All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And now, your host for today's program, Dale Throneberry.
Good afternoon and welcome to Veterans Radio.
My name is Dale Throneberry.
I was a chief warrant officer in the United States Army.
I flew helicopters in Vietnam in 1969.
I want to welcome you to our program here.
Today's program is going to be really fun.
We're going to be talking about Top Gun.
We've got an author of a new book celebrating the 50
years of naval air superiority.
Although I think my guests might not agree with that.
Also in the studio joining me is a retired major general,
William Henderson.
He was a marine pilot during the Vietnam era.
And we're going to be talking about his experiences in Vietnam
as a pilot.
And hopefully, he and Dwight can tell a few war stories
between them about the different types of aviation
that are out there during the time of the Top Gun
and also, of course, a jet aircraft in Vietnam.
I want to make sure that we tell everybody
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Twitter, all those other forms of social media
that I don't know a whole lot about.
But I know that we can get some messages out
and let you do that.
So what I want to do is I want to take a real quick break,
and we come back.
We're going to be talking with Dwight Zimmerman, who
is the author of Top Gun, 50 Years of Naval Air Superiority.
You're listening to Veterans Radio.
MUSIC
All right, we're playing Anchors Away there.
I wasn't sure exactly which anthem I should play when
we're talking about Top Gun, because the book is Top Gun,
50 Years of Naval Air Superiority.
And it talks about aviation in general from World War I on.
And it's a great read.
And I want to welcome a frequent guest to Veterans Radio.
And that is Dwight Zimmerman, author of many books, many
military books, actually.
He was one of the founders and president of the Military
Writer Society of America.
And just a good friend of ours, he
did a review of books on Veterans Radio a few years ago.
And that's what kind of introduced me
to a military writer society.
But I want to welcome back to Veterans Radio, Dwight John
Zimmerman.
Welcome back, Dwight.
Dale, it is so nice to be back here.
Thank you so much.
And happy Father's Day to all the fathers who are listening.
That's true.
Happy Father's Day to all of us, right?
Had my breakfast with the fam this morning.
Everything went well.
I hope you did.
Hope you did too.
Well, not so much.
No celebration yet?
We did a little earlier in the weekend,
because our son was having to do a travel.
Another obligation.
They always have obligations.
Who let our kids grow up?
Yeah, it happens.
It does.
That is for sure.
Well, Dwight, I want you to meet my other guest who's
in the studio.
And let me kind of give a little introduction to him.
He's retired Major General William Henderson and Bill.
And he is and was an F-4 fighter pilot in Vietnam, Marine.
And he's here to kind of act as my expert.
We talk a little bit about some of the airplanes
that are in your book.
So Bill, meet Dwight, Dwight, meet Bill.
Dwight, it's good to be here on the show with you
and looking forward to a very interesting conversation.
I looked at the book and I told Dale,
I definitely want to get the guy.
I'm going to have a copy of that book.
It really looks like something I want to have.
Well, General, that is a great thing to hear.
I am so humbled by that, because as someone who
is a lifelong civilian, but from childhood on,
respected, admired the military was, I grew up reading
military history and wanted to do something that
would contribute to it.
And when I became an adult and I had the opportunity
to write the military books, as Dale can tell you,
this is my 17th book on military history.
Outstanding.
Well, I'll tell you, again, not familiar with the others,
but just through perusing through this one,
this is a first class book.
A lot of great pictures and a lot of narratives.
So I'm definitely going to pick it up.
Well, thank you.
I had a lot of fun with this.
And obviously, the original purpose
was to, we were looking at the 50th anniversary of the Navy's
fighter pilot training program, which came to be known as Top Gun.
And with the Tom Cruise Top Gun movie sequel coming out,
it seemed like a nice dovetail.
And as I was putting this whole thing together,
as it happened when I was working on my Uncommon Valor
book, which was about the Medal of Honor recipients
from Afghanistan and Iraq, and recognizing that people,
because there's so much time at past between the last real
recipients of the Medal of Honor from Vietnam, with respect
to Sugar Garden Gordon and the Mogadishu thing,
the civilian authors, the civilian audience, I'm sorry,
had lost what was the meaning of the Medal of Honor.
