 |
| Lt. Vilas Bielefeldt poses with F-86F FU-351 at the Far East Air Force (F.E.A.F.) Gunnery Meet in April, 1955. |
Vilas Bielefeldt served in the U.S. Air Force from the Korean War until the end of the Vietnam War, flying a wide variety of aircraft. Vilas spent time with two units in Korea. In 1951, he served as a navigator with the 452nd Bomb Wing (light) flying the B-26 Invader, and from August 1954 to December 1955, he flew the F-86F Sabre with the 67th Fighter Squadron, 18th Fighter Bomber Wing.
CB: You flew the B-26 Invader in combat over Korea before you went to the F-86. That means you were flying during a period of transitioning from one era to another.
VB: Oh, gosh, I think I flew 46 different kinds of airplanes. Some of them were civilian; I had a pilot’s license before I went to the military. I was trying to be an airline pilot in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1949, working my way by doing double shifts, and all that. We were about ready to fly big airplanes, and then we got drafted.
CB: When did you get to Korea?
VB: I was in Korea in 1951. First, I went to pilot training in East St. Louis, and then had an FAA physical. When I got drafted, I enlisted in the Air Force – I didn’t want to be a ground pounder. So I enlisted, and they said, oh, gosh, we need pilots. So I went in as a pilot, but when I got to the last physical, I could not pass an eye check. So I went to navigator’s school in 1950. In 1951, I graduated and went to the B-26. Fortunately, being a pilot, I got chosen for an airplane that had no place for a navigator! So I flew in the co-pilot’s seat of a hard-nosed B-26 – it had eight guns in the nose, three in each wing and four in the back, four turrets with two guns each. I had a good time. I was flying in the co-pilot’s seat and I couldn’t have cared less about giving the pilot directions every now and then, because that was my job. I flew in the B-36 for a year; we had one-way missions with that thing into Russia. Then, I was accepted into pilot training and graduated into the F-86 in 1953, and went back to Korea. In the Korean War, I was there just as we were establishing the line at the 37th parallel. The Chinese had chased us all the way down to the Pusan perimeter, and then we chased them back up to about the 38th parallel, and then there was more or less a stalemate there. I was there six months and I got my 55 missions in, which was the requirement for a tour for a B-26. It was all at night. Low-level at night. Which was a fun thing, really. It’s kind of hazardous in some ways. A few guys dragged back some high power lines on the tail, and one guy on the propeller. It doesn’t work too long after it’s wound up 40 lines of power line!
CB: The night interdiction campaign was credited with helping to stop the Chinese advance down the Korean peninsula, but there were a lot of pilots and planes lost. That was before the avionics for night attack were really evolved. How did you enjoy that mission?
VB: I had a good time in it. I had gone over there as a replacement. The unit I went to was the 452nd Bomb Wing (Light). It was the Long Beach National Guard. They had been recalled to fly those airplanes, and had taken them over there. I got there, and the commies had been driven north to about the 38th Parallel, and we were replacing these National Guard guys. I was a teetotaler at that time. When I went to flying training I was a pretty good partier, but I got up one morning after a party and I was up solo and I said, jeez, you could kill yourself doing that. Two hours of sleep and feeling poorly and here you are all by yourself up next to God. I kinda quit drinking, so I was the bartender when I got over there. Those guys who were already there, they could snork it down. They were ready to go home, of course.
The B-26 was just a great airplane. Seven or eight of us second lieutenant navigators had gone over there and we were replacements, so they hadn’t assigned us to crews because people were going home and coming in. Us seven used to sit in the back of the briefing room, which was a big, dark bungalow, a mud hut. One day, after we all had seven or eight missions under our belts, here comes this guy, a captain. He’s got a crunched dungaree hat on. He doesn’t wear a flying suit; he has dungarees on like an army soldier. He’s got an army belt around him. After seven missions, us second lieutenants didn’t wear our army belt any more, no canteen and no .45 around the base. We were hot stuff, y’know. But this captain comes in and he’s got a bayonet strapped to his right leg and he’s got this .45 on, extra clips of ammunition around his belt and the bayonet, and a canteen, and a first aid kit and then he had another Sam Brown belt—all over dungarees, green army fatigues.
