A Brief History of the Douglas F-6 Missileer
March 23rd, 1968 marked the beginning of a new age in aerial combat. At 1137 local time, two US Navy F-4B Phantom II fighters, Streetcar 304 and 305, both of which were providing MiGCAP over North Vietnam for a strike by Navy and Marine Corps A-4 Skyhawks and A-7 Corsair IIs, spotted a flight of four North Vietnamese MiG-17 fighters in a low altitude circle, one of the infamous wagon wheels.
The wagon wheel was an excellent defensive formation. If Streetcar dived down to the low altitude of the MiGs and tried to engage with AIM-9 Sidewinders, another MiG would be on the collective tails of Streetcar as soon as they tried to engage while ground clutter prevented the use of AIM-7 Sparrows. Additionally, the MiGs were more maneuverable at low altitude than were the Phantoms while the wheels themselves were often placed above anti-aircraft artillery units.
However, as with nearly all things aeronautical, the success of the tactic depended on the skill of the pilots and US pilots were more skilled than their Vietnamese opponents at this point in time. Thus, Streetcar could have engaged and broken up the wheel, likely killing one or two of the enemy fighters in the process. But, much to the annoyance of Streetcar’s pilots, the pre-mission briefing had included an order that, in such an instance, Red Crown, ship-based Navy fighter control, was to be alerted and the Phantoms were to engage only in self-defense or if given the go-ahead by Red Crown.
Upon hearing of the wagon wheel, Red Crown immediately informed the Phantoms that they were not to engage, but were to observe the enemy flight and report on anything unusual.
“I was damned upset when they told me to just sit there and watch them. I was convinced that Washington had decided that it was going to decide whether or not we could take a shot against MiGs,” recalled Streetcar 304. “So I’m stewing up there, hating Red Crown, hating the President and McNamara, and hating those damned MiGs that I couldn’t touch. As I’m doing that, I think I had just finished calling McNamara a thrice-damned sonofabitch, one of the MiGs exploded. I think my RIO summed it up for both of us when he shouted out, ‘What the hell?!’ Just as he said that, a second MiG exploded, followed by a third a few seconds later. I guess that the last one figured that he had better skedaddle, because he started diving for the after the second one ate it, but he blew up and crashed after just a few seconds as well.”
Unbeknownst to Streetcar, a pair of F-6 Missileers[1], part of USS Enterprise’s air wing, which had just arrived at Yankee Station, had been flying a CAP some fifty nautical miles away. Though they had the wagon wheel on their own radars, the rules of engagement prevented them from engaging it without the positive ID that the F-4 Phantoms provided. This engagement would be but the first of many for the MiG Sniper.
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The Douglas F-6 Missileer started its life as the F6D Missileer in 1960, making its first flight in December of 1963 shortly after redesignation as the YF-6 under the Tri-Service Designation System. The Missileer, quite unusually and controversially for a fighter, was not developed on its own sake, but rather, for the benefit of a missile, the then-designated AAM-N-10 Eagle. This was, quite obviously, the complete opposite of the normal fighter development process and was subject to harsh criticism and more than one attempt to cancel it.
While such criticism seems absurd with modern hindsight, in the context of the times the criticism made perfect sense; indeed, it is far stranger that the program survived than is the harsh criticism surrounding the aircraft. While the Douglas was building the first subsonic interceptor in a decade, and one that was far less maneuverable than its supersonic and subsonic predecessors, McDonnell was starting production of a Mach 2 fighter-interceptor (that would enter service as the F4H/F-4 Phantom II), Vought had prototyped a Mach 3 fighter for the Navy’s smaller carriers (the XF8U-3, though this would not enter service), and the Air Force was building a Mach 3 bomber, the XB-70 Valkyrie, although the Valkyrie was suffering from political controversy over its cost and vulnerability compared to ICBMs. In the black world, the CIA had contracted Lockheed to build the A-12 OXCART, a reconnaissance platform designed to operate at Mach 3.4 and 90,000 feet. Is it any wonder then that the pedestrian Missileer, whose sole advertised virtues were an untested missile and an extremely long loiter time, would be looked at quite askance?
