American MiG Pilot: Inside the Top Secret USAF "Red Eagles" MiG Squadron Part 2 (445)

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0:41Smooth caramel, maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. And I'm walking into the first large hangar and I'm taken back because here, no fewer than nine MiG-21s park nose-to-nose. They're right there. I'm going, you gotta be kidding me. This is Cold War Conversations. If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to Cold War history. Please make sure you follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss future episodes. Lieutenant Colonel Rob Zeman Zettel is the author of American MiG Pilot inside the top secret US Air Force Red Eagles.

1:27He tells the Red Eagle story for the first time through the experiences of a pilot who flew Soviet MiGs to their maximum performance in simulated combat engagements, often several times a day, against some of the very best fighter pilots. Rob's vivid accounts put the listener right in the cockpit at one of the most access-restricted airfields in the entire US Air Force. We join him in part two of our story, describing his first interview for the Red Eagles. I'm delighted to welcome Lieutenant Colonel Rob Zettel to our Cold War conversation. I show up promptly a little bit before four, enter the squadron building, which actually isn't really a squadron.

2:10It's a double-wide trailer. It's pretty nondescript. It's kind of embarrassing looking. It looks like something at a junkyard or something. It doesn't look very like a top-secret squadron would be, But I walk in there and I quickly notice I'm the only one in there wearing dress blues. And I'm sure they're thinking, who is this guy and what's he doing here? Luckily, Jim Day was there at the door. He ushers me in and makes some introductions to a few of the people that are standing around. And a few minutes later, he tells me, hey, come on down. I'm going to introduce you to George Jenner, our commander.

2:45So I go down there and I won't belabor that too much. But I go in for an interview. It didn't last more than about 20, 30 minutes. And I go in his office, and Jim closes the door as he leaves. And in the office with him is the operations officer, a guy by the name of a major, Burt Buffalo Myers. And the call sign is perfect. Buffalo, because this guy is huge. He looks like, for those of you who are familiar with the football league, looks like he could be a guard or tackle on your offensive line. He's huge. He's a big guy. But he's just standing and leaning against the wall. I don't know either one of these guys.

3:19And Jen is gracious enough. He stands up and he shakes my hand and introduces me to Major Myers. And he tells me, have a seat. And anyway, interview goes on for about 20, 25 minutes. And at the end of it, he says, OK, thanks a lot. He gets up and that's my cue. OK, this interview is over. And I shake his hand. Same thing with Myers. And I walk toward the door and I'm leaving. And as I'm leaving, he says one more thing. He says, oh, one more thing. Z-Man. He said, don't call us. We'll call you. So I walk out of there thinking I'm probably not going to get the job, but at least they knew who I am.

3:56So if I come back here a year from now, they'll know who I am and maybe I'll have a shot at it some months later. So that's what happened. I go on. I go back to Clark shortly after New Year's in 1983. And And I'm back at Clark flying my usual aggressor sorties for the next six, seven months. And in about June of 83, I'm coming in from a mission. I just got out and flown a 1V2 against another pair of Phantoms from the third attack fighter wing. And as I enter the squadron, the guy who's sitting the duty, a guy by the name of Captain Phil, Phil Gilbert, calls me over. And I'm coming in. I'm a sweaty mess.

4:41It's hot, humid. It's June in the Philippines. And I just flown a 1.1 sortie. So I got my helmet bag in one hand, my parachute slung over my other shoulder. And he says, hey, Z-Man, come here. He said, when you get done with your debrief, the colonel at the wing DO, deputy commander for operations, I just called a little bit ago. He says, when you get done with your debrief, he wants to see you in his office to clue everyone in. When you're told that as a fighter pilot, it's like seeing the flashing lights of the police behind you when you're driving down the road. You immediately think you're guilty of something, even though you may not be.

5:23But you certainly think you probably are. So I'm thinking, oh, God, now what did I do? I don't think I screwed anything up, but I'll find out soon. We'd sit her up. So I do my debrief with the F-4 Phantoms. Lasted about an hour. And then I make my way down to the wing DO's office, which is only a few blocks away. Make myself look about as presentable as I possibly can. I'm still a sweaty mess. And I tell the secretary that, hey, Captain Zettel's here to see Colonel Holden. So she says, okay, have a seat. Ten minutes goes by, and she answers the phone, and she says, yeah, Captain Zettle's here to see you.

