More Anecdotes

Navy A-3 Story submitted by Joe Montana [ iflewusaf@yahoo.com ]:

I thought B-66'ers might find the following story of an F-14 shoot down by an A-3 interesting since the A-3 and B-66 are siblings to some degree.

We used to fly over in the Beaufort Tactical Aircrew Combat Training System (TACTS) Range using the TACTS pods. One time we were in the ERA-3B, we were just killing time trying to keep from being a "kill". I was on the lookout for the bad guys. I was seeing plenty of jets mixing it up in DACM, nothing was going on around us.

I was looking out the back at a jet trail that was coming our way, it was about 1,000 above us. I knew it had to be a Tomcat with the wings swept forward. I called it out to the pilot, and about then we started to hear someone telling the controllers that they were lining up to take a shot on an A-3. We knew that was us, so the pilot dropped the nose and firewalled the throttles. I think we were around 400 knots, all I knew was this F-14 was coming at us trying to line us up for a shot.

The pilot asked me how close was he, I guesstimated it to be a half mile and closing fast. The pilot told us to hang on, gave a slow five count, then pulled the nose up, pulled the throttles back, dropped the flaps and gear and popped the speed brakes. We stopped like we had hit a brick wall.

The F-14 never had a chance to slow down, he passed us up before he could call "guns". The pilot then raised the gear, closed the speed brakes and firewalled the throttles again. We gained enough speed to line up on the F-14's tail, the pilot called "guns guns guns, A-3 firing on F-14".

The controllers called it a kill for us.

I heard that the crew of that F-14 didn't show up for the post debriefing at the O-Club. We had a confirmed "kill" by the TACTS range. If I remember right the crew was a student crew from Top Gun.

Just another sea story by Joe Hawkins

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