They introduced him as a new pilot, and we were all laughing. “Who the hell’s gonna get assigned to him? He looks like a tough cookie!” He had a big nose, but he was a good-looking man, about six foot four. We look up at the assignments, his name was Probst… and it’s Bielefeldt. Oh Christ! So he sat me down and we talked for quite a while. He said, “This is my first mission, and it’s going to be combat. I haven’t flown before. I trust you will keep me on the straight and narrow with everything that goes on on the base and in combat.” I said, “Yes sir!” He said, “Let’s go to the airplane.” I knew that airplane in and out. I sat in it all day. I had everything memorized the way a pilot should. We were just marching out the door, and I’m talking away and trying to be a nice guy. He interrupted me and said, “I believe second lieutenants march on a captain’s left, do they not?” I said “yes sir!” And I moved over and I never said another word.
We went out to the airplane and did our preflight, went to lunch and came back. By now, it’s pitch black and things aren’t going as well as they should for him in the cockpit. He’s the only pilot now, other than me sitting next to him, and I don’t pay no mind to what he was doing—except I was monitoring every damn switch he moved. By now, we were taught that you mind everything because you can get killed. So he’s thundering down the runway, and I hadn’t said a word yet. He said, “Goddamn! where’s the cowl flaps!” He has them not in trail like they were supposed to be but open. I hit the switch before he even got “Goddamn!” out! They went trail and he said thanks. After that we were great buddies!
One night we were dropping a bomb on something we thought we saw move. Now, remember, it’s pitch black, and we’re diving toward the ground. It was my job to keep my eyes closed while he fired the guns. He would call a signal and I would close my eyes while he fired the guns. When he stopped firing, I opened my eyes and said, turn right, or whatever. Anyway, as we pulled out, a lone tracer came over our heads pretty damned close. He just let loose with the worst language—he was a Cajun—and on the way down he says, “Everything armed!” And I’m hitting switches and everything. He goes right back down, and they’re still shooting, so he knows where he is. He unloaded every bomb and every round of ammunition we had on that one position. “Take that, you SOBs!” We were right down in the dirt, and I’m sure everything that was there was blown up, and we went home. He took it personally.
We did some godawful low stuff and I’ve seen the B-26 over 500 miles per hour when we still had stuff in the bomb bay. The thing was tough, and it was tough until it got to Vietnam. There, they started pulling wings off it. Some of the modern things they did with it were not conducive to longevity!
CB: After you flew 55 missions in B-26s, you come back to the states, you go through some alternate training and after a stint in Strategic Air Command, you end up back in the Far East Air Force flying the F-86 at the very end of the war. What was the typical mission in mid-1954?
VB: The only thing we’d do with it then that might involve combat was fly taunting patrols up the west coast. We’d be at 45,000 feet, probably 14 or 12 of us, and we’d put a Canberra bomber down at 20,000 feet, hoping the MiGs would come up and try to shoot down the Canberra, and we’d pounce on them. Well, hell, the MiGs were just as smart as we were, really, and they wouldn’t fall for that trick.
I got to Korea in October, and then we did not stay long. By January, we were moved back to Kadena, Okinawa. All 75 F-86s took off at once, and we flew to Kadena, and we stayed there one month. During that month we were at a base with zero buildings. Sort of like Iraq. All they had was a fuel dump, an underground fuel pumping station, and a good runway. So we lived in tents, and we had a very short runway, a 5000-foot strip, and we flew bombing missions every day. It was the beginning of the mobile air force.