6:06And I hear some voice on the other end saying, well, okay, send him in. So I walk on in, and I won't ruin the whole story for everyone, but I get in. It's not a butt-chewing like I expected. It's basically him holding a piece of paper, which is a letter from Colonel George Jenin to the wing commander saying I had just been selected to be the next Red Eagle. And so that's how it happened. So it's something you can't map out and plan for. You have to have, obviously, you have to have the skill, the right credentials, the aptitude, and it's a good part of it. And that I know when I was doing research from the book, in fact, this is only about six months ago, probably about only about three months before I finished the book.

6:46I actually went through some old files and I had a file there that I hadn't opened probably, no kidding, 40 years. But I looked at it and I go, when is this? And in that file was a package that the wing commander at Clark had sent with letters of endorsement from my squadron commander, the wing commander, to the 57th Fighter Weapons Wing commander at Nellis saying, hey, we got a young aggressor here who would be an excellent red eagle. I had copies of all my OERs, letters of endorsement, and my performance reports, and my official photo from when I was a young captain. I'm thinking, man, this all went on behind the scenes.

7:27I had no clue this went on. So anyway, that's how it happened. And if I tried to do it all over again, it probably wouldn't happen. I doubt that. I doubt that, Rob. And there is loads more detail in the book. We're just skipping through various parts of the book here. Rob, if we can just move ahead. You make it to the Red Eagles. You have to undergo some training. But if you can take me through the first time you fly the MiG-21, because there's no two-seater versions of either the MiG-21 or the MiG-23 in the Red Eagle. So the first time you fly this, you are on your own. That's correct. And it's quite amazing.

8:11I look back on it, and even all these years later, I'm still amazed that the operation actually ran as, well, not that it ran as smoothly, but that we were able to do what we did back then. I'm sure today that would never be allowed. But I show up, and within a week of being at Nellis, I go up and I get my first trip up Tonopah Test Range, TTR. And I fly up on a MU-2 turboprop airplane. We had two of them in the squadron that we flew ourselves. Our guys flew them. And I'm flying up with Lieutenant Colonel Jenner. So he knows this is my first day up there. And he makes sure that I'm on the plane with him and all the way up there, which is about roughly an hour flight.

8:51He just tells me, OK, what to expect, what's going to go on. And he's going to give me the grand tour. So we get on the ground and this is a top secret base. No one gets on that base without credentials and background checks and that sort of thing. So I get there and he gives me the tour. and it's one jaw-dropping experience and surprise after another for about an hour. First off, immediately we go in the squadron building. There's no MIGs on the ramp at all. Everything's behind closed doors. Huge, immense hangers on the ramp that I'm going to be shown here shortly. But one of the first things we do is we go into every day, we go into a big basic briefing room.

9:35It's almost like a boardroom. and we go through the daily schedule. And of course, I'm new to all this, so I'm just, I'm a sponge. I'm taking everything all in, but I'm watching. They're going through the daily schedule. And again, I've only been there about a week, so all my squadron mates are pretty new to me. I'm still learning names and faces, but they go through the flying schedule, what's going to go on. The squadrons are flying against the types of sorties that'll be going on, any satellite overheads, yada, yada. At the end of it, Jenin looks at me and says, okay, Z-Man, grab your Jackalos kill.

10:08Time for you to get the tour. So I go with him. And again, I don't want to spoil the whole book, but it leads me through hangar after hangar. And it's every door that opens, there's MiGs behind it, either some on static display, some undergoing maintenance. It's there's MiG-21s in this hangar, T-38s in this hangar, MiG-23s, and this other huge hangar. In between all these are workshops for the maintenance troops to work on anything from repacking drag chutes to hydraulic lines, you name it. So my head's just spinning because, again, think about this. before I go up there, most U.S. Air Force and even Navy pilots and Marine Corps are the same.

10:56About your only exposure, unless you happen to be one of the lucky few that happened to have a, had flown in a constant peg sortie, your only exposure to a MiG-21 or MiG-23 is what you saw in intelligence manuals and you read about. And usually those were just some grainy black black and white photos, maybe something from Paris Airshow or something like that. So when the hangar door is open and I'm walking in with Jenin to the first large hangar, which houses Meg 21s, I'm taken back because here, no fewer than nine Meg 21s park nose to nose. They're right there. I'm going, you got to be kidding me.

