F-105s were getting raped by Mig-17s and Mig-21s over Southeast Asia in the 1960s.

Different aircraft in the USAF and USN inventory were evaluated via Foreign Material branch technical exploitation programs using captured/acquired Soviet Migs like the MiG-17 and MiG-21.  They actually got the MiG-21 before the MiG-17 according to the declassified documents, from the Israelis after an Iraqi pilot defected in one.

Israel wanted to buy the new F-4 Phantom II multirole combat aircraft, but since it was cutting-edge, the Johnson Administration wouldn't sell it to them.  Israel negotiated a deal once they got the MiG-21, and soon they would get as many F-4s as they wanted.

After the Israelis evaluated the MiG-21 themselves, it was packed into a C-5A Galaxy and flown to Edwards AFB, then taken out to Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nevada.

When testing the F-106A against the MiG-21, the F-106 was found to have superior flight characteristics against the MiG-21 across the flight regimes since it had a lot of power and a lot of wing, but the canopy didn't allow good visibility, and it lacked a gun.

They were seriously considering deploying F-106s to SEA to provide top cover/MIGCAP for thuds, predicated on interrogation of the M61 Vulcan and a better canopy.

HAVE DOUGHNUT

Read Red Eagles...

Ah, so Have Doughnut wasn't just a dream I had after watching too much discovery Wings and Simpsons repeats.

The F106 is my favorite century series fighter.

Attached File


Check out this theoretical improved variant.

Watching 106s mix it up with Migs while the Thuds did their thing would have been a thing to see.

Instantly sees SAAB Viggen... cannot unsee...

Looks familiar:

HHAAHAHA Great Minds Think Alike

I wonder if those have any combat record? I know the Swede ones never saw combat, but I know they exported a few.

I had a donut this AM.

Looks like a viggen

What measures are taken with planes now to keep defectors from treason? Fuel limit, self destruct?

No but they were one of the few fighters to ever get a possible firing solution on SR-71s,though under perfect circumstances. Viggens were never exported,sadly. Denmark and Austria had Drakens though.

FPNI as usual, Red Eagles is a fun read. I fell in love with the MiG-21 after hearing US pilots give it glowing reviews.

An F-5E was taken to the USSR from Vietnam for evaluation. It was judged to be a far better aircraft in every way.

True, still doesn’t change the fact that the MiG-21 was fun to fly

The advanced F106 was a competitor to the YF12 and they envisioned speeds of up to mach 5.

The amount of stuff we learned from that program was invaluable.

When the TF-15 was evaluated against the F-5E, it was a wash.

50/50 kill ratio.  F-5E is a little hotrod that often gets overlooked as to what it can do.

Soviet FORMAT program on the F-5E:

Soviets Flying F-5E

Did the defecting pilot ever fly the mig during evaluation?

They normally don't allow that for obvious reasons.

So MiG-28s were real after all!

I never was sure if they did or didn't. I could think of a few reason not to let them.

There's a guy on youtube named Bruce Gordon who flew the F-106 and he has some interesting stories about the aircraft. He thought the F-106 was by far the best overall fighter we had in the inventory during the Vietnam era, especially at higher altitudes. That big wing, the powerful engine, the sleek design and the internal carriage of weapons all made the F-106 A VERY formidable foe. But prior to these tests, many people within the Air Force didn't really know just how capable the F-106 really was in the air to air role. It was better than the Phantom and miles ahead of the poor F-105. Only the F-8 Crusader could outperform it in a fight, and only then at lower altitudes. Up high the F-106 was still superior. Bruce even says that at 40,000 feet and above, the F-106 could give the F-15 a hard time. However, the F-106 lacked any real ECM capability, which rendered it less than optimal for use over SAM infested North Vietnam.

Still flying Red for the USN.

What kind of fight? Nobody BFMs at 40k. Or if they started there it’d go downhill fast.

Not exactly...

Welcome, Search, Segregate Pilot from Aircraft, Interrogate Pilot while making him as comfortable as possible.

Notify nation of origin of the incident and that after a full investigation, we will do everything in our power to return their property in most cases, unless we obtained it from a 3rd party, then we negotiate with them usually.

Debrief pilot on his training, base of origin, technical capabilities of the aircraft that aren't obvious, offer payment and citizenship in exchange for info on countermeasures, radar capabilities, radar warning, chaff, flare, weapons parameters, latests weapons variants, what they are taught about our capabilities, family considerations, etc.