So we included a history of the Medal of Honor
to put it in context.
And as I was putting together this Top Gun story,
I said, well, the civilian audience really doesn't know,
well, what in the heck does this really mean?
Why is Top Gun so important?
Why are fighter pilots so special?
And that's where I wanted to include a history of fighter
pilots and to put into context the whole ethos of being
a fighter pilot and why they are such extraordinary individuals.
Well, you've done an excellent job.
And again, I'm looking forward to getting the book
and reading it from cover to cover.
But I'm really impressed with what I've seen so far.
Well, thank you.
Well, yeah, it says as an F-4 pilot himself,
I was very, we had a very lively discussion
on the attributes of the F-4 and the strengths
and weaknesses of it.
And I think that you did an excellent job in your book
of talking about not just the F-4, obviously,
but all the other aircraft that you mentioned
starting in World War I. And what I want to do,
kind of, Dwight, if we can, kind of go back chronologically
and talk about some of these fighter pilots
that I think the audience might be interested in.
And as you say, maybe rekindle some interest
in what these fighter pilots really do.
How about that?
OK, well, I'm happy to do that.
What was really fascinating for me was World War I,
obviously, that was the first war in which air combat occurred.
And it is really amazing when you start looking at what
all happened, how dangerous.
I mean, yes, air combat is dangerous by definition.
Yes.
So what?
When you look at what the pilots in World War I were facing,
it wasn't just against their adversary.
It was the planes themselves.
These were very fragile aircraft.
And one of the points that I wanted to make visually
was, and I was really happy when I found that,
I have a photograph in there of the cockpit
of a French Newport fighter plane.
And you're looking at the thing, and you're saying,
there's absolutely almost no instruments in there.
No, they weren't any.
And the helicopter wasn't that much better.
But it looked like an old car.
There's no speedometer.
There's no air speed.
There's no artificial horizon, all the different things
that pilots are so used to today.
But they got them up in the air.
In fact, I don't know how they stayed up in the air most
of the time, or even how they figured out
how to coordinate machine gun fire with the propellers
and all the other things.
And you've got some great stories inside your book.
We are talking here on Veterans Radio with Dwight Zimmerman,
who is the author of Top Gun 50 Years of Naval Air
Superiority.
And he goes back and looks at the history of aviation,
and military aviation specifically.
And yeah, those planes were the Wright Brothers types
of things.
They're lucky they stayed up in the air more than 15 seconds.
Yeah, and initial air combat was pilots
who had pistols, shotguns.
They even threw rocks and grenades at each other.
And the first machine guns that were mounted just above the engine,
they wrapped metal around the propellers
because machine guns weren't synchronized.
So you can well imagine they're pulling the trigger.
And then suddenly bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,
and bullets are flying, hither and yon.
And maybe a couple actually went forward.
But who knows how many went elsewhere and even backwards.
Yeah, wounded by your own ricochet.
Yeah, we're talking about friendly fire
in the worst way.
That's pretty bad.
So who was the first American ace?
And I'm going to ask you to define ace for our audience.
OK, well, the first American ace,
I don't think I could tell you.
But as these pilots were out there,
they captured everyone's imagination.
And they came to be a standard.
Initially, it was the downing of 10 aircraft that gave you
the title.
And the French were the first to give the designation of ace.
And it was only after the Americans entered the war
in World War I in 1917 that the allies,
Joe Britton and France said, let us put the designation at five
planes to make an ace.
Because it was at that point that you
received a decoration.
In France, it was the Claude de Guerre.
And then you got other decorations as well.
And as it turned out, well, we had a number of really good
American pilots that started with the Lafayette Escradeal,
which was a group of American pilots who fought under the
French Air Force.
And then when America entered the war, they were signed on
to the American Air Corps.
And Raoul Lufteberry, who was our top ace at the time,
he was French-American.
And he taught Eddie Rickenbacher how to fight.