Indeed, it is highly likely that the F-6 Missileer would have been cancelled almost at its inception by departing Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates in December of 1960 had it not been for an internal Navy study that indicated the tremendous capability of the F-6 Missileer. Analyzing the defensive capabilities of Navy carrier battlegroups against projected Soviet air raids a decade hence, it was found that a CAP composed of F4H Phantom IIs made almost no contribution to fleet defense, increasing the survivable raid size by only two bandits over what the battlegroup’s SAMs alone could provide. While launching Phantoms in the midst of the raid to counter the enemy provided a significant increase, by fifteen bandits, this was only as many as an F6D CAP would provide. Most significantly, deck launched Missileers provided a 75% increase in the survivable raid size as compared to only SAMs.[1]
This increase was significant enough for Secretary Gates to forbear canceling the project while he was in office, leaving the decision to his successor, Robert McNamara. Obsessed with cutting costs, he at first attempted to use this as a means to end US Navy procurement of F-4 Phantoms. The Navy counter to this action took approximately five minutes as the Secretary of the Navy simply reclassified the F-4 Phantom as a “multirole fighter-bomber” rather than a fleet interceptor. Later, the F6D Missileer would be successfully used as an excuse for his refusal to procure the F-12 Blackbird fighters that Congress had included in the Defense Department budget, requiring the USAF to either purchase F6D Missileers or do without. The Air Force chose “without.”
When the YF-6 Missileer finally took to the skies on December 5th, 1963, it was nothing more than an empty shell. While the Eagle was a workable missile, as tests from modified A-3 Skywarriors proved, the Westinghouse AN/APQ-81 radar was not yet finished, nor was Pratt and Whitney’s TF30 turbofan engine ready yet. In their place, the prototype and pre-production aircraft were fitted with ballast in the nose and J75 turbojet engines. It was not until 1965 that both systems would be fully ready and another year until all aircraft had been fitted with their proper radars and engines.
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The Westinghouse AN/APQ-81 was the heart of the Missileer. The first production pulse Doppler radar system in the world, it was not subject to the traditional woes of ground and sea clutter, allowing the Missileer to stay at fuel-efficient altitudes while still knocking down sea-skimming targets, a far better proposition than the previous expedient of having the F-4 Phantoms drop to the target’s altitude or even lower in order to set up a Sparrow intercept. With a range of 160 nautical miles and the ability to simultaneously track up to eight different targets, it was considered to be the world’s most advanced radar, perhaps a decade ahead of its time.
Of course, high advancement does not come without cost, and radars were not the most reliable of electronics at this time to start with. Radar failures were a constant source of frustration for Missileer crews, with a Mean Time Between Failure of 45 minutes at one point. When a CAP mission was expected to last six hours, this was unacceptable. US naval planning at this point kept only two or three Missileers on CAP due to the frequency of radar failure, instead planning to use them for deck-launched intercepts. By 1970, however, the radar’s MTBF had improved to acceptable levels.
The father of the Missileer, the Eagle missile, was the most successful element of the Missileer system, and the only complaints leveled against the missile’s performance came from behind the Iron Curtain. At a grand total of 686 pounds, the missile was second in size amongst air to air missiles only to the Air Force’s AIM-47 Falcon, though it would later be eclipsed by its successor, the AIM-54 Phoenix, and the Soviet equivalent, the AA-9 Amos. In performance, however, it was second to none. Unlike its Air Force cousin, which used semi-active radar homing from launch until intercept, the Eagle only switched from semi-active radar homing to active radar homing for the terminal intercept. The 95-pound warhead was half again as large as the Sparrow III’s own warhead, allowing it to miss by even several yards but still destroy the target.
The range of the Eagle was, of course, its crowning achievement and raison d’etere. Powered by a liquid rocket motor and possessing a stated range of “in excess of one hundred nautical miles”, the Eagle made documented intercepts as far away as 78 nautical miles with the main restriction being battery life.
While designed to intercept Soviet bombers, the Eagle had a fairly successful time against fighters as well, despite a known and acknowledged issue with its maneuverability. The reason for this lies in the oft-quoted maxim that 90% of downed enemy pilots never even knew that they were under attack. Even if an aircraft is theoretically capable of outmaneuvering an enemy attack, if it is not aware that the attack is in progress, or if it becomes aware of the attack only too late, barring an error in the execution of the attack, it will succeed.