Three days after we got done with that 30-day mission at Yontan, we flew back to Kadena and then the Chinese attacked the Tachen Islands in January of 1955, and I flew FU-351 down to Chaiei, Taiwan. I was the first scramble from Chiayi to fly top cover missions over the Tachen Islands. We were instructed explicitly not to get over the mainland, and not to get within three miles of the coast. Hell, the ground cover was down below, and you had no clue where you were. But you could see contrails over to the west. They would make their circles over land and we would make ours over the water, guns hot and test fired and ready to drop tanks. We’d sit up there for an hour, and then we’d come back and somebody would replace us. I got three or four of those missions before it kind of died down, they found out they weren’t going to take the Tachen Islands. They never were intending to; they just fired a lot of artillery shells at them.
CB: By this stage, 1955, there had been some time to digest the lessons of fighting the MiG. Did you get to be the beneficiary of any of that experience?
VB: When I got to Korea in 1954, most of the big-gun aces had already been transferred back to the states. They could fly 100 missions then and they were done, so they would come back to the states. There were no aces in our group when I got there in 1954. They had gone home already. I was assigned to the 18th Fighter Bomber Wing, and that was strictly an air-to-ground mission. We went up on a lot of air superiority stuff; what they did to the F-86 in the fighter squadrons was to wax the wing edges and make sure the rivets were polished to make it go faster and they very rarely carried anything; they didn’t even have bomb shackles beneath the wing. They slowed the thing down. The wing I was with was air-to-ground, so we had six bomb shackles hanging down underneath, and that slowed airplane down considerably. They did have shackles for external tanks just to give them a little time to get up there, and they fought with those shackles underneath the airplane, which is a streamlined fairing that goes over the shackles and hooks the tank to it or the bomb to it. The MiGs did the same thing, but you’d punch those off as soon as you had contact with one another.
 |
| Crew chief Ronald Laudenschlager joins Lt. Bielefeldt by FU-351. |
CB: You said all 75 aircraft went from Korea to Okinawa. These days, people don’t realize how big a deal that was.
VB: Big deal! Actually, all 75 cranked, but 75 didn’t get off the ground. I think there were four aborts on the ground at K-55, and they came down later because of maintenance problems. If you have 75 airplanes, you weren’t going to get the all off the ground in that day and age because you had too many malfunctions mechanically. We had 5 T-33s that went off at the same time in that ferry mission. We were moving. The whole unit moved. Big trucks were moving off the base with our supplies, we didn’t have many big air transports back then so a lot of stuff went to Kadena by water.
CB: In those days, the weather could radically affect the beginning or the end of a mission. How did you find your way without modern avionics and things like GPS?
VB: The only thing we had in our airplane was a box called the “coffee grinder.” It was a big radio about six inches wide and 12 inches long, and it was way down in front of the stick. There was a handle to wind it, and you had to wind it side to side as you did an old a.m. radio. It was merely an a.m. radio, is all it was, with a direction finder indicator up in your instrument panel that would point to a station. You had to tune it in and then identify it and make sure it was the right one, then click it to “DF” as they called it, or direction finder. That needle would point to the station. If you followed the needle, and made the compass coincide with the same heading, you would get to the station. Of course, the wind would affect you, and you would describe an arc going there if you didn’t compensate for that. It was very difficult. As a matter of fact, we had the same AF band that radio stations had at that time, 550 to 1700. A lot of guys would listen to music on various stations. I never could do that – I always wanted the radios turned off. Remember—if you put that thing on DF and just kept pointing it at the station, you could be 100 miles off course. It would still point to the station, but you’d be pointing in a different direction. A lot of guys got really lost by putting the plane on the nose and following that instead of following a perfect heading and putting some drift in so you through maintained five or 10 degrees drift through your hour-long course.
In the F-86, you generally flew for an hour unless you were doing a cross-country. I was just looking at my log book, and most of my flights were 55 minutes or 30 minutes. So if you flew a long course and didn’t pay attention to the drift you could be 50 miles off course and not know it. It was about four months after I left K-55 in 1955, a flight leader had a flight of four up, and he fooled around and got them so far from base, up doing air to air combat over water from Kadena, that they never made it back. They ran out of gas. They put four airplanes in the water and bailed out.