And Rickenbacher, as some of our listeners may know,
is our World War I ace of aces with 26 kills.
Right.
And in fact, I was just going to give you that number,
because I'm reading it in this amazing book that I've got
sitting here on my desk as we're talking.
And the French ace of aces was René, and I don't speak
French at all.
So it's funk, F-O-N-C-K.
And this gentleman.
You did well.
Oh, thank you.
This guy had confirmed 75 kills and another 67 that were
listed as probables.
Wow.
I think we just impressed the general here with this guy's
flying ability.
And of course, inside the book, you also mentioned the Red
Baron and some other people that were well known.
And how the American public became so enamored with these
fighter pilots, especially after the end of World War I.
And as you mentioned throughout the book, you are
talking about the influence of Hollywood on recruiting.
Oh, it was manifest.
You know, these fighter pilots became the
Knights of the Sky.
And even before the end of World War I, stories were
being written, magazines, short stories and magazines and
books were coming out.
And Hollywood, no fools them, were quick to capitalize on
it.
And arguably the most famous.
I mentioned a number of movies in there.
But really, the big one was the original King Kong movie.
And it was really funny.
I got into the background of that.
And it was fascinating to see how the producer of the film
fooled the chief of naval operations to trick them to
actually get a squadron of pilots to do the flying
around the Empire State Building and staging the
attack on King Kong.
Right.
It was not a model.
No.
It was real airplanes flying around pretending to attack
the Empire State Building.
Yeah, I can remember that movie.
I watched King Kong, I don't know, about 100 times on
the old million dollar movie.
I guess so.
But of course that, and for movie buffs out there,
there's a movie Wings.
That was, and all that was pretty much live action.
They didn't use.
Yes, it was.
They didn't use airplanes.
It defined how to do aerial combat for the movies.
Yeah, that was a pretty high.
In modern times, this Top Gun, it was a major recruiting
tool.
The interest in becoming fighter pilots in the military
after Top Gun came out went up exponentially.
It had a major effect.
You're quite right, General.
I was talking with a friend of mine who was the, Craig
Simons.
He at the time was the head of the chair of the history
department at the US Naval Academy when that movie came
up.
And he said there was a huge spike in recruitment.
And of course, here are all these young men coming out of
the movie and they're all pumped up with adrenaline and
saying, wow, I'm going to be a fighter pilot and everything
like that.
And they sign up.
And General, what's the difference between what Hollywood
depicted and what it really takes to be a fighter pilot?
Well, it's a big difference.
What you see in the movies is the end result of the
fighter pilot training.
But what you have to go through for that on the Air Force
for 12 months and the Navy Marine Corps for 18 months,
it's a lot more mundane, a lot more less exciting, let's put
it for great parts of it.
Like repetition.
Right.
And there's a lot of pressure because every flight is like
a final exam.
But it's well worth it.
And there are some exciting times also in flight training
when you are formation flying and gunnery and that.
But a lot of it is instrument training, for example, is
very going to be boring, very intensive.
It's a long, like a month and a half program, as I recall.
But it's been a long time for me.
But what you see in the movies is the end result, which is
that part is exciting.
But getting there is not that exciting.
Half the fun.
Especially when you have to go through the spin and puke
chair.
Right.
A lot of hard work.
It is a lot of hard work.
And we're talking with Major General William Henderson
here and Dwight Zimmerman, who is the author of a new book
entitled Top Gun 50 Years of Naval Flight Training.
And you talk about, from a historical perspective, we're
going from World War I and we're up to World War II, where
now we're doing all of these aircraft carrier landings.
And we'll mention that later on with the general.
He had so much fun doing that.
Yeah, I bet you did.
That night, especially.
Exactly.
He was mentioning that the last portion of your flight training
was carrier landing, correct?
In the last portion, in the basic training,
and then last portion in advance, yes.
And if you messed up your landing?
Right.
You could have been, like I was to tell people, the ace of the base.
But when it came time to go to the carrier,
if you didn't qualify, there was no second chance.
You were out of the program.