If the pilot is allowed back near or in the aircraft, it's after the ejection seat, cockpit, and all panels have been searched.

The MiG-25 was completely disassembled after Lt. Bylenko defected to Japan.  It took many months to debrief him.

Whatever happened to him?  Flying for Delta somewhere?

When the USAF fighter pilots who evaluated the F-15's performance flew it against the F-5E, the kill ratios were 1:1 after many iterations, which is shows how impressive the F-15 is actually.

Think about the F-15 being over twice the normal take-off gross weight of the F-5E (max TOGW of F-5E is 24,000lbs), and how barely visible the F-5E is in WVR.  That visibility aspect of the F-5E is not represented in the performance parameters in the graph above, and plays a huge role in lethality/survivability WVR and even BVR, since the RCS is so low.

The F-15 planform is like a tennis court.

He wrote a book about the defection and worked as an engineer.

One of the main recommendations for F-106 upgrade after its HAVE Doughnut, HAVE Dell evaluations out at Groom Lake, was to equip it with RWR and ECM, as well as IFF that could interrogate/recognize MiG-21 IFF.

They recommended:

Install M61 Vulcan
Make the canopy better for visibility
Upgrade IFF
RWR
ECM

AIM-4F Falcon performance was found to do well against the MiG-21, so I haven't seen anything about integrating AIM-9 on the F-106, and never saw F-106s with AIM-9s.

Granted, most of the 106s I saw were doing this when my dad was on B-1B Combined Test Force out at Edwards in the early 1980s.  F-106s flying over the Antelope Valley was often a 3-4 day per week affair.  Beautiful plane with performance ahead of its time for sure when you realize it was developed in 1956.

Something was said about the F-106 fuel system...one leak and it goes kaput. Tanks air pressurized?

Love seeing them take off and land as I'm driving home.

F106 Delta Dart has always been one of my favorite planes...

The "6".

Still the fastest single engine jet to every fly in the sky.  The world speed record set by the back up (the specially prepared plane developed issues so they flew the back up without taking the time to clean it up for the record attempt) F106 is approaching 60 years old.

Ever see/hear of SAGE?  I remember that big square building with no windows at Minot AFB.  We were driving by one day and I asked dad what SAGE stood for (sign out front by the road).  I believe he said, "Semi Automatic Ground Environment."  The link is to an article on SAGE.  Funny, this article says SAGE was deactivated in 1963 at Minot AFB and when we were there (67 to 70) the building was there with a sign by the road and cars/trucks in the parking lot.  Doesn't add up.  My dad worked on the F106's (avionics).  He didn't say it was an old system that was no longer used.  He told me what it was for (guiding the F106 into position for a firing run on Soviet bombers and even making the firing run by remote control if necessary.)  He said they could fly the F106 "up north", shoot down Russian bombers and then bring the F106 back to Minot, from that building.

SAGE

In those days, the F106's would pass over Minot AFB and their sonic booms would shake the big old picture windows in the houses something fierce.  We used to look at those windows bouncing back and forth and marvel at glass being that flexible and not breaking.

One of the great mistakes of the Vietnam War was trying to take the F-105, an airplane designed for the express purpose of delivering a specific nuclear weapon to communist targets, and turn it into a general fighter bomber. Lots of planes and pilots were lost using formations of F-105s to deliver B-17 equivalent payloads to well defended targets.

I just watched a documentary that showed footage of the early TF-15A in the early 1970s against the F-5E.  The documentary was focused on the F-15 and how revolutionary it was.  It was the first time I ever heard this statistic, but they were pretty detailed about it.  This is coming from someone who grew up with the F-15, my dad eventually ended up on the F-15 CTF after B-1B and other programs, knew a lot of F-15 mechanics, pilots, engineers, collected all the books, learned to read on aviation books specific to US military aviation in the USAF Flight Test Center environment.  I had never heard that about the F-15vs F-5E before, so it stuck out to me.

Documentary was on amazon, very dated.

The F-14 guys said the same thing about the F-5E.  Even the F-14A had superior acceleration, climb rate, sustained turn rate, yet the F-5E gave them headaches because it was so small and had better roll rate.  The Tomcat guys said they had better exchange rate with the F-5E than the F-15 but only in the Block 90 F-14A with TCS, because they could acquire the F-5E on TCS with radar slaving TCS during the merge, giving them much better SA than the F-15 had.