CB: Speaking of water, one of your more scary F-86 stories involved saluting departing families on a ship.
VB: On 8 January 1955, I was up on a test hop, a flight to check out aircraft systems, but it was more or less an unwritten plan that any aircraft from the 67th or any flight would salute the ship on which departing pilots and families were rotating back to the states. On this day, many of our good buddies from the 18th were on their way home. The night before there was a big party and an embarkation on a great transport ship for a leisurely trip home. All were with their families. As the ship steamed past the last visible point of Okinawa, I in the lone Sabre came over the ship, just under Mach 1, about 580 knots. I pulled up in front of the ship to about 15,000 feet and lazy-eighted the old bird back down in a diving turn to line up with the bow. The old Sabre breezed down the length of the ship at mast height at Mach 1. Everyone was on the deck waving. And I thought, Goodbye Charlie, have a good trip home, and everybody’s waving from the deck and you’re boring in on them, and I was probably less than 100 feet above the ship. At the stern of the ship, I commenced a 4-g pull up, intending to disappear into the blue, when the Sabre let out a loud explosion with a loud disturbing shudder and burble. Needless to say, the pucker string tightened. I eased off the 4 gs and eased the power back to 90 percent, checked every instrument, craning my neck to view the rear of the plane for flames. When I looked back in the cockpit, and I can still see it, almost, every gauge is as steady as a rock. There ain’t nothing wrong in the cockpit. Now what! You still got the roar!
Well, what appeared to be an explosion was not that at all. It was just that little radio compartment panel in the back flying off. Then you wonder, did it hit the ship? Well, there’s no way could it hit the ship, because I was going 550 or 600, and that thing followed me for two miles. You’re flexing the airplane, and the panel was held on with dzus fasteners—a piece of wire under the skin, and then you turned what looked like an old fashioned screw with a slot, and you’d snap that over the piece of wire with a prong that would stick out of the screw. That would hold the panels on. Well, if you flexed the airplane, a lot of times it would come loose, or the flexing of the fuselage, because it does flex, would jar it loose and it would fly off.
CB: I guess it’s lucky it didn’t hit the tail.
VB: A little piece like that wouldn’t have hurt the tail a whole lot. It could have cut into it... We had one F-86 hit a guy wire underneath a power line in North Korea, and he brought it back. There was big rip in the side—I guess he busted the guy wire. But it left a big rip in the horizontal stabilizer!
CB: When you come back from a flight like that, how do you face your crew chief? You know who he’s going to blame!
VB: I don’t know how you face him! When I landed, I didn’t know I’d lost anything. Laudenschlager came up to the airplane, and I was on a test flight... Remember, even though we were assigned to that airplane most of the time we flew some other airplane because it wasn’t feasible to be scheduled tightly with your own bird, or it was out of commission or whatever. But Luadenschlager comes up and I said, “something’s wrong with this airplane! I had a big boom!” He said, “oh yeah, you lost a panel!” I lost a panel? Well, that’s good news really! I’d been up there trying figure out what it is.
CB: The F-86 was late in the game in becoming a fighter bomber in Korea.
VB: The first ones were all fighter, air-to-air, air superiority. Our unit really got F-86s very late. I just took the airplane that John made me over to the 18th FBW Reunion that we had in Dayton this year. All of the people who are there except for about 10 were all from the F-51 outfit. That was before the F-86 got there. They were really one of the backbones of the defense of Korea in 1950 when they first got invaded. They flew two or three, four, five times a day to keep the enemy off guard, but it was losing battle because they had old airplanes. They were good, but the F-51 was an air superiority airplane too, now used for air-to ground so it doesn’t carry a lot of ordnance compared to its weight and use of fuel. It wasn’t meant for it.
CB: When the F-86 started replacing the F-51 around 1952, those guys were really pioneering the use of a jet light attack aircraft.