It wasn't like we'll go back and train some more
and you come back out again next month.
It didn't matter what kind of grades you had prior to that.
If you couldn't get aboard the carrier, you were out.
Just that simple.
That's a lot of taxpayer money going to training.
And they say, well, see you later bye.
Right.
Well, and also, you had the different resting cables.
Oh, yeah.
So you were graded as to which ones you'd hit.
I think our listeners would be interested in that aspect, which
you would know a lot more than me.
Well, the number three wire is the desirable one.
How many wires on there?
I can't remember.
It's three or four.
It's been a while.
But it's three or four.
But number three was like the ideal.
However, from a pilot's point of view,
it doesn't matter which wire you get.
You just want to get a wire.
And at the end, it didn't matter if you got all ones or all fours.
You qualified.
So the three wire was nice.
But from the guys going out there doing it,
they actually could care less about which wire it was.
I'm sure.
I just heard recently about landing types.
And there are good landings and there are great landings.
A good landing is a landing that you can walk away from safely.
A great landing is one that you can walk away from,
and they can actually reuse the aircraft.
Right.
Well, I'll leave you two guys to talk about that.
I'm sure, Dale, you have your anecdotes as a helicopter pilot.
Well, just at one quarter of the speed.
That's the only difference.
Or maybe a tenth of the speed.
But we have about three minutes to write before we're
going to hit the bottom of the hour.
Let's talk just briefly about the effects of the movie Top Gun.
As we mentioned, it increased enlistment in the flight programs.
In your book, you mentioned that there was actually
a Navy recruiter that was opened right next to a couple of movie theaters.
Catching as it came out.
Yeah.
As it turned out, when the movie started getting some real buzz and
legs, the Navy was quick to seize on it.
They would set up kiosks at big theaters in major markets, like Los Angeles, New York,
Chicago, big cities.
When the young men came out, they would see these recruiting kiosks.
They're in their late teens, early 20s, and they're figuring, hey, I can be the next
Tom Cruise or Val Kilmer.
The Navy was smart enough to say, you sure as hell can.
Just sign right here.
Now, didn't all pilots have to have college degrees?
When I first, in 1966, when I went through flight training, they still had a program
in the Marine Corps and the Navy, the Mar-CADs and NAV-CADs, two years of college.
But that ended in 1966.
After that, everybody had to have a four-year degree.
Which is why the Army went to the Warren Officer program so that they could get the
number of pilots that they needed.
Right.
They were short amount of time.
Yeah, exactly.
Kind of busy.
We got about a minute and a half to go.
Let's talk in a minute, I guess we can do this, is a transition from prop-driven aircraft
to jet aircraft.
This occurred between World War II and Korea, correct?
Correct.
And did this change the training at all, as far as, you know, going from the props to
everything else?
I can't address that, because when I came through it was all jets, except for first
two months in a prop, small prop.
Okay.
Well, we got to take a break anyway, so we'll think about that question and I'll make sure
that I'm not being a good lawyer today where I don't know the answer to the question before
I ask it.
We've been talking and we will be talking more in a moment with Dwight Simmerman, author
of the book Top Gun, the first 50 years of naval air superiority and Major General William
Henderson, United States Marine Corps.
And so you're listening to Veterans Radio and we will be back in just a moment.
Now, welcome back to Veterans Radio.
My name is Dale Throneberry and I am getting your host today.
And we're talking with author Dwight Zimmerman, whose new book is just out.
It's called Top Gun, 50 Years of Naval Air Superiority.
And joining me in the studio is retired Major General William Henderson, who was an F-4
pilot in Vietnam.
And we're just talking during the break about a number of other aircraft that he's flown,
so we're going to get into that in a little bit as we continue on with our chronological
look at Top Gun.
So Dwight, tell me what happened in World War II, I think it was.
That's where we ended up with some more aces, didn't we?
Well, that was, you could say, excuse me, the golden age of aerial combat.
We saw so many advances in the technology.
We went from airplanes fashioned from cloth and wood and primitive machine gun use to
all metal, enclosed cockpit, powerful engines.
