In this article:
Roger Ball!
He was the second of two children and born on 25 January 1940 in Shandon Baptist Hospital in Columbia South Carolina. He, in every way, gave the appearance of a normal, healthy, well-developed kid of average height, slender but not skinny. History would show that he was anything but normal.
His name was John Monroe Smith, and “Roger Ball!” is his story—a tale that should be told. It intertwines the true, firsthand accounts and experiences of a fighter pilot with the significant developments in the fighter community and historical events in which Captain John Monroe Smith, USN, call sign “Hawk” was a part. Finally, it speaks to the men who laid their careers and sometimes their very lives on the line for their shipmates and their country.
Hawk was a legend in the fighter community. During his thirty-year career, he forged a reputation as a skilled and lethal aviator in the air-to-air combat arena, a natural tactician, and consummate leader. To many, he was one of the most essential pathfinders in the modernization of the naval air war arts.
He was just a man, but his story, his life adventure, is a high-fidelity history of personal achievements for naval tactical aviation, devotion to a cause, and service to his nation. It was a time during and shortly after the Vietnam conflict that America became ideologically divided. The military was disillusioned with the intrusion of nonwarriors in the White House over the conduct of the war, and tactical aviation of all the services was struggling to catch up to the realities of the war’s hard lessons. It was a time when the Navy needed leaders and tenacious thinkers to set things right again. It was Hawk’s time!
Lawn Darts
Part II (CLICK HERE to read Part I) of “Hawk’s Excellent Adventure in the Netherlands” straps the reader in the cockpit of a Dutch F-104 Starfire with Hawk at the controls and one of the most senior pilots in the Dutch Air Force in the rear cockpit. Not exactly a place I’d be willingly.
Hawk wore his TOPGUN squadron patch on one shoulder of his flight jacket and his 2,000 Hours in the Phantom patch on the other. That apparently caught the attention of one of the senior F-104 pilots during the second week of their stay.
Hans, a very senior Dutch Air Force instructor pilot with over four thousand hours in type, asked Hawk if he wanted to fly in the two-seat version of the F-104.
“Of course!” Hawk responded. The F-104 Starfighter is a Second Generation, mid 1950s vintage fighter/ interceptor built by Lockheed. It was a javelin just big enough to wedge a powerful General Electric J-79 engine. As almost an afterthought it was built with wings—atrophied little things which were responsible for its exceptionally high, 115-pounds-per-foot, wing loading and poor turn performance. On the positive side, it was the first aircraft to hold the climb-to-altitude record (91,243 feet) and the speed record (1,404 miles per hour) at the same time. There were many safety concerns with the F-104, however. It was a tough aircraft to fly well and had one of the worst safety records in military aviation.”
“This, no doubt, was the reason it was dubbed the Widow Maker and Lawn Dart and described it as an airplane with fire at one end and a fool at the other.”
TOPGUN Instructor flying Dutch F-104 in 2 Vs 2 mission against F-5s
That said, this was still quite an opportunity for Hawk; he’d never flown in a Starfighter before. He was anxious to make a good first impression and asked Hans if they had an F-104 simulator or a trainer for familiarization.
“Naah ve don’t Herr Hawk,” Hans responded, “but you von’t need vun.”
Hawk was given a short familiarization brief just before man-up for a two-versus- two mission against their F-5s. Surely, Hawk thought, there’s got to be more to the airplane than what I just heard in the brief. Hans must be leaving something out.
Hawk climbed into the front seat of the F-104 and Hans crawled into the back. There were no problems during start-up, taxi, or take-off, but everything after that went downhill with embarrassing speed.
According to Hawk, “No sooner had we broken ground on take-off than we went into the overcast. Nothing in the cockpit looked familiar. There were buttons and switches I’d never seen, and gauges I didn’t understand, and the altimeter was incremented in metrics instead of feet. There was nothing I was familiar with, but I did notice it had a stick and throttle so I figured I could fly it.”
They broke out of the cloud layer and from out-of-nowhere their wingman joined. The two F-104s continued to their station for the first fight. When all the aircraft had checked in on the working frequency, Hawk turned his section toward the opposing bogies. He was slightly concerned on the run-in because there was absolutely no aural feedback to indicate airspeed. It was quiet as a church. “We’d better push it up,” Hawk suggested.
“Yaah Hawk, but ve doing 550 knots!” Hans announced.
“Oh yeah? That’s what that dial means”, Hawk mused?
The stick-kicker
The F-104s ran-in at twenty thousand feet and six hundred knots in basic engine. Four miles away, he had a tally on both F-5s. “Hawk has a tally, left eleven, slightly low,” Hawk transmitted on the radio.
“Guut tally!” Hans commented on the ICS. “An vat vill you do now, Herr Hawk?”
Hawk knew he couldn’t win a position fight against the F-5, but with nearly six hundred knots he had a significant airspeed advantage, “Well, I’m just going to pull into the vertical and come back down shootin’.”
