I probably wound up saying nothing except that which shouldn’t be posted here. It was pretty obvious what had happened. Like I said before, every now and then one of them pesky AA shells takes a life of its own and seeks a higher effective range than it’s suppose to. We were in its airspace.
First thing, fly the airplane. OK, so I did that and it seemed to respond to the controls. There was something distinctly different though. The best word that I can think of to describe the way the phantom was flying is wallowing - that is, it was rolling from side to side albeit in a controlled fashion. The F4C has hydraulically driven flight controls. It flies smoothly and reacts to pilot input quickly. This bird wasn’t flying that way. I found out later that left wing damage had pretty well cancelled out the effectiveness of the flight controls on that side. The ailerons and spoilers were not working properly, if at all. There was some new induced drag on that side of course since the sheet metal was all screwed up. The plane flew kind of like what I remembered the T-33 felt like. Big stick input. Wait! There! She’s beginning to move. Wallowing.
We were still heading up with a lot of power, so as I rolled back more or less level, I pulled back on the throttles and got that part of it under control. Level flight, heading to Ubon, reasonable speed. They say pilots react instinctively. That’s true. I can’t really remember doing anything as a result of analyzing the immediate situation. It was all reaction. Anyway, as soon as we could, Bill and I ran the checklist for lighted Christmas tree in the cockpit (the lights are in the lower right in the cockpit picture). One thing I do remember though, is how relieved I felt that we were still inside the airplane and not hanging on a parachute outside in the wind. That was a very good feeling.
My flight lead called and asked if everything was under control. He informed me that I was headed in the right direction and that he was joining up on me from seven o’clock low. Once there, he gave me a look over, but I have forgotten what he said. I’m sure that he mentioned that there were no more bombs attached (that’s good), I think he may have said something about all of hydraulic fluid stains under the wing. He was mainly interested in how we were doing and what our intentions were. First of all, my intention was to get the hell out of there and go “home”. We were already on the correct heading and our speed would get us there in about twenty minutes or so. That gave us time to think about what we were going to do to get the airplane on the ground. As Willy looked us over he had his own situation develop. He got one of those pesky low oil pressure lights and he had to RTB (return to base) ASAP. So long Willy. There were still a couple of guys nearby to watch us fly home. Meanwhile Bill and I assessed what we were dealing with.
I could control the aircraft fairly well. As it turns out I had flight controls on the right side only, that’s why it flew so sloppily. Some turning require almost a full stick deflection. There was a failure in the A system (PC 1) and Utility Hydraulics. Engines were both operating OK. The lack of hydraulics meant no brakes, no flaps, no nose wheel steering. Manual rudder control with attendant high pedal pressures. No gear retraction once they were down pneumatically. The “hook” would work and I would have to make an approach end barrier engagement. A no flap final airspeed with unknown battle damage could be around 200 knots. There would be no leading edge flaps and so no boundary layer control to help reduce the approach speed. I could deploy the “RAT” (ram air turbine) to see if that helped. It was unlikely. The drag chute would work, but wasn’t necessary in an approach end trap.
Good thing we had trained for this emergency. Too bad most of the training had taken place at happy hour.
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