And at the end of the war, we actually had jet engines in combat.
It was really an amazing, when you look at how quickly, excuse me, aircraft were designed
and constructed and put into combat.
But nowadays, it takes more than 10 years from drawing board, well, now it's computer,
to final product.
There we were seeing aircraft, well, in World War I, it was months from drawing board to
actual fighter plane.
And similarly, in World War II, the accelerated pace of aircraft development was just absolutely
amazing.
My jaw dropped when I was seeing how quickly we, well, all of the major combatants developed
their fighter planes.
And quickly, and in such big numbers.
Well, yeah.
The numbers of airplanes were unbelievable.
We'll never see anything like that again.
No, I can't imagine doing that.
I mean, we're right down the road from Willow Run, where they were turning out, you know,
1,000 B-17s or 24s, whatever it was toward the end of the war.
And yeah, I think the ability to produce these aircraft obviously led to our victory.
The World War II.
They built 5,000 B-24s at Willow Run.
5,000 and some of those 5,000 plus.
Yeah, it's an amazing number, you're right.
Well, when we went to, so we, we had, as you said, it was the golden age of fighter pilots
and so forth during World War II, because everything seemed to be, now most of those
fighter planes were not pressurized, so they weren't flying at 20,000, 30,000 feet.
No, the interesting enough, the only pressurized aircraft was the B-29 Superfortress.
And ultimately what happened was instead of it flying at the higher altitude necessitated
by being pressurized, they wound up flying at low level in their attacks against Japan.
So yeah, we're talking about classic dog fighters, you know, from at the highest 15,000
feet, you know, down to ground level.
I was curious about that and I wanted to ask the general question about the pressure suit,
because the idea of all these G's on your body, and I think that's probably another
test that you had to pass from a physical standpoint, what, can you tell me what it
was like to fly with a pressure suit on?
Well, it wasn't really a pressure suit, you wore a G suit, which was from, covered your
lower part of your stomach and then your legs, and it was a head of hose plugged into the
airplane and when you pulled G's, a certain amount of G's in a turn or whatever, those,
you would feel bladders in that G suit start to fill up, and fill up to different levels.
If you're really pulling hard, they fill up to the maximum state.
But what that did was it kept the blood from pooling in the lower part of your body.
Now as soon as you stopped pulling G's, it would deflate again, so it would inflate,
deflate, based on the number of G's you pulled.
But that just protected the bottom, or kept your blood from going pooling in the bottom
part of your body.
And you went into, when they start wearing full pressurized suits, is when you get up
into 45, 50, 50,000 range of altitude and above, which not none of the fighter pilots
are doing that.
So it's a G's, and that's the same thing they wear today, same G suit.
Okay, and a G is basically your body weight multiplied by however many that you're pulling.
Yeah, right, right, by a force of gravity.
And most airplanes at that time, you could pull about six G's.
I think people start passing out around seven or eight G's.
But each airplane had a G limit.
So if you over G'd the airplane, pulled more than say six G's, then that airplane had to
be inspected when it came back.
And all the pieces would start flying.
Right, right, right.
And I'm sure the newer airplanes, I know they have G limits.
And it may be more, probably is more, I don't know.
But yeah, that was the only pressurized type suit that was the G suit.
Okay, I don't like to do this, but I'm going to kind of skip over Korea and get to Vietnam
time period because this is where there's so many changes in tactics and aircraft that
occurred there.
So Dwight, let's talk a little bit about what was going on at the beginning of the Vietnam
War and the 64-65 era.
Well, basically what happened was Korea was the last gas of the true dogfighting era.
And when we had the F-86 Sabre, which was our last true dogfighting fighter craft, the
advances with jet-powered aircraft caused a reassessment of tactics.
And generally, I'm sure you were very familiar with the new training that was implemented
at the start of the 1960s that carried into the Vietnam War, in which instead of being
a dogfighting fighter, the aircraft was an interceptor, with the target being rather
another fighter, it was an enemy bomber, in this case, the Soviet bear and badger.
Yes, yes.