Skip to 18:30 for discussion of F-14A vs F-5E


It all comes back to the F-5 being so small and nimble that allowed it to approach and press a quick attack without being seen, as well as make VID extremely difficult after the merge.  It's very interesting to hear about some of these nuances that they would naturally want to protect the info on back during the Cold War, since so many MiG-21s were proliferated all over the world.

It's also one of the main reasons the YF-16 was the winner over the YF-17, even though the fighter mafia guys thought the YF-17 had it in the bag.  After both sets of pilots for YF-16 and YF-17 had both criss-crossed and flown them both against MiG-21s and MiG-17s out at Groom Lake, the analysis and engineers were surprised when both sets of pilots reported that the YF-16 was much more difficult to detect visually, and that it was hard to determine how it was oriented WVR.

It also had better roll rate, allowing it to reverse and escape if you got in its rear quadrant.

Where did you see about the AIM-4 doing well against the MiG-21? Robin Olds ordered an unauthorized field modification to switch out 8th TFWs F-4s from Falcons, to Sidewinders they'd acquired from the Navy. This was after almost constant failures of the Falcon in combat. Falcon was designed to intercept bombers, not for BFM.

General Bond was killed flying a Mig 23 out of groom lake.

The airforce let the media find out about the Mig program, rather than risky nosey reporters inadvertently find out about the F117 program.

Yeah, the F-106 was built around that whole mission profile as an Air Defense Fighter for NORAD, ground-controlled for intercept with an advanced integrated fire control and flight control system for optimum time to intercept, since they couldn't afford to have Soviet bombers break through.

This is really the whole reason why it never saw service in SEA, as there weren't a lot of them, and the entire airframe, weapons load, avionics, and communications relay was geared for NORAD air intercept mission profile.

This makes the whole deal of it involved in HAVE DOUGHNUT/HAVE DELL the more interesting to me, and why I posted about it after I came across the article.

It's in the declassified report about HAVE DOUGHNUT and specifically states that the AIM-4F had good detection ability of the MiG-21 from all aspects, including frontal aspect during the closure from about 3.5 miles and in, or about 5.6km, as long as the AIM-4 had been prepared properly.

Yes, the AIM-4 was intended for bombers.  I'm not aware of a drone shoot program using AIM-4s that were maneuvering much, but it was nice that it was launched from an internal weapons bay.

Here's some F-102 footage of AIM-4 shooting WWII-era bomber drone:

Yeah even though on paper the F15/14 have every advantage kinematically its hard to fight something you cant actually see.

I see "Have" and "Pave" in aviation related stuff.Do they have a specific meaning?

What's interesting about all this is that a year later ADC instituted Project Six Shooter for the F-106 which have them a bubble canopy and the installation of a M61 Vulcan in the forward part of the weapons bay

Wonder where they got the impetus to perform this mod on the 106

HAVE means an exploitation of enemy technology or programs.

PAVE is something else gained from developmental programs.

One of the best examples of PAVE was the development of the GBUs in the Vietnam era.

PAVE Knife on F-4 and A-6 in Vietnam



PAVE WAY Laser Guided Bomb in Vietnam



PAVE Tack IR targeting pod on the F-111



PAVE Low MH-53 Special Operations Helicopter



PAVE Penny Laser Designator Pod for F-16 and A-10



PAVE Eagle



PAVE Hawk Special Ops helo based on crash hawk

Thank you.

The F-117 started as HAVE BLUE.  Was that considered enemy tech exploitation because of the formulas they used for ECHO1?

The aircraft can't be blamed,being behind the air defense measure-countemeasure curve is what caused the losses.  It was a great bomber but North Vietnam had really good air defense thanks to the Russians.

http://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/codenames.html

This makes Have,Pave etc clear as mud,which is the point. While you can know that a Have program is something the USAF has done,one shouldn't be able to know that Have Drill is flying a MiG 17 or Have Nap is buying Popeye missiles from Israel and so forth. There is no end to other project names: Constant,Senior,Safari etc.

My FIL was involved with a similar project at Area 51 around 1970 involving
MIGs and Soviet Radar.

They were trying to improve the B52 counter measures against SAMs.

He says there is still stuff he can't talk about.