VB: When I transitioned… we transitioned in training from the T-6 to the T-28, which is a pretty sophisticated plane. The T-28, when you push it downhill, it’s going to rip right up to 300 or 400 miles per hour. It had seven cylinders and it wasn’t very big. It was so different, because when you jab the power on a reciprocating airplane, you have power, now. In the T-33, the next airplane I flew, it took eight seconds to wind up from idle, which was 65 percent roughly, to 100 percent. So you had to think about full throttle eight seconds before you’d need it. It would be the same as that with going to the F-86 from the F-51, which had a very fast engine in the Merlin engine. Those things, they’d rev up right now, even though it had a big, huge four-blade propeller on it. The F-86 took a few seconds to wind up from 65 to 100 percent.
CB: That must have made attacking a target, especially in a dive, a very interesting experience.
VB: It’s not the loss of instant power, or the delay in getting into power. It’s more apparent when you’re landing than when you’re attacking something. If you’re attacking something, you’re at some 3500 feet or above, depending on the steepness of the angle you want to go down at. Typically, you wouldn’t have the power very high at that point. You’d probably leave it there and just point the nose downhill. A jet airplane would then accelerate very swiftly. You’re going as fast as the airplane can go very quickly because it’s so streamlined. Whereas the propeller airplane, you’d probably have to put power on it to get the airspeed you wanted to drop a bomb or to strafe or whatever. In a jet airplane, you just added power when you wanted to pull up. You’d be sitting there at maybe, I can’t recall exactly what it was anymore, mainly because you don’t even look at the danged power instruments in a dive, because you have other things to look at, so I have difficulty telling you now what percent of power we’d have in a dive, but probably around 90. Then you’d pull it up to 100 when you wanted to pull up and get away, as soon as the bomb was gone.
CB: Was there any specialized sight for bombing, or did you use the gunsight?
VB: We used the gunsight in the airplane. The F-86 had a very sophisticated gunsight. It was a radar gunsight, and it would acquire the target way out to 3500 feet, which is a half a mile or a little more. It would actually take on a target farther than that, probably. Then we shot at about 800 feet. That thing would keep the pipper where you should hit the target with the Gs and speed that was on the airplane. As long as you kept the pipper on the target, it was going to do that. That was air to air. When you went air to ground you’d just fix that. You had a switch where you could fix the sight in the middle ad you’d depress it for whatever bomb or strafe you wanted. You’d depress it so many mils down and then the sight would just stay there, just like a fixed bombsight. It didn’t take off for any drift, like the Norden bombsight for a bomber, you could bring in the drift and kill drift, that kind of thing, and you had to move the airplane around to do that. But the F-86 just had that pipper that came up on the windscreen from a light sitting down behind the instrument panel. We were a true fighter-bomber. It had a ring around the pipper, a ring of dots—actually, they were little squares, I suppose—but when you’d get in really close, the ring would be almost solid. When you get out wider the dots would be farther away. When you had the proper data set in air-to-air, that ring would enclose the wingtips. That would give the range of when you should shoot. When you were in air to ground, you could do the same thing. If you knew the size of the truck, or the bridge or whatever you were hitting, when you set the ring on there and they coincided it was time to get and go.
CB: Did the F-86 have any vices?
VB: The F-86 on high-angle dives and/or tough air to air combat, it had a ridiculous wrinkle in its aerodynamics. That was the tuck, or the dig-in. The F-86 liked to be flown with light fingers, with light hands. And if you did that it was a very fine airplane. But if you didn’t, you could get an angle of attack that’s just a tad beyond what it should be, and it goes into a high-speed stall which would start shuddering and that would overstress the airplane. It would try to turn faster than it was built to do. That was about the only flaw I can think of with the F-86. A lot of airplanes have little things that you ought not do with it because it’s going to flip you or whatever and go out of control, or one wing would stall or the tail surfaces would stall, and then you’re out of luck because it’s going to start dropping shortly after that. But the F-86 had a high-speed stall, which is what it amounted to, and that put a lot of stress on the pilot and the airplane, of course. It was kind of like turning a car too fast around a corner. Most cars will straighten up, but sometimes you get a car beyond where it will do that and it won’t straighten up any more.