So I'd like your comment about that.
Well, I can speak from the F-4 and at that time frame, the Navy and Marine Corps F-4s
didn't even have a gun on them, for example.
Everything was missiles, sidewinders and sparrows, which were designed, the sidewinder especially,
to hit targets beyond visual range, or BVR, they call it.
And you had a radar interceptor officer in the back and he would lock up a target and
you might fire on targets 5, 10, 15 miles away, never maybe see it visually.
When you got in closer, you used the sidewinder, which was strictly a heat seeker, but no gun,
not at all.
Now, the air force, eventually the Navy slash Marine Corps did put a gun pod on the F-4,
which looked like a big fuel tank underneath the airplane with a gun in that pod, but they
just weren't that accurate.
The air force at that time went to an internal gun, what their F-4s, they bought new F-4s
with guns, internal gun, which was like the World War II fighter with a gun.
But it still wasn't that much gunfight and it was mostly with missiles, even against
other fighters.
You had mentioned that you didn't, luckily, did not run into any MiGs while you were there,
but you had heard about their tactics.
Dwight, you touched upon this in your book.
The general also said that the North Vietnamese pilots were by the book.
They were controlled more by ground controllers than they were by their own whims when they
took off.
What was really fascinating was that they were using their aircraft, the MiG-17 and
MiG-21s, were technically inferior to the F-4 Phantom and they were using the World
War II tactics that were rigidly Soviet-based, but they were still knocking our pilots out
of the sky, which was really an astonishing thing.
It was really hard to accept.
What the heck is going on here?
And it was simply a fact, perhaps oversimplifying it, by saying we were fighting a different
aerial war than the North Vietnamese were.
General, would you agree with that?
In fact, the missile, the sidewinder, the Sparrow missiles, initially in Vietnam, many
times they would fire, but they wouldn't track.
So there was a lot of trouble, even with the missiles not being up to par with doing what
they should do.
And also, again, they would use those hit-and-run tactics.
I disagree with you a little bit on one area.
The MiG-21 was a pretty good airplane.
The advantage that the MiG-21 had was it was very small and it was hard to see.
In fact, we had a MiG-21 that had been captured or flown by one of the Arab Air Forces that
the United States government got a hold of.
And they showed a video of the F-4 and the MiG-21 flying beside each other from a distance.
And you could see the F-4 coming.
They're together.
You can see the F-4 coming because the F-4 also left a smoke trail, which the MiG-21 did
not.
And it wasn't until it got fairly close that you even saw the MiG-21 next to the F-4.
So it was a pretty good airplane in that respect, whereas the F-4, again, was easy to see because
of that smoke trail and didn't have a gun.
Okay.
Well, hey, that's all right.
I got that correction in there because we got a correction by a phone call, came in from
a Rosie the Riveter group.
Nancy from the Rosie the Riveter group.
That will run said there were 8,600 B-24s constructed out of the 16,000 that were built in America
during World War II.
There were no B-17s built at will run.
Right.
8,600 B-24s at will run?
At will run alone.
Oh, wow.
I didn't notice that many.
That's right.
Well, Nancy, thank you very much for giving us a call.
Yeah.
Correcting our information here.
Right.
One of the things Dwight that I couldn't find when we're talking about now getting into
the Top Gun era, I can't seem to locate it in your book right now, is that the kill ratio
of American fighter pilots to enemy fighter pilots was very high during World War II.
Some were in the neighborhood, I forget what exactly what it was, but that you found that
when we got to the Vietnam era, it had dropped down precipitously down to almost two and
a half to one.
And that generated the change.
Yeah.
At its peak, it was like 20 to one in World War I, World War II, and in Korea, it was
like 12 to one.
And then in Vietnam, it dropped to 2.5 to one, which needless to say, that kind of attrition
is unacceptable.
Right.
Yes.
And so that's when the Navy sat down and decided to make some changes.
And this is really tough because they had already set up and bought into the whole interceptor
concept, which the general was very good at describing.
