybe!”
What eventually happened to most of the Red Eagles’ assets remains unclear. At least five of the Indonesian YF-110B Fishbeds have found their way to museums or as gate guards around the world (one in Florida, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, another in Nevada, and one in Belgium), but none of the YF-110Cs have surfaced and one of the maintainers who left the Red Eagles in April 1988 to join the Red Hats recalled that a large hole was dug in the desert near Tonopah, and the Chinese-supplied J-7Bs were buried. This had been an ongoing practice, according to Nelson, who recollected that broken wings, engines, and even whole airframes had been buried up to 40ft deep in the desert surrounding the airfield. Pyatt agreed: “On some of the MiG-21s we couldn’t be sure how many hours they had on them. So, we decided that we would put x number of hours on them, and then we dug a hole and buried them. In a thousand years from now, someone’s going to say, ‘Wow! What is all this!?’” Finally, the fate of the MiG-23s is also unclear. At least one of the MiG-23s now resides in a museum in Europe, and another has been photographed on an Air Force weapons range, while one maintainer recalled that only two or three of the Red Eagles’ Floggers were saved from burial.
The decision to shut down CONSTANT PEG remains controversial, even today. Some believe that the MiG-21 and MiG-23 were simply not representative of a modern threat, while almost all of the Red Eagles agree that any MiG was enough to prompt Buck Fever in a Blue Air pilot – the point was always to make sure that Buck Fever was experienced first in a training environment, and for that you don’t necessarily need a MiG-29 or Su-27.
Operating a more modern air threat on the same scale as that offered by CP proved impossible in a world of shrinking defense budgets, where every cent counted. In 1992, Thompson had worked on an FME program tasked with sourcing a squadron of Su-27 Flankers to be based at Nellis as a white world Aggressor program. He’d found the Flankers, but the funds for the program were never released. When he sourced later model MiG-23s from the former East Germany for static exploitation, he was permitted to do so only if Germany paid for the cost of shipping and supplied the Floggers for free. He was successful, but it was an indication of how strapped the Air Force was for cash. The Air Force did later buy a batch of MiG-29Cs from Moldova that would otherwise have been destined for Iran, but there was never any intention of operating these as Aggressors.
While CONSTANT PEG closed down in March 1988, the 4477th TES was not officially inactivated until as late as July 1990, according to one official Air Force history. There are some interesting clues about exactly what happened next. What is clear is that while CONSTANT PEG was shut down, the 4477th TES itself remained active. In 2009, while at a book signing at Nellis, a man approached me, directed me not to ask any questions, and requested that I simply listen to what he had to say. He thanked me for telling the story of the Red Eagles, and with that he pressed a bronze keyring into my hand. As he turned to walk away, he told me that he had carried the keyring with him ever since he had joined the Red Eagles. It was, he said, a symbol of his appreciation. Stunned into silence, I looked at the battered object, noting the Red Eagles patch embossed into the metal. But as I turned it over I was surprised to see a different insignia: an Eagle swopping down against the backdrop of a five-pointed star. Below it is written: Det 2, 57th Wing. I recognized the patch as belonging to what is now known as Det 3, 53rd Test & Evaluation Group. It immediately became clear to me that while CONSTANT PEG ended that April day in 1988, the 4477th TES had continued to operate, which accounts in my mind for the fact that the official closing date of the squadron is listed by the Air Force as July 1990.
Later, I was finally able to see a high-resolution image of the “Fun Brothers” Bandit plaque that had been requisitioned by the Aggressors at Nellis on the basis that it was classified. I initially noted the same Det 2 patch that was on the keyring had also been added to the plaque, but as my eyes scanned the names I noted that there, at the bottom, were six additional and unfamiliar names that ended with Bandit 75. The reason for the turf war over the plaque was now abundantly clear.
My final confirmation that the MiGs had continued to be flown came from a discrepancy in some of the sortie data I had been given. I won’t expound on this in order to protect the innocent, and nor will I list the names of the additional Bandits, but I later learned that under the guise of Det 2, 57th Wing, Bandits 70–75 on the plaque, and one of the “original” Red Eagles from TTR, had continued to fly the surviving MiG-23s from Groom Lake. Curiously, these were “Continuation Training” flights that did not involve any exposure to the TAF, but simply allowed the TAC pilots to maintain a minimum number of MiG hours. One can posit that while TAC wanted CONSTANT PEG shut down, it also wanted to retain the option of exposing a much smaller selection of aircrew to the threat at some point in the future. It is also apparent that a selection of the Red Eagles’ maintainers relocated to the 4477th TES’ new home at Groom, while others still joined the Red Hats.
Shervanick was clear that when Gen Russ instructed him to shut down the squadron, he had no inkling that it would actually simply migrate somewhere else. But Pyatt recalls that within the squadron there was much speculation that this would be exactly what would happen: “It was too important to shut down completely. Okay, the airplanes were old, but the assumption was – and I have no knowledge of this – that they had some of the newer airplanes and that they were going to continue like they had in the pre-CONSTANT PEG days.”
What remained of CONSTANT PEG’s infrastructure was therefore absorbed by Det 2 of the 57th FW (formerly the 57th FWW), and this process almost certainly involved Manclark at the Pentagon.
Det 2 eventually became Det 3 of the 53rd Test & Evaluation Group (TEG), carrying over the patch on the metal keyring I was given as it did so. The USAF describes Det 3 thus:
[It is a] representative for Air Combat Command [formerly TAC] interest in USAF Foreign Materiel Exploitation, and training opportunities with Air Force Materiel Command [formerly AFSC]. The Detachment’s primary mission is to ensure USAF combat aircrew personnel are prepared to fight with the latest knowledge available through FME. DET 3 maintains an active involvement with AFMC and other services ensuring all testing is planned, executed, and reported with combat aircrew in mind. In addition, DET 3 acts as liaison for all training opportunities conducted on the Nevada Test & Training Range (the Nellis Range Complex), providing procedures and acting as subject matter experts on key systems.
In 2004 I interviewed the commander of the 53rd TEG. As I sat in his office awaiting his arrival, I noted three control sticks – all of the kind found in the latest Soviet fighters – mounted on a wooden base and displayed proudly on his wall. When I asked about them, he brushed aside my question with practiced nonchalance. On another occasion, an Air Force pilot told me that one of the senior pilots in his squadron displayed a wooden model of a Flanker on his desk. When I asked him why he thought he would do so he responded, “Well, it’s not because he thinks it’s pretty or any good!”
While little anecdotal bits of evidence can lead to false conclusions, what cannot be refuted so easily is photographic evidence that has come to light that shows the US Air Force is operating MiG-29 Fulcrum and Su-27 Flanker aircraft out of Groom Lake. In 2008, I received photographs dated 1992 in which a Su-22 Fitter is seen flying over the Nellis ranges with a T-38 escort. In 2009, images arrived in my mailbox showing a Su-27 Flanker over Groom carrying Russian Sorbtsiya active jamming pods. On another occasion, it was confirmed to me that the USAF has authored a series of “Technical Order” manuals for the Su-27 and the MiG-29. This is to say that they have created a set of “Dash 1” flight manuals and “Dash 34” weapons manuals specifically intended to act as operating manuals for the two jets. There can be only one reason why such an effort would be made to create a set of TO documents like these. It is interesting to note the progress that has been made in formalizing TOs since Gennin’s highly effective bid to formalize CONSTANT PEG in the mid 1980s.
Today, with AFMC the lead organization exploiting these aircraft on a technical basis, ACC – the new name given to TAC in 1992 – performs operational exploitation of the Flanker and Fulcrum. This apparently includes a single ride against the MiG-29 for Weapons School students (and their Navy counterparts), and will almost certainly include exposures for Weapons School instructors and selected pilots from the F-16 and F-15 Aggressors, as was the case with HAVE IDEA in the early 1970s. Additionally, as it always has, the 422nd TES at Nellis maintains a very close working relationship with Det 3 and Eglin-based units that are also covertly involved in FME.
History, then, has come full circle: the exploitation pecking order of the early HAVE programs has reasserted itself. For its share of playtime with the newest assets, ACC relies on Det 3. And Det 3’s unofficial name? The Red Eagles.