RF-4
Phantom
K-KE
41985 WHAT: Underneath view of a U.S. Air Force RF-4 in flight
over Phu Cat Air Base, South Vietnam. October 1970. PHOTOGRAPHER: Sgt
Peter B. Seel, USAF U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO
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The photo-reconnaissance
version of the F-4 roamed the skies of Southeast Asia searching out new
targets and helping provide Bomb Damage Assessments (BDAs) following strikes.
These brave crews often penetrated North Vietnam without armed escorts.
During truces or bombing halts, when strike aircraft were prohibited by
American political leaders from missions into North Vietnam, the RF-4s and
RF-101s still went North to help document the increased North Vietnamese
logistical activities on the ground.
This photo shows some of the
viewing ports for cameras in the nose of the RF-4. I believe the large items
are a centerline fuel tank and two drop tanks under the wings.
The RF-4 crews depended on high speeds at low altitude for penetration
to, and egress from, their targets. Since more fuel is burned flying at low
altitudes, using fuel from drop tanks while inbound was more important for
these missions than for others that operated at higher altitudes.
I’m not sure what the pods
are between the fuel tanks. Perhaps
they include additional kinds of camera, or perhaps other sensors, or perhaps
they offer some countermeasures against enemy radars.
While FACs in Steel Tiger
seldom saw RF-4s, we often used photographs taken by the jets.
Our bad encounters with the photo-recce birds came at night, after our
reflexes had adapted to being triggered by any flashes of light. The photo
reconnaissance aircraft ejected a series of photo-flash cartridges that were
essentially very brilliant flashbulbs used to light the area for each picture.
Thus, the first photo-flash cartridge set off by an unannounced RF-4
normally produced a strong reaction within the O-2.
The FAC knew something had happened, but the light disappeared as
quickly as it appeared. For the
next couple of seconds, the pilot simultaneously searched for another clue on
which way to maneuver and tried to slow his heart rate back to normal.
The second flash comes only two or three seconds after the first, and
the FAC then recognized he had been “terrorized” by a photo-recce bird.
Thus, the second flash usually stimulated a few choice words for the
recce pilot since such missions never were coordinated with the FACs working
in the area.
Occasionally we did request
support by an RF, and if we got it, we knew when the bird was coming through.
In November 1967, we at NKP were in one of our periodic battles with 7th
Air Force at Tan Son Nhut. They
were upset that we reported night kills of trucks that 7th
couldn’t document by photo-reconnaissance of the same area during the next
day. Their suspicion was that we
were inflating our truck counts. The
opposite tended to be true, and we sometimes disappointed our strike pilots by
refusing to count a kill unless the truck burned or exploded.
The factor that was eluding the people who sat in headquarters instead
of in the cockpits was that the North Vietnamese tried to move the hulks under
jungle cover for salvaging instead of leaving them in the open for us to
better document how much of a toll we were taking.
On the night of 20 November
1967 we caught trucks trying to get through Foxtrot, which put them in the
open for nearly 3 miles, much of it probably about 100 feet above the Xe
Namkok River, which shows prominently in some of the pictures of Foxtrot.
Either a Zorro or a Nimrod (NKP-based A-26) hit a fuel tanker in the middle of
Foxtrot. My diary notes include:
1 truck destroyed. Blew up 5
times and burned with 50-foot flames for over 2 hours.
The truck just kept burning. One of the explosions blew it off the road, and it tumbled
into the edge of the river and still burned.
I told Alley Cat I wanted an RF-4 to come and take a picture so the 7th
Air Force people would have a picture of at least one truck that didn’t make
it through Steel Tiger.