CB: Did the dig-in ever get you?
VB: One time in my case, I had my own airplane, and Laudenschlager was my crew chief. I was doing air to ground at high angle, which is 60 degrees or higher, which is considerable angle, really; you have to start pull up quite a ways from the ground, or else you’re going to be in the ground. If you’re at 10,000 feet and going 600 miles an hour in that dive, you’re going to hit the ground no matter what. You might as well just bail out because you’re going to hit the ground regardless of what you do with the airplane. You can pull it to idle, put the speed brakes out, pull the gear down—it’s going to fly off because it’s overstressed--there ain’t nothing you can do. You’re going to hit the ground. This one, I was at about 70 degrees, and we use to paint little gadgets on the side of the cockpit with a grease pencil that would indicate the angle. When that grease pencil line on the cockpit was lined up with the horizon, you’d be at 70 degrees. I was diving on a truck that I couldn’t see very well and it was a target, just a practice target out on the range, and I pressed a little bit steeper and I imagine I was at 8000 feet. Well, here come the trees, so I brought it up a little too high and next thing you know I’ve got 10 Gs on the airplane. It’s only stressed for 8.4 or so. Around 8 Gs you could pull without overstressing the airplane. So I came back, and of course the crew chief came back and said, “Well, Lieutenant, you and I are going to be using the screwdrivers” It took 400 screws to get that belly pan off before he could test the spar to see whether I’d cracked it or not. Of course, I laid under the airplane along with everybody else for four or five hours unscrewing the screws, and putting them back in, which is even worse!
They called it “dig in.” The plane would dig in if you pulled back too hard. It would do it in air-to-air also.
 |
| Lt. Bielefeldt and crew chief Ronald Laudenschlager pose with FU-351. This photo was later published in Osprey Publications’ F-86 Saber Fighter–Bomber Units Over Korea. |
CB: You and your wing-mates put an awful lot of holes in the rocks around Okinawa.
VB: Oh yeah!
CB: In that geography there, you can do that sort of practice. I imagine that the wing became very proficient in air-to-ground.
VB: Yeah, We would get pretty doggone proficient. The problem arises that on a rock like that, it was a matter of your wingman saying whether you hit it or not, because you don’t have any place out there, unless you put a boat out there, to triangulate to see if you hit it. We had a gunnery range at Yontan which is just north of Kadena a ways, it’s on most Okinawan maps, and at K-55 in Korea we had a gunnery range and we also had one in Taiwan. They had the target marked out, they had three towers, they’re manned by a person, and you drop a bomb and they can triangulate—you’d drop a 25 pound bomb, just a little bitty thing about a foot long that has a shotgun charge with black smoke. When you hit the ground a puff of smoke would come up and the guys are watching in the tower and they’d tell you, 13 feet at 20 degrees and 12 o’clock.
Out on the rock, the real practice with everybody, and we had a lot of new pilots when we got to Okinawa who were transport pilots. It’s the feel of getting the airplane off fully-loaded. You’ve got a lot of weight on when you have a full bomb load, and the airplane flies different. It was a matter of getting into the proper glide or dive and then getting to the release point so you can hit that rock or that target. Most of the time, you can look back, pull up and start turning right away and you can see the splash if you missed the rock. The rock wasn’t very big, maybe several hundred feet across. It wasn’t much of a target.
