F-5/F-18 training "near miss"

Collision Course

G. L. Koelzer – February/March 2006 Air & Space

Shooter five-five, flow zero nine zero.” My flight leader, call sign “Shooter 55,” has ordered our egress, or “flow,” headed east. With boththrottles on my F/A-18 lacked in maximum afterburner, I’m light in my seat as I push the stick forward, descending and accelerating rapidly through 460 mph. I twist on my ejection seat, grabbing the hand-holds welded to the canopy bow, straining to look aft for adversary aircraft rolling in on my tail-the infamous six o’clock position from which most shootdowns occur.

It’s 2002, we’re flying over the southwest desert, and we’ve just had a dogfight with two aggressor F-5Es from Marine Fighter Training Squadron 401. Luckily, both bandits are dead, and now we’re continuing our mission-a fighter sweep to clear the area of enemy aircraft. I’m Shooter 56, and in my jet’s rear cockpit sits a student weapons and sensors officer (WSO), who is supposed to be clearing our six as we exit the fight. I can see his shiny white helmet in my rear-view mirrors, but instead of looking aft, it’s pointed downward, at his lap, and all I hear from the back seat on the intercom is Blaaahhhckk! Blaaahhhckk!
Two miles off my left wing, the pilot in Shooter 55 is Twitch, a friend of mine, and as instructors in Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 101, it is our enviable duty to teach young pilots and WSOs the finer points of fighter flying/riding. Sometimes it’s so fun they puke.
Like today. My WSO is worthless to me now, and I can only hope there aren’t little globules of his lunch floating around the cockpit under zero G. I check our six-it’s clear-so I decrease the dive angle, reset my radar to search mode, and get a visual sighting on my flight leader. “Shooter five-six visual, right two o’clock, two miles, a little high.”
“Visual,” says Twitch. The radios, feverish only moments before from a raging two-versus-two dogfight, settle into uncomfortable silence. My intercom, however, crackles Blaaahhhckk!
A small green rectangle appears on the blank square of my radar display. “Shooter five-six, snap two o’clock, eight miles, 22,000, hot,” I call, with target data in bearing-range-altitude-aspect format. It’s an untargeted bogey (not yet identified), and since it’s too close for us to run away, we’re committed to a head-to-head altercation in the sky, known as a merge.
“Shooter five-five…clean. ” Because the bogey is above our altitude, the contact is in Shooter 55’s assigned search sector, and Twitch’s student WSO has failed to get their radar on the unknown aircraft (their radar display is empty, or “clean”).

So far, things aren’t going so hot. We have a short-range unidentified target that my flight leader can’t find, and my WSO has his nose wedged in a sick sack. I’d love to just squeeze the trigger and send a simulated missile on its way to end this problem, but I can’t shoot without a positive identification. Instead, I roll right and yank the stick back, wrapping the F/A-18 into a 6-G turn to get my nose on the bogey. Peering into my head-up display, I see a small speck framed in a green target designator box, three miles away, coming downhill and closing fast. “Shooter five-six, tally one, on the nose, three miles, five degrees high. “
“Shooter five-five, no joy, visual.” Twitch and his WSO don’t see the bogey (“no joy”) but still have sight of my jet (“visual”).
The dot in my HUD closes rapidly, slightly right of my nose and a little high. I count down the seconds until our merge, so that when I visually identify the bogey, Twitch will finally see it and take a quick shot. “Three… two… one…” I see that it’s an F-5E, with blue and gray mottled camouflage, as it flashes by my right side in a right-to-right merge… “Shoot, shoot, F-five!”
“No shot-no joy-visual,” calls Twitch, unable to spot our adversary’s blue jet against the blue sky.
I pull back hard at the merge, grunt against the Gs, and crank the Hornet into a climbing right-hand turn. With my left fist gripping the canopy bow’s right hand-hold, I again twist to look aft, barely keeping sight of the F-5E turning nose-low across my tail, also in a right turn. Airspeed bleeds rapidly from the climbing Hornet, and I ease the stick farther back to get the nose around. “Engaged two-circle right turns, nose-high to the west,” I call.
“Three miles northeast, visual, no joy.” Twitch still sees me, but not the F-5E. He’s now just a high-speed cheerleader.
And I’m in a one-versus-one. Crunching my abdominal muscles to help me look over my right shoulder, I still see the bandit F-5E below the horizon on the opposite side of my turn circle. Brown desert quickly replaces blue sky in my partially inverted canopy, and halfway through the turn a sharp yank on the stick honks the nose out of the vertical and points it at my opponent. The radar’s air combat maneuvering mode locks the F-5E at a range of two miles, and I select an AIM-120 radar-guided missile with the switch under my right thumb. A quick pull of the trigger launches a simulated weapon, and I call “Fox three” on my flight’s radio frequency to announce the shot.
I shove the stick forward to break the high-angle-of-attack turn, decrease the drag, and get some airspeed back. The F-5E’s nose is pointing slightly right of me now, and it looks like we’re going to meet in another right-to-right merge as the digital time-to-impact counter in my HUD reaches 0. I’m about to key the mic and call the bandit dead when I suddenly notice that something is dangerously wrong. I expect to see the F-5E pointed almost directly at me, cooperatively maneuvering to another merge with safe flight path separation. But instead of his nose, I’m looking at his belly.
He’s turning in front of me-less than a mile away. We call it CBDR, for constant bearing, decreasing range, and it means our flight paths will soon co-exist in both time and space. By the time I can make a warning call on the radio, I’ll be dead.