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With their explosive entry into the Vietnam War, Missileers began to acquire a great deal more respect than they had prior. Slow and unmaneuverable, the Missileer was often regarded as not even being worthy of the fighter designation by Phantom and Crusader crews. After all, it was everything that they were not and the Phantom and the Crusader followed in the lineage of previous fighters, the Crusader holding the additional honor of being the last gunfighter, though it now also carried AIM-9 Sidewinders when it hunted MiGs.
Due to justifiable Navy paranoia over the possibility of the Soviet Union gaining highly important technical knowledge from the wreck of an F-6 Missileer, they were forbidden to go feet dry over North Vietnam during their initial deployments. Even when this restriction was later relaxed, strict no-fly zones were enforced near known SA-2 missile sites. However, their ability to “reach out and touch somebody” meant that this restriction did not pose much of a hindrance.
As their participation in the war continued, the Missileer crews noticed a baffling development: They were actually being envied by other fighter crews. The Eagle missile had had a decade of gestation by the time that it entered fleet service, allowing plenty of time for bugs and kinks to be worked out. Furthermore, the Eagle was fired from a benign launch environment well within its launch parameters, unlike the Sparrow and Sidewinder which had to deal with launch from hard maneuvering aircraft against targets that were trying their hardest not to die, and often on the edge of their intercept envelope.
As a result of this, and the ability of the Missileer to simultaneously engage up to six targets at a time, the Missileer quickly racked up an impressive number of kills, with three crews making ace by the end of 1968. Initially, the Eagles were only used as MiGCAP for coastal targets or as a supplementary CAP to cover multiple strikes, finding a special use in breaking up MiG wagon wheels, often well before a strike arrived, to the consternation of the Vietnamese People’s Air Force.
On January 16th, 1970, Operation Woad began. Long proposed by Missileer crews, Operation Woad was intended to shut down the Vietnamese People’s Air Force. As day broke, a dozen F-6 Missileers reached their loiter positions off the North Vietnamese coast, scanning their radars over the Vietnamese countryside. The area around every VPAF airfield had been declared a free fire zone. Any aircraft observed taking off or loitering around the airfields or previously known MiG loiter positions or patterns was fair game, the dream of fighter pilots.
The opening shot of Operation Woad was extraordinarily anti-climactic. Nickel 105 observed a MiG-21 taking off from Phuc Yen outside of Hanoi. Establishing lock-on, Nickel 105 selected the first Eagle on the rails, confirmed that he had a solid lock-on, squeezed the trigger, and proceeded to watch helplessly as the missile carved a perfect unpowered ballistic arc into the ocean. The second missile launched perfectly fine, tracked perfectly on target, and then proceeded to do nothing, either due to failure of the active seeker or to a fuse failure. Now alerted to the presence of Missileers, the MiG popped afterburners, corkscrew climbed to 50,000 feet, dodging another Eagle in the process, and dashed towards the pair of offending Missileers at twice the speed of sound. The worst fears of the Missileers had been realized: An alert enemy fighter was after them. A fourth Eagle, snapped off by Nickel 106 again failed to bring down the by now quite annoyed fighter, who was now, as the saying went, the fox in the henhouse. As both Missileers dived for the deck in an attempt to get into the thicker air and so reduce the capability of the two AA-2 Atoll missiles carried by the MiG, the fighter swung behind Nickel 105, fired both missiles, and barreled off towards its home base. Pulling up, Nickel 106 fired a second missile at the now retreating MiG-21, successfully connecting thanks to the MiG’s poor visibility and lack of radar warning receiver. Nickel 105, however, was hit in the starboard engine and crashed into the water, with no survivors.
To be continued
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[1]In TTL, the F6D is redesignated as F-6 while the OTL F-6, the F4D Skyray, is redesignated as F-7. The F2Y Sea Dart is not redesignated as it was OTL.
[2]Actual study, contained in
Carrier Task Force Anti-Air Warfare in the 1970 Era. Only applicable to no-ECM environment, as the F6D/Eagle had already been cancelled by the time they got around to ECM environment, but Eagle armed F6D would have been far more useful than a Sparrow III armed Phantom.
[3]Designation-systems.net gives the aerodynamic range as 160 nautical miles and battery life is said to be the main restriction on the useful range of the AIM-54 Phoenix.