And now they had to completely rethink how they were going to conduct aerial combat and
basically turn the F4 into a dogfighter, which it really wasn't designed to be.
Right.
And that's where Lieutenant Commander Peterson, he was given the open book to create what
became known as the Top Gun Fighter Pile Training Program.
Right.
General Henderson mentioned that he was missed going to Top Gun by two weeks.
We were in a class to go out, four of us from my squadron, and we actually got out there,
and then they turned right around and come back because something had happened, something
of logistics.
They had to delay the class or something.
I can't remember exactly what it was.
This was in 1973.
So we ended up not going.
We didn't make it.
Well, General, I would like to hear from your side what you were hearing about the Top Gun
Program.
I've written about this historical thing, but you were there at the time.
So you're hearing from the other pilots.
So what was the feedback?
Oh, the Top Gun Program was great.
In fact, that turned everything around.
I mean, it started to turn around because now pilots were getting that additional training
before they went to Vietnam, and the ratio did change after that.
And also the Air Force started a school called Fighter Weapons School, which is equivalent
to Top Gun.
So both Top Gun covers the Navy and Marine Corps, and of course the Air Force was Fighter
Weapons at Nellis.
Both first class schools, and when you come out of there, you really know your aircraft
and your weapon system.
And you learn a lot about the adversaries aircraft.
There's a lot of air to air work against smaller airplanes that are typical of what
the adversary had.
So it's a first class school.
The other thing that impressed me too was the students who graduated from Top Gun, they
weren't just simply going to be the hot shot pilots.
Their mandate was also to take the training that they received and pass it on to others.
Tell me about that for you.
Oh yeah, yeah.
When they come back to a squadron, they were many times put in positions where they become
instructors in certain fields.
And they had the corporate knowledge of what the rest of the pilots didn't have who hadn't
been.
They did train and bring back knowledge that they learned at Top Gun, and it made everybody
better.
There's no question.
It had an immediate effect.
The ratio changed once these guys started going to Top Gun, and the kill ratio in Vietnam.
And you said as everybody's becoming a better and better pilot and the aircraft were modified
and changed?
Well, no, the F-4 wasn't really modified.
It's hard to turn an airplane, modify an airplane to change it big time.
But the new airplanes that started coming out after that were smaller.
The F-16s were smaller.
The F-14 was a big airplane.
But they started making the airplane smaller.
Some of them went to single pilot instead of two crewmen.
So that's the things they learned that was a lot of a result of Top Gun.
The F-4 was a big airplane.
The MiG-21, for example, was a small airplane.
But it was lethal.
The one thing that I was very fascinated about when I was doing my research was that the
original Top Gun instructors, they basically played test pilot with the F-4s, putting it
through so many maneuvers and everything beyond the envelope, beyond what the manufacturer
advised.
That's correct.
Can you tell me something about that that you knew about?
Well, when I first got into the F-4, for example, I was in a school, they'd had the F-4 maybe
about three years when I got into it.
But when I first got into the F-4, they were very hesitant to do overhead maneuvers in the
F-4, like loops and things of that nature, because it was a heavy airplane.
And if you didn't do it exactly right with certain parameters, you could lose control
of the airplane.
So it was not designed like the airplanes are now to be as maneuverable as they are.
But as time went on, when I finally got into the F-4, they started loosening up on what
you could do with the airplane, because some of that has resulted Top Gun, as you said,
they started doing things that hadn't been done in the airplane before, and they realized,
well, we actually can do it and survive.
So they taught methods to make you more effective as a fighter pilot, maneuvering the airplane
to its maximum limits.
I like that.
A lot of things learned in Top Gun.
Yeah, I'm looking at, we're talking with Dwight Zimmerman here, the author of Top Gun, 50-Year
Anniversary of Naval Air Superiority.
And his whole chapter here devoted to the Air Force's answer to Top Gun, which was called
Red Flag.
Right.
It's what it is.
And I think they're out there pretty close to where the Navy is, aren't they?
As far as they're looking for it.
Red flags at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas.
Top Gun was out of Miramar down in San Diego, but now I think they've moved up to LeMore
because Miramar became a marine air base.