11:41Anyway, so we go on and same thing happens when I go to the big 23 hangar. And then we go outside and now these airplanes are starting to taxi for takeoff and I'm just abuzz. So I get back to the squadron. He introduces me to the operations officer, Major Watley, who is a former, he's a F-4 Phantom guy. He'd been a fighter weapons school graduate and instructor, but he's the operations officer. And he introduces me to a guy named Mike Roy, Mock Roy, who actually I happen to know Mock from when I was a lieutenant flying F-4s at Cadena. He'd been in one of the other squadrons and later on went on to fly F-15s.

12:21Mike is there in the squadron. Monroe Watley says, okay, Z-Man, here's what's going to go on. Starting next week, actually starting today, your whole job, whole focus is to get into books. Mike here is going to be your instructor. And for the next week, you're going to go over everything, academics, you're going to sit in an airplane, you're going to go through all switchology. Engine starts, flows, emergency procedures, you name it. And then a week from today, you're going to fly it. So I'm thinking, wow. And most squadrons, and just like you had said, Ian, we didn't have any 2C trainers. And we didn't have any simulators.

12:57So it was all, when you talk about hangar flying, this is really the quintessential hangar flying. I would sit in a MiG-21 inside one of the hangars. if Mike was there, he'd be standing on, leaning over the cockpit rail with me, pointing out this, that, and the other thing. And I had the flight manual open or the checklist on my lap and going through procedure by procedure. So this went on for about the next five, six days. And in comes the day before you're going to fly it. What we have is they call it the ground taxi day. and because the MiG-21 was a little squirrely because it didn't have hydraulically-assisted nose wheel steering, it had pneumatic brakes.

13:40And this is quite different because it's completely opposite to anything I've ever flown in our Western fighters where you have a button at the bottom of the control stick, you depress it and you push a rudder to go left or go right and it can't be anything easier. The MiG-21 was all pneumatically-assisted brakes. And so you had a lever at the base of the control stick, which if you wanted to go left or right, simply pushing on the rudder pedal, unless you're going really fast, had no effect on moving the airplane left or right. You had to actually squeeze that lever and then push either left or right rudder to go in whichever direction, in which case you'd be metering preciously stored high-pressure air to either brake pad.

14:30Anyway, so you kind of get the picture. It's really different. So on the morning before I fly, they say, okay, here's what you're going to do. You're going to do an engine start, and then you're going to do what we call a low-speed taxi. You can start up the airplane, do all your normal procedures, and then you're going to try and taxi out of the chocks all the way down to the end of the runway and then taxi back before you run out of air. and I'm sure everybody, all the crew chiefs would laugh because they'd come out when they'd see this new guy attempting the taxi and it's probably a comedy of errors there.

15:05But our call sign for this sortie wasn't banded. It was zigzag because that's exactly what you do. You'd zigzag down the taxiway until you got your feel for it. And luckily I made it all the way down there and all the way back. And then we have lunch break and then you go do it again. But then in the afternoon, again, you're going to start the engine up. You go through the same procedures you did a few hours earlier. And now you're going to take it to the end of the runway. You're going to go through all your pre-departure checklist, before takeoff checklist. Now you're going to call the tower and get clearance onto the runway to do an afterburner run down the runway.

15:41Pop the drag chute, pull it out of afterburner, and then taxi back, drop the drag chute, taxi back. And again, try to do it all without running out of air. So sure enough, I do. I get in position. Canopy obviously is closed. Flaps are down, just like you would be. And you simulate, okay, tomorrow this is going to be for real. But this time I just got in full mill power and then squeezed the throttle lock, push up the full afterburner, let the thing light up, keep it in afterburner until I hit about 100 knots, and then smoothly pull it out of the afterburner all the way back to idle. Pop the drag chute, make the exit off the runway, drop the drag chute on the infield, and then taxi back.

16:22And once again, luckily, made it back without running out of air. So that's your intro to getting ready to fly. And then the next morning, I had two flights scheduled the next morning or the next day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. And to get to your initial question, what was it like flying? You're right. No two-seater. So you're getting ready to take off. And my instructor pilot, Mike Roy, he's in a T-38 chase airplane. He takes the runway with me. He gets clearance for takeoff. So he takes off in front of me. And I wait for him. He does a climbing afterburner turn at the end of the runway.

17:00Once he's airborne, gets his gear up, flaps up, and he's on downwind about 1 ,000 feet on the reciprocal heading, basically on downwind at 250 knots. And he says, okay, bandit, one, two, one, one's ready. And that's my cue to go ahead and push up the throttle to mill power, hold the brakes, obviously. And he says he's ready. So I tell him, okay, three, two, one, here. I release the brakes. Lift the throttle lock, push the, smoothly push the throttle up to full afterburner, feel and hear the light off, and away I go. And as I'm doing this, of course, I'm just paying attention to what's going on in my cockpit.