PUSH! I shove the stick forward, thinking I can dodge underneath him. But at less than 230 mph, even the Hornet’s huge horizontal elevators can’t pitch the nose down as fast as I need to move it. The F-5E is still in a right-hand turn, and its belly looms in my windscreen.
PULL! Try something new. I wrench the stick into my lap to try to climb above the 13,000-pound arrowhead winging at my soft pink body. Not working. I’m so slow that the nose of my Hornet is moving, but my flight path vector is not, and the teeny F-5E looks bigger than a space shuttle. Absolutely unavoidable.
PUSH! Back to Plan A. My right hand again shoves the stick hard, almost to the instrument panel, and I float in my ejection seat, restrained only by the four harness straps. The light blue belly of the F-5E fills my windscreen, and my mind takes a mental snapshot that I will never forget. An orange instrumentation pod occupies the tip rail of the F-5E’s right wing, seemingly inches from my nose, and a captive Sidewinder training missile sits on the left wingtip.
The entire push-pull-push process takes barely a second, and feels like much less, with no chance to panic or yell or watch my life flash before my wide-open eyes. Nonetheless, it’s enough time to be gripped by frustration and utter disgust-that I had put myself in this predicament, that I know I am about to collide with another fighter on a training mission, that I probably am about to die. Yet there is also a split-second of hope-that somehow we’ll survive the ripping metal and streaming, fuel-fed fireball, that we’ll only barely hit, that we’ll make safe ejections…
WHOOOOOOOSH! The humongous F-5E blocking the sky suddenly disappears. I don’t even see it whip past, though it must have-but it felt as if the jet passed through us. In the span of a nanosecond, our atoms met, fused, and separated, while a quick thunderclap of jet noise crescendoed. It takes another second or two for the far-too-loud sound ofthe F-5E’s diminutive J85 afterburners to register in my saturated mind, with the abrupt realization that I am in open airspace-nothing but blue between me and Mexico. I am still alive, and not fluttering through the thin air of high altitude as a million bits of ash.
“Knock it off, knock it off.” It was the F-5E pilot. A pause, then: “Did we just have a close pass?” “We did just have a very close pass,” I reply, with the artificial calm of abject disbelief as I look over my jet. Expecting to see a missing tail or wingtip at the very least, I am stunned-and immeasurably thankful-that my lovely Hornet is intact.
Our fuel is low, and so is my motivation to fling myself at another F-5E, so we head home. “Did you see that?” I ask the student WSO. I haven’t heard a peep from him since before the first merge, and I hope he’s still conscious. “See what?” Conscious, and oblivious.

I knew it had been close, and back in the debrief at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, I was about to learn just how close. The instrumented pods carried by both jets measured aircraft separation based on Global Positioning System data, and the computer display read nine feet. Nine feet, plus or minus three. With 45,000 pounds of aluminum, composites, fuel, and human beings mixing flight paths at 700 mph of closure, that’s pretty darn close.
Even post-flight, I couldn’t say for sure if the F-5E went above or below us. Neither could the computer, because when we zoomed in on the graphic display of our two aircraft, we saw a haunting image of a blue Hornet and a red F-5E, fused in mid-air. The first few words (following the four-letter exclamations) with the adversary pilot enlightened us all as to the cause of the near-miss. In air combat training, we’re never supposed to get any closer than 500 feet to another aircraft, but after the first merge I had wrongly assumed the F-5E driver still saw me. While I was planning on meeting him in another right-to-right pass, he in fact had lost sight of me, but spotted Twitch (about two miles to the northeast) and was turning against him-and directly in front of me. I had broken a fundamental rule: Always assume everyone else does not see you. By assuming the opposite, I had almost killed three men.
As I mulled this over, a number-crunching computer tech gleefully informed me that, based on the instrumentation pods’ location on the two aircraft, and relative aircraft position, the true miss distance was even closer. Actual miss distance: one foot, plus or minus three.