The practice that we wanted to get at Yontan for preparing to go to Taiwan was how to get off the ground at a full gross weight. The same thing was towing an air to air target. The
F-86 towing a target didn’t want to get off the ground the same way as another airplane would, where you’d wait and sit there until it flies off. The F-86 would not do that. If you left the
F-86 on the ground, the plane is nose low. If you put full throttle to it and you let it on the ground and don’t touch the stick, it’s probably going to go off the end of the runway at 250 knots and never get airborne. It’ll be at a negative angle of attack. If you try a normal take off, you pull the airplane up so the nose wheel is 16 inches above the cement as you take off. If you get that proper angle of attack, the F-86 is one of the only airplanes I’ve ever flown where, when it starts to fly, when the wings gain lift and you have the proper angle of attack, the nose will very gently head toward the sky. Coming back to land, when you lower the wheels, the airplane again will very gently lower the nose toward the ground. But, going back to take off, if you pull it back too far, say about two feet off the ground or maybe more, you’ll pull it behind the power curve, you get too high an angle of attack, and it’ll again go off the end of the runway at 250 knots and never get airborne.
This happened towing targets quite a bit. People would get the nose up; it doesn’t get off the ground because you have all this drag hanging behind you, 500 feet of cable and this six by 20 target. You’re dragging that piece of cheesecloth behind you and it doesn’t want to get off the ground right away, but you have to leave it at that angle of attack because if you keep pulling the nose up the damned thing will go off the end of the runway and never get airborne again.
We lost one F-86 this way in Korea. The pilot had never towed a target before. “How do you tow the target?” he said. Somebody told him as a joke, “Just pull the nose back a little more, a little higher.” He went right off the end of the runway. He made it! He ejected just as the airplane turned 90 degrees. What happened was he hit the barrier at the end; we had a chain barrier. He hit those chains and it bounced him up in the air. As he was up in the air he said, “This baby ain’t going to fly,” and he ejected, but he was 90 degrees to the ground and it ejected him into a rice paddy. And he lived! He wasn’t even hurt!
CB: The other thing people seem to miss these days is just how many planes were lost in the military during the 1950s.
VB: When I went through training at Nellis, I think we lost about one a week. You’d never see it in the paper outside of the Nellis News or the Las Vegas Sun. You’d never hear it in your home town. You’d lose a lot of airplanes. During the war, in the B-29s, the statistics showed, it was safer to be on a combat mission than it was to be in training back at Dougway, Utah.
I went back to Vietnam in the A-37. It wasn’t sophisticated. It was about the same as the F-86, except that it had civilian OMNI and civilian TACAN, and it had all the modern navigation equipment. But as far as flying the airplane, you were manual—everything was manual cables. And armored. And it had big engines. You could get off the ground in that. I’d have much rather have been in combat with that airplane than in training. We lost many more in training than we ever did in combat.
CB: The A-37 replaced the A-1 in the Sandy role in Vietnam, right?
VB: We were trying. They probably should have replaced the A-1 earlier. We had sophisticated anti-aircraft guns in Vietnam, and their radars can pick up those propellers before you get over the horizon! You ain’t going to pick up an A-37 as easy, or an A-4 or any other attack airplane. We had problems in training. Instructors would lose the T-37 in with two instructors in it! You wonder how that could happen, but it does.
CB: How did the F-86 stack up against the other planes you flew?
VB: In its time, that was the airplane to fly. I flew the F-84F a little later, which was an atomic bomber, and we again had one-way missions right after I came back from Okinawa. The airplane was built 10 years later than the F-86, so you had better strength metal, better control surfaces. But some items in the F-84 were a heck of a lot worse than the F-86. I’d rather fly the F-86.
CB: When you went back to visit Okinawa, they still had 10 F-86s, not F-84s.
VB: Yeah! They were H’s. The F-86H had a totally different engine in it and totally different flying characteristics. It was a quite a bit heavier airplane. The F-86E was a pretty light airplane. They actually lucked out. The F-86XP or whatever they called it was not a good airplane when they test flew it at first, so they lucked out when they found a good engine for it. It made a good airplane out of it.
Chris Bucholtz has been building models since 1973 and has been a member of SVSM since 1986. His interests include 1/72 scale aircraft of all types, but specifically World War II and subjects whose pilots or crew he has met.