The chuckle on the ICS should have alerted Hawk to some treachery at work but he was concerned with other things.
Hawk took one of the F-5s close aboard and then reefed hard on the stick to bring his nose into the vertical. Initially there was a respectable pitch rate, but suddenly, and mysteriously, the stick snapped forward, almost out of his hand.
“What the …?” Hawk started to ask.
“Yaah. Dat’s der ‘stick-kicker,’” Hans mater-of-factly offered. “Da computer tinks you pull too hard.”
“Oh great!”
The stick-kicker system channeled hydraulic fluid at three thousand PSI into the elevator actuator to avoid a pilot-induced overstress. Brawny as he was, Hawk was not going to win a stick-wrestling contest with the stick-kicker.
“G” warning tone
He’d managed to bring the nose of the F-104 about forty degrees above the horizon but there it stagnated. Three times he reefed hard on the stick and three times the stick-kicker nearly snatched it out of his hands, all the while he was decelerating and the F-5 pilots were figuring things out.
Hawk strained to recall any mention of this during the world’s shortest brief. He couldn’t. Hawk eased off the back-stick pressure and the elevator seemed to respond again. Hawk realized by modulating stick pressure he could keep the airplane pulling into the vertical while avoiding the stick-kicker. It was agonizingly slow but he coaxed the nose up. Just as he had solved this problem an annoying whistle shrieked in his headset.
“Now, what the hell is that?” Hawk yelled over the noise.
“Yaah dat. Ven ve have a drop tank, dat’s der varning tone dat tells us ven ve exceed four ‘Gs’” Hans calmly explained.
“Yeah, but we don’t have a drop tank!”
“True but dis airplane tinks ve do.”
The cockpit task loading was increasing logarithmically. In addition to dealing with the stick-kicker problem, and understanding the highly accented words of Hans over the loud “G” warning tone, Hawk still had two F-5s to fight and a wingman to keep track of.
The Stick-shaker
Over his shoulder Hawk saw his wingman in an oblique turn to the north, and both F-5s, uncommitted at this point, pulling into the vertical. Then he caught sight of a strange zigzag contrail leading up toward his jet. It was not the graceful arc that defined a smooth pull to the vertical. This contrail recorded the recent history of the contest between his right arm and the stick kicker. Just as Hawk was pondering the kinetic trajectory of his jet as the source of the saw tooth wave form, from the ICS …
“And vat vill you do now Herr Hawk?”
The question snapped Hawk out of his fascination with the zigzag contrail, and he came back to full alert.
“Well, I’m gonna stomp on the rudder and slice down into the closest F-5!”
A second chuckle emanating from the rear cockpit foretold of more surprises to come. Either that, or Hans thought there was something particularly humorous about Hawk’s plan.
Hawk wanted to get the airplane slow at the top of its trajectory before he inputted controls to make the turn, but the tactile cues simply weren’t there. The stick didn’t feel mushy, there was no change in wind noise over the canopy, and the airspeed indicator was nearly useless.
It seemed about time to do something though; he knew he was quickly running out of airspeed. Just as Hawk eased the stick forward and fed in left rudder in an attempt to rudder roll the airplane back into the fight, the stick began to shake violently, and Hawk was beset with yet another Starfighter “gotcha.”
“Well … what the hell is that now?”
“Oh Yaah!” Hans explained, “Dat’s der ‘stick-shaker.’ It’s der slow airspeed varning dat tells us ven das aircraft’s approachin’ a stall.”
Rudder limiter
“Ah! Thanks!” Probably another point he missed in the brief.
Hawk really didn’t need another warning system, or a new distraction. He just wanted all the machinery to leave him alone so he could fly the airplane. At this point every bit of energy advantage had been lost while he was unraveling the mysteries of the devices, mechanisms, control over rides and warning cues carefully laid-in by a bunch of coffee drinking engineers designed to take the pilot’s mind off flying. Meanwhile he was losing the war.
He shoved the stick forward and stomped down hard on the left rudder pedal in a desperate attempt to salvage what little airspeed still remained and mind-boggling as it might seem, the rudder responded with an anemic nudge that hardly qualified as a flight control deflection. Another point not addressed in the world’s shortest brief concerned the rudders: Rudder deflection was limited to ten degrees in certain configurations.
Hawk continued to feel for the right combination of flight controls to urge the F-104’s nose back below the horizon and into the pursuing F-5s. After what seemed like minutes the F-104’s nose came down.
Hawk was still four thousand feet above the F-5s but he had hoped for far more vertical separation. To make it even sportier, one F-5 had taken a keen interest in him. That F-5 was
setting up a nose-high turn to align fuselages as Hawk passed. Hawk took the F-5 close aboard down the port side. Even before the pass, the pilot made a stunning lead turn and timed it perfectly so that his nose was pointed nearly at the F-104 as it went by.
