Vietnam | Tom Benjey's Weblog

Posts Tagged ‘Vietnam’

Shooting Down Balloons

February 14, 2023

Two of the planes I worked on in the Far East

An unexpected article popped up on my phone this afternoon possibly because fighter planes have recently been shooting down airborne “items.” A little background is needed as to why this got my attention. From February 1967 through mid-August 1968 I maintained the FCS of F-102 aircraft in The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand. The Deuce, as F-102s were often called, wasn’t a sexy airplane at that time. The F-106 was faster and the F-4 carried a much larger variety of weapons. Being an old plane, half of the F-102s, maybe more, were then flown by National Guard units. In spite of its age, the Delta Dagger, the plane’s official nickname, was chosen for overseas duty because it was more reliable and more easily supported logistically than the newer interceptor, the F-106.

The article linked to below tells of one pilot’s experiences flying the plane against a very fast target, the B-58 bomber. In order to better understand the article some abbreviations and acronyms need to be defined.

FCS stands for Fire Control System. This has nothing to do with putting out fires. It has to do with aiming and firing the plane’s weapons. The F-102 used the MG-10 weapons control system built by Hughes Aircraft. It used radar and infrared to seek and track targets. Most of its circuits used vacuum tubes. Only a few functions utilized solid-state components.

ECM stands for Electronic Counter Measures, devices used to defeat or confuse the interceptor’s radar.

IRST stands for Infra Red Search & Track (or sighting & tracking). An IR seeker head resembling a chrome ball was located just forward of the cockpit. Targets could be located and tracked using either radar or IR or both together. Follows is an anecdote of both methods being used together:

One day at Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam we had the radome off to do some work on the radar antenna . About the time we needed to test the system after finishing making the adjustment the adjustment an Air Policeman guarding the revetments in which our planes were stationed walked by smoking a cigarette (it was 1967). I locked the infrared onto his cigarette and shifted the mode to IR/Radar Slaved. Normally there is no external indication as to what the system is doing but, with the radome removed, the antenna is visible. With IR locked on to his cigarette and radar slaved to it, the radar antenna followed him as he walked past. He, not surprising, was unnerved by this.

If the Chinese balloon/items had floated by back in the day, F-102s very likely would have been assigned the job of shooting them down.

F-102 Vs B-58: former Deuce driver explains why no fighter aircraft could catch a Hustler supersonic bomber

Tags:F-102, Vietnam
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50 Years Ago Today

May 10, 2016

My blogs are almost always about some person or thing other than myself. This one is intentionally different. This morning’s Facebook post generated some interest in my life I hadn’t expected:

50 years ago today, I was inducted into the U.S. Air Force. I didn’t want to be there but I was about to be drafted and my dad suggested I’d have better conditions than in the Army and might learn something useful. He was right but it was a very long 3 years, 7 months and 16 days, including 18 months in The Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand.

Besides receiving well wishes from several people, I was asked about what was it I did when in the Air Force and responded with the following:

I was an Automatic Weapons Control System Technician on MG-10 and MA-1 systems. In English, I worked on the fire control radar on F-102 & F-106 interceptors.

To make sure I remembered some of the terminology correctly, I Googled the terms to unexpectedly find this written by Tim White:

PACAFUSAFETAC An Extraordinary Bunch

In the middle and late 1960s, the sophistication of high-tech electronic systems began to grow at a phenomenal rate. Fortunately, the USAF (and a few other nations) had a small number of technicians – rarely exceeding 600, worldwide–who had the ability to maintain, upgrade, and even improve upon these state-of-the-art systems. Sustained, at first, by the compelling “equality” of the Vietnam draft (a rich source of competent and intelligent recruits who otherwise would have excelled in civilian life) the switch to an all-volunteer military resulted in a slow decline in the “quality” of personnel available for this challenging task.

They were farm boys and ghetto punks; college drop-outs and those who barely passed in high school. Scoring in the top 5 percent of the population in spatial perception, electronic/mechanical aptitude, and command of language, they were some of the best and the brightest the nation had to offer.

Eventually, basically-analog systems (containing digital components) were completely replaced by digital; in many cases, the software writers had no idea how the electronics worked, and never considered the hardware to be a maintainable, alignable system. In a binary world of on/off, there was no room for a concept other than pass/fail. Maintenance mock-ups became “test stations” in a “smart machine/dumb technician” form of maintenance–and the WCS troops were no longer required. Failing components were trashed instead of repaired (because no one knew how anymore), and dependence upon “spares” grew, along with depot and manufacturer-level repair. WCS troops, as a species, started to become extinct. It was the end of an era.

I assumed the newer aircraft used digital systems but was unaware that the newer equipment does not require alignments—which were a significant part of my job—and of the shift to a “smart machine/dumb technician” approach to maintenance. Thank you for the kind words about my generation, Mr. White.