17:39But Mike Roy is doing this swooping, descending rejoin on me in this T-38. And as I get airborne, lift off at about 160 knots and quickly accelerates a really fast airplane. By the time I get to the airfield boundary, I've got the gear up now. The flaps are up at 220, 230 knots. I'm climbing up in about 15 to 20 degree nose-high climb. Mike Roy is rejoined off my right wing. Of course, I can't see him. And he comes underneath me and does what we call clean and dry. check on me just to make sure all the gear doors are up. Everything's looking good. There's no fluid or hydraulics or fuel leaking.

18:17And he said, okay, we're good to go. Let's switch frequencies. We do a check and we'll switch frequencies. And away I go. I continue climbing out into the range and I'm airborne for the first time in a single engine fighter and happens to be a MiG-21. And it doesn't take any time really to get used to it. It's my initial impression is I'm climbing out and big sigh of relief thinking, okay, hey, I'm really doing this. I'm airborne in a MiG. And I'm thinking, man, this thing is just as agile as an F-5. Fly's great. I really like it. And then proceed for the next 20, 25 minutes to ring the airplane out slowly, get a little more aggressive in the hard terms, stalls, gear up, gear down, that sort of thing, do some loops and hard turns and acceleration maneuvers.

18:59And before you know it, it doesn't have a lot of fuel in the airplane. We're on our way back, and we come back to high key for a simulated flame-out approach. And I'm thinking, man, of course, I've never flown anything single-engine, but this is my first time coming back to the airfield in a MIG. And I'm going to go to high key, which is about 12 ,000 feet above the airfield. And you get there and have your gears up, your flaps are up, your speed brakes are out. And over the numbers, you get clearance for the SFO, simulated flame-out approach from tower, and they clear you for this SFO. And Mike Roy is chasing me on the outside of the turn, and I go into it, never having done one, and I'm thinking, okay.

19:43And do this descending falling leaf maneuver to roll out on final. And, of course, the airplane is just descending like a banshee with all that drag on. And then, of course, as soon as you put the gear down, you increase your drag even more. So now you have to really lower the nose. And the whole idea is to, if you had a no kidding engine anomaly where you had degraded engine performances, could you make it back to the field and save the airplane? So anyway, survived all that. Got told by Mike Roy, okay, that's low enough. Go around. And this is the first time the engine performance really gets your attention because the spool up on the Make 21, the R11 300 engine on it wasn't very quick, not like the J79 or the GE85 engine on the F5, which are almost instantaneous.

20:34This thing had quite a delay. You went from flight idle to afterburn, it would be a solid 10 to 11 seconds. So when you went around, you had to plan it well ahead of time before you would, otherwise you'd actually impact the ground. But anyway, survived that and then did a couple of closed patterns and normal landings. And at the end of the second one, rolled out, final, full stop, popped the drag chute and taxied back. And you come back to the chalks and shut the airplane down. The crew chief comes up and shakes my hand and says, congratulations, you're America's newest MiG pilot. That was it.

21:11That was my first sortie of MiG-21. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can. So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast, and I look forward to it every week. to be like ronda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the cold war as a monthly or annual supporter you'll be able to listen ad free you'll become one of our community get the sought after cold war conversations drinks coaster as a thank you and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve cold war history just go to cold worldconversations.com slash donate to find out more.

22:09Now, if you've listened this far, you must be enjoying the show. At least I hope you are. The reason I say this is on the Spotify app, you can now leave comments on individual episodes. So do me a favour and hit that pause button and leave a comment. It'd be great to hear from you and your interactions help push Cold War Conversations up the Spotify rankings. Whatever you do, thanks very much for listening. And now back to your episode. Wow. Well, just like that, Rob, you make it sound quite easy. Where did the U.S. Air Force find these MiGs? Unless you can't share that with me. No, I can share that because everything now is an open source.

22:52For a long time, I was already closely guarded secret. And all the MiG-21s, we flew the MiG-21s, we flew the Soviet MiG-21s. roll a MiG-21 F-13 miles. And all of them came from Indonesia, with the exception of one. One we got from Israel, and it had actually been the, oh, it had been a defector aircraft. The Israelis had gotten from Iraq. If viewers want to Google