But they're both in the desert.
Good safe place to be.
Right.
Not a lot of people you could run into.
Right.
Yeah, right now, Top Gun is at Fallon, which basically is right next door to Nellis.
Oh, okay.
We've got about five minutes to go here.
So I wanted to kind of skip ahead a little bit if we can to the stealth aircraft and
how do those aircraft compare at all with as far as fighters from what you've learned,
Dwight?
Oh boy.
This is a real new chapter and that is being written.
The big difference is, of course, we don't have a human in the cockpit.
It's instruments.
The pilot, as it were, is sitting on a chair on the ground in a trailer or wherever, as
much as half a world away, and using his controls to put the aircraft through its paces.
So, it's not limited by the problems that the general knows about blood rushing from
the brain and other problems associated with just human body limitations.
It's more mechanical.
Everything is going to get ripped off through a violent maneuver or stalling or whatever
can happen just from a mechanical standpoint.
You were talking about the drones here, right?
Right.
Yes.
I think that that's going to be really interesting when you get to drone aircraft from opposite
sides fighting like a big video game, only deadly for people.
This is where it's going to be interesting to see what the top gun movie sequel, how
it addresses that, because originally that sequel was supposed to be out now, but because
it's been working so closely with the Navy, they pushed back the release date a year,
which is no small thing, given how much money is involved in everything.
So that tells me that they are really investing in what's all happening with drone technology,
drone tactics, and how that's going to play out.
It looks like I see another book in mind for you.
When is the second movie supposed to come out?
June of next year, or it might be close to July, I think it's June 20th, something like
that.
Well, that ought to be, I'm looking forward to that.
That ought to be great.
That ought to be something.
I got a feeling he likes to watch.
Probably got top gun in his CD list, in his car and everything else.
I was going to do that earlier, and then I said, no, I think we'll just sit there listening
to the music.
All right, so the book is 50 Years of Navy Air Superiority.
Where can we get this, Mr. Zimmerman?
Well, thank you, Dale.
Top gun, 50 Years of Navy Air Superiority can be purchased at any fine bookstore, and
any bookstore that has it is definitely a fine bookstore, as well as Amazon and other
online outlets.
I was going to say, including the bookstore on the USS Intrepid in New York Harbor.
Oh, yes, I had a great time there.
I can only imagine.
And of course, all your other books are available at these other fine bookstores, correct?
Yes.
Well, Dwight, I want to thank you very much for being on the program today, and I'm going
to ask you a favor if we could get a copy of your book signed by you that I could give
to the general.
Oh, I'd be happy to, Dale.
I will, yep.
I'll get you the information.
Yeah.
And, no, that's my pleasure.
I honored, sir, and thank you for your service, and Dale, you as well.
One of the things that I am humbled about is that I wind up having, my skill set has
been able to tell your guys' story, and, Dale, you're familiar enough with it, and I just
know, thank you to you guys, you are amazing individuals, and that I'm able to take my
skill and help tell your stories to the larger audience.
I feel that's my role as a bridge, you know, to bring your stories to a civilian audience.
Well, we're most appreciative, and you do an excellent job of telling the story so that
everybody can understand it, and, you know, not just military people, it's always exciting
to see what you've got coming out next.
Yeah.
I want to thank you in advance for your, thank you for writing the book, and then thank
you in advance for me getting a copy of it, and I've really enjoyed talking to you.
Me too.
Okay, so we're coming up to the end of the hour here.
I think I've got about a minute left or less.
This is not in his head at me.
I don't know.
By the way, Dwight, thank you very much for being on the program.
We'll be in touch.
Let me know when you've got another bestseller coming out.
Okay.
All right, and General Henderson, I want to thank you very much for being on our program
today.
General Henderson is a local young man.
He's from the Ann Arbor area.
Went to Pioneer High School, Eastern Michigan University, and I want to welcome him for
that.
I want to remind everybody to tune in next week on Veterans Radio.
We're going to be looking at post-matic stress treatments.
And dismissed.