1967-0620- First Time Downtown

Charlie (Buffkin, my pilot) and I had one uneventful flight under our belts .  We had flown a side-looking radar  (SLR) flight along the southern coast of North Vietnam.  This technically counted as a "strike" since we flew within shooting distance of NVA air defenses, but  we didn't really see much.   Before the advent of focused synthetic aperture radar (pioneered by a small R&D firm in Ann Arbor...), the only way to get high angular resolution imagery was through a physically large antenna, using as high a frequency radar as you can manage.  In the case of the RA-5C, the antenna was about 5 meters long, and the radar operated in the Ku band, at about 30GHz.  Plugging this into the formula for diffraction, one obtains a angular resolution of about 0.1 degree.  At a range of say, 10 km, this one could resolve a target as small as  10 meters or so.  This means a boat of any real size could be detected and recognized.  Thus this mission, which was intended to detect "water borne logistic craft"  ("WBLCs") as they transported supplies down to the sounth.  The system was quite effective in searching large areas of coastal waters.  And it was generally a low stress flight.

For this flight, however, we had something else in mind..  The plan was to have a second  RA-5C (us) head in behind the strike as uusal, heading roughly northwest.  But about halfway to the target, we would make a sweeping turn to the southeast and head for the center of the port of Haiphong.  This, target, with its constantly changing harbor traffic, was a prime reconnaissance target.  And it was very well defended.  But we were going to do this a higher than usual altitude, 12,000 feet, so we could use the very advanced 18 inch focal length panoramic camera, which should provide excellent coverage over a very large piece of the country.  The reason for the feint is that previous attempts at photo-reconnaissance of Haiphong were not very successful in that the imagery was poor and there was a lot of ground fire from AAA and SAMs anyway.  The story of how the use of this camera at what was thought to be suicidially high altitudes is related in the Violent Skies Presentation (see below).

The tactic worked out just fine.  The air defense crews must have been told to stand down as it became clear the strike was going elsewhere.  There was little fire,  Still, this is where I saw my first little black cloud (flak burst from a 100mm antiaircraft cannon).

Traveling at a little over Mach 1.2 (about 800 mph) we were soon past the harbor, and we relaxed a little as we went feet wet, out of SAM range. Charlie throttled back to subsonic cruise airspeed.  Suddenly  we began to hear a very loud hissing airflow  noise, like an open hatch.  It was loud enough that we had some difficulty hearing each other lever the intercom. Sudden, loud noises are seldom a good thing in aviation.  We first each thought the other had lost their canopy.  Having established that this was not the case, and instruments showing nothing untoward, he throttled back a little more and the noise seemed to subside. Cruise back to the ship and landing were routine.  Turns out there was a leak in the pneumatic system and not flight critical (fortunately).

The the imagery was superb, as was usually the case with this amazing camera, which produced high reolution imagery over a large expanse, in long film strips (5x30 inches), in a flight regime it was never designed for.  Hats off to Texas Instruments, the manufacturer.   This flight was an early demonstration of the use of this camera, which we came to rely on.  Much later (2015) I would present an analysis of this flight at the Violent Skies symposium held at the National Defense University in DC.  See Violent Skies for the briefing.

Charlie and I were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for this mission, presumably for the excellence of the imagery collected in a high threat area, even though the we weren’t shot at that much.  Except for the false missile launch warning and the pneumatic leak, it was a walk in the park.  We wouldn’t always be so lucky, and we would earn our next DFC the hard way:  17 SAMs launched our way.

See the presentation Constellation 1967 Yankee Station Cruise, slides 11-19 for some photos from this flight.

Next:  1967-07-  July