by Dale Varner, MD

  Time for a commercial break about the two fighters. I only have about 5 hours in a viper and I thought that when the hornet pilot sheepishly told me that vipers could outperform hornets, I would not feel the difference...wrong. It was very obvious in the fur ball. Hornet max G was about 7 compared to viper 9. The Hornet didn't have the thrust to weight and started turns out mushy.

Don't be fooled, the Hornet jocks can hold there own and know how to use assets of their fighter to advantage. Notice that I said, "in the fur ball," BVR, a hornet is not to be messed with. Another thing that I noticed was that corner airspeed thing that we learn about. My pilot would hall at nearly Mach to the fight and then rapidly slow to about 320 at the merge...every time. Guess it's important after all.

Anyway, back at the fight, it seemed like an eternal stare off between the fighters. We juked a couple of times but Mr. Viper didn't flinch. I thought, "We gotta break and turn into him...now!" But I didn't know where our wingman was. We turned away, hard right. I lost the viper and a couple of seconds later the ground referees announced that we were both dead. He shot us and our WM shot him....sacrifice fly?

We set up another CAP and waited shortly for the fights off call. We had used up over half of our fuel by now and one hornet had called bingo. So not much time and separation was made before fights on again. This was less organized, to me anyway. This time, from the merge, I saw the whole thing and it got me hard. We were able to turn and get behind a viper.

As we pulled hard onto his six, I thought this is it, we are going to smoke this guy! He was turning hard too. We stayed. He tried a high yo-yo just like I first read in old "KC"s writings. I saw it and more importantly, so did our driver.

Click to continue

KC-10A Extender refuels Navy EA-6B and F/A-18 fighters over Persian Gulf.

We slowed slightly and got tighter on his six but we musta been winchester by now and as yet, had not really gotten a good nose shot. Oh yeah, baby!, he pulled vert for the old my-viper-has-more-thrust-to-weight-ratio trick. Sorry, we were all going too slow by now from spent energy. We got so tight on his six that, I swear, if we didn't have a canopy, my hairs would be singed from his afterburners. He was dead, dead, dead, coulda' just thrown a hand grenade at him.

Once in the middle of this fight, we passed through another dog fight. I think our bandit was trying to get a shot off at our wing man before dying. At that point I thought, "Wow, this looks just like Top Gun the movie," when I noticed my visual fields had grayed to about 80%. I had gotten so into the coolness of it all that I forgot to grunt a bit 'o blood to my head.

Fortunately, I was in a Hornet and it really wasn't that much G...maybe 6 or so...and a quick push got my full vision back. I later thought that it was a good thing that I didn't get a quick onset 9 G in a Viper or I would have been doing the funky chicken in the back seat.

The Hornet flight had all called bingo by now.

The RTB was uneventful. I made note, as before, that the landing was not like we do at the LAN squadron. It was a quick drop and brake turn into the sand box and bamm, we stuck the run way. I thought, "what approach, there was none." We came down in formation with the wing man ON the right wing. When we touched down, the pilot said, "look above the canopy." As I did, the wing man flew about twenty feet above full after burn to come around for his landing...cooool.

Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking HERE.