Pilots fighting their own airplane
Buckshot, Hawk surmised. That had to be Buckshot! A quick assessment of range, geometric relationships, and Hawk’s best guess on the F-104’s ability to rebuild energy forced him to conclude that he couldn’t run out of the fight—not this time. Buckshot was dead six o’clock.
Hawk had two things going for him—two advantages that might give him a way out of the mess. He had at least a two hundred knot airspeed advantage and although Buckshot had the positional advantage, his nose was buried nearly straight down as he rebuilt his energy package while Hawk’s nose was already coming back into the vertical. As Hawk noodled through his next move, the voice from the back seat came over the ICS, “Now vatcha going to do, Herr Hawk?”
“Well, it seems like a good time to drop the flaps!” he yelled as he smacked the flap handle down.
Again … that annoying chuckle. By now Hawk had developed a Pavlovian response to that chuckle and was just waiting for some new tone, mechanical device, or limiter to destroy what little attention he had left to devote to the fight. Nothing happened this time. This was supremely welcomed because he was waging serious combat with two foes: one against the F-5s and one against the over-ride and warning systems … and he seemed to be losing both.
How do the pilots fight the bad guys when they spend so much time fighting their own airplane,
Hawk wondered?
A respectable pitch rate
Hawk actually did have a plan … the only one that made sense. I’ll use the flaps to pull into the vertical again and keep them down to turn back into Buckshot. If we’re still alive after that, if Buckshot hasn’t shot us, I’ll uncork the J-79 and see what that engine could do to get us out of here.
Against the full protests of the stick-kicker, stick-shaker, over-“G” warning tone, and rudder limiter, Hawk horsed, urged, nudged, and coaxed the F-104’s needle nose back into the vertical. When Hawk had the F-104’s nose sixty degrees nose high, he stole a glance over his left shoulder. There, nearly three thousand feet below him, Buckshot had completed his turn and was pulling toward Hawk. That was Hawk’s cue, but just as he started to make things happen, the now familiar taunting question cut the silence, “Yaah Herr Hawk, and vat vill you do now?”
“Now seems like a good time to get out of Dodge!” And with that Hawk rolled inverted and pulled. It was slow-going to get the nose through the horizon and pointed at Buckshot, but Hawk gingerly modulated stick pressure to avoid another stick-snatching contest and managed to develop a respectable pitch rate.
From lawn dart to rocket
By the time Hawk completed his turn and was pointed at Buckshot there was less than two thousand feet separating the two jets, but this time things would be different. Hawk wasn’t going into the vertical again. The vertical fight had compressed to the point that Hawk had no time to build the requisite speed for a vertical extension. This time Hawk was going to run out of the fight, nose low, and he’d let Buckshot choose the direction.
Hawk set his nose to the left of Buckshot, raised the flaps, and shoved the throttle forward, past the burner detent, all the way to the stop. As soon as raw jet fuel hit the afterburner the F-104 took on an entirely new personality—it morphed from a stub-wing, lawn dart into a rocket. From a nose high attitude, Buckshot started a left lead turn into Hawk even before Hawk passed him. Hawk turned right and in the direction of Buckshot’s extended six o’clock. This would force Buckshot to complete the longest possible turn back toward Hawk, which translated into more time to build separation.
Hawk calculated that it would take Buckshot at least ten seconds to complete a rudder reversal with maneuvering flaps. In that same time the Starfighter would have accelerated to over 550 knots and opened up the distance to at least seven thousand feet. Buckshot might call a Fox Two shot, but by Hawk’s calculation, the missile would never make it to them.
TOPGUN Instructor flying Dutch F-104: a true rocket ship
The back of the J-79 belched fire. Nearly eighteen thousand pounds of thrust thundered out the tailpipe and smashed Hawk and Hans solidly against their seats. Like lightning, the Starfighter streaked away from Buckshot. Buckshot pulled the F-5’s nose toward Hawk and then realized they were over a mile away and opening by the time he got his nose around. There was only one missile in the world that could touch them now and those were carried only by the Tomcat.
“Good bug-out,” Buckshot called. “Knock it off. Let’s set up for another fight.”
“Roger, knock it off,” Hawk responded.
Hawk’s learning curve was steep. There was one more engagement, and by the time they hit their bingo fuel state Hawk had almost figured out the stick-kicker, stick-shaker, rudder-limiter, and all the annoying warning tones. Hawk joined his wingman and turned toward home.
Hans was the most experienced F-104 pilot in the Dutch Air Force. He was calm, knowledgeable, and thoroughly unshakable. He’d seen every mistake in the book, just not all of them on one flight.
Hawk had never, in his life, experienced so many systems, safety backups, over-ride controls, and warning tones that were so effective in keeping a pilot from flying his jet. “And the ergonomics were horrible,” Hawk lamented. “But all those deficiencies were mute compared to the incredible acceleration of the jet. There is no aircraft I’ve ever flown that could match the raw acceleration of the F-104 Starfighter. It’s a true rocket ship.”
Photo credit: Fotoafdrukken Koninklijke Luchtmacht
