air combat maneuvering f14 vs russian fighters

'It started out good, but it sure got bad in a hurry,' Possum says, laughing. That's pilot talk for driving without looking. 'I was just starting to transition from my visual scan aft to forward, and Possum's visual scan from inside to outside, and we're dead,' says Yogi, who is 26 years old and has the gangly good looks of a John Travolta, in amazed indignation. Atolls are the air-to-air missiles that Russian-built MiG-21s carry, but in this exercise the word means, 'Up yours, guys, you're dead and going home with your tail between your afterburners.' Their glorious hop is all screwed up. They've been racing fat and dumb and happy like a dodo bird, and the F-5 painted in desert camouflage, no less, which stands out against the blue like a billboard - just rolled in out of nowhere, got on their tail, and simulated slipping a heat-seeking missile up their exhaust pipe. Suddenly a soft voice is saying 'Atoll' in the earphones, and by the time Possum spots the little F-5 behind them it's too late.

Great fighter pilots are always ahead of their planes, and, as his adrenaline surges up, Yogi's eyes bore into the empty blue space before him, looking for the bogeys. He'll cut the first bogey off at the pass with a head-on missile shot, and then, breaking and rolling to avoid getting hit, he'll rein the plane in and pull it around like Ivanhoe at the end of the first joust and come racing back across the skies for the other. Yogi has rehearsed this kill in his mind a dozen times. As twin white-hot flames shoot out from the plane's exhaust nozzles, the magnificent silver machine explodes forward, slamming into their backs like a truckload of bricks and hurling them through the sound barrier. With that, Yogi stops jinking, peels off to the right, and pushes the throttle all the way into afterburner. 'Roger,' says Possum, the radar intercept officer, or 'backseater.' He's already bent over his radarscope, punching buttons and looking for the tiny blips of the bogeys - hotshot instructors from Top Gun, the Navy Fighter Weapons School, flying their deadly little F-5s.

'Fight's on,' says Yogi, who is the pilot, or 'stick,' and sits up front. They're at just about the right spot, over international waters some 30 miles off Ensenada, when a voice crackles over the radio to warn of two bogeys 20 miles south. Yogi was still in junior high school when he realized that flying straight and level might be okay for some people, but if you like yanking and banking- the feeling of riding inside one of those storm-in-a-bottle souvenirs - then there's just one place for you, and that's the cockpit of a fighter plane. There are no ups or downs up here, no rights or lefts, just a barely perceptible line separating one blue from another, and that line is spinning and racing like mad in the distance. From where they sit, however, it's not their silver rocket that's rocking but the entire vast blue dome of sea and sky. He whips the stick - the steering mechanism between his legs – from side to side and the plane rolls this way and that, letting him and Possum spot anybody making for their tail. Once over the Mexican border they pick up speed, and Yogi starts jinking. They float past Mission Bay and North Island, then Possum calls out a new heading and Yogi hangs left, and they're making straight for today's action. A great beginning for a great hop.Įven the weather is great, and they’re floating in their glass bubble through a regulation Southern California blue-on-blue crystal morning – clear skies over clear sea – with white curls of foam swirling around La Jolla below. The preflight brief was short and to the point. They’re holding this thought as they blast off the oil-stained strip in their F-14 Tomcat and head out to hassle bogeys – “enemy” planes – off the coast of Ensenada. “The good ones always start out good,” Yogi says, so the only thing to do is ride them through and try not to screw up. Yogi and Possum have a theory about hops – that is, air combat maneuvers. Top Guns – by Ehud YonayĪt Mach 2 and 40,000 feet over California, it’s always high noon. Inside the bubble: a Wolfpack pilot’s view, past his “backseater” and into a wild blue filled with fellow F-14s. Be sure to read his sidebar at the bottom of the page, in which he finally got his own dogfight hop. Yonay took readers into the cockpit with incredibly vivid descriptions. This article and these photos inspired the Paramount motion picture 'Top Gun.' Think back to the days before the movie, before GoPro cameras and squadron videos on YouTube. Here's the original article from the California magazine May 1983 issue, presented as a tribute to author Ehud Yonay.

Air combat maneuvering f14 vs russian fighters