The first time I saw it I knew. This had to be my airplane.
This I had to fly. The F-104.
I was three or four years old when I first saw a Curtiss Jenny.
It was running up, making a huge cloud of dust prior to take
off. When he went by and lifted into the air I knew it would
be airplanes for me from then on. Through the years growing
up I couldn’t wait to get into the Air Force and then,
with the F-104 always on my mind, I was accepted into the Air
Force Aviation Cadet program.
 “When I get my silver wings, I’m gonna fly a 104”,
we sang, marching in the steamy heat of Lackland Air Force
Base in the summer of ’58. Then came the T34, T37, T33;
I’d memorize the manuals and fly the planes. I was in
my element; loved every minute.
Graduating, I snagged one of two F-86 assignments. I was on
my way, though it would be a few years before I finally got
orders to join the 476th TAC Fighter Squadron at George AFB
California.
Heaven! Day fighters; 104’s; George AFB.
Now in my mid 20’s, my days and evenings are spent at
the squadron, mostly with the weapons officer who was a bigger
104 nut than even I. Tom Delashaw. “Deler”. I would
enjoy his friendship from then on. Even with his great experience
in fighters, I think he respected my dedication to the thing
he was himself so passionate about. His assistance would make
my transition into TAC and the ‘Zipper’ easy and
his friendship made our later tour in Viet Nam tolerable.
So it was that day as Deler briefed a typical training mission
for fighters; BRS and ACM. A four ship flight to the range
for (B) bomb, (R) rocket and (S) strafing runs, then climb
out for (ACM), Air Combat Maneuvering. Dog fights; fur balls;
1V1, for as long as the fuel holds out. Life never got better!
Coming off the range we break up into two flights for some
1(versus)1 stuff. It usually starts out high and slowly degrades
to really low level. In those days we didn’t have a “hard
deck” like you learned about in the movie ‘Top
Gun’. Guys now get grounded for flying below their ‘hard
deck’, an established altitude below which you WILL NOT
fly, an altitude which to you represents the ground, a ‘hard
deck’.
Nope. We had special operating areas, SOA’s, restricted
areas whose limits were surface to whatever. SOA Alpha outside
George AFB in those days ran surface to unlimited, and we were
in it. Surface to unlimited.
The 104 was designed with a single purpose in mind; climb
vertically and shoot down the enemy as you go by. If you miss,
catch him on the way down. The tactic was honed to a fine edge
by “Rich” Riccioni’s "Double-Attack",
two aircraft working in unison, one going up as the other is
coming down. Deadly.
But, take two young, aggressive pilots, put them in fighters,
release them into a restricted area with no limits and you’re
going to get something besides well rehearsed tactical practice,
your're going to get rat racing. It would, that day, nearly cost me everything.
We’d come head on to each other and pull into
the vertical as we passed. It may have been that I had a little
less fuel on board, or possibly my jet was rigged a little
tighter, or whatever, but in one engagement I topped out in
Deler’s six and there I would stay for several minutes.
We went through every gyration, slowly working our way down
to the floor of Death Valley. I remember a hard right turn
down the side of Telescope Peak, and our racing up the valley
in an easy left turn, not closing on Deler, but now both flying
very low. The 104 on the deck was that steady, no pitching
sensitivity at all. Steady. Flying very low was easy; and that
must have been when it happened.
We eventually joined up and flew back to George. The pitch
and landing were uneventful and we stopped for the arming crews
to put pins in our launchers before we taxied in. I was already
in the equipment room hanging up my chute when the crew chief
came in with “Captain, you want to come out and look
at something”? Without a concern I followed the Sergeant
out to the left wing tip of what was now his bird. The tip
tanks on a 104 are twelve feet long. They have several fins
on the end and are roughly three or four feet in diameter.
This one exhibited something special. There was a gash in the
lower surface at what would be the five o’clock position.
A gash, half an inch high, almost the full length of the tank
and clear thru the tank to the inside. A gash that told the
story of the tank’s contacting the ground at high
speed somewhere out there on the Mojave Desert. A gash only
thousands of an inch deep. I don’t recall that the fins
were damaged. Just that gash.
Funny. I probably said something like “Whoa”,
or something to convey that I was impressed, but It didn’t
bother me and by the time I was back in the flight shack having
coffee I had just about forgotten about it. No sweat. Just
one of those things. We were immortal. Nothing could REALLY
touch us – surely not scraping the ground a little – it
happens.
But it’s been a long time now. We went to war after
that. Most of us came back, left the Service but continued
to fly. Deler continued to fly 104s with the StarFighters display
team and many other fighters for the rest of his life. It ended
one day when a Hawker Hunter he was ferrying quit on take off.
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| Tom Delashaw "Fighter Pilot" |
And that inch that I never gave a second thought to at the
time; that inch between never feeling a thing and rolling up
in a ball near Furnace Creek?. It comes to mind now, from time
to time. That inch that made all the difference in everything
I have done since, all the people I’ve touched, everything,
since that day in SOA Alpha. I think about that inch now, from
time to time.
Yogi Berra said it best. “It’s a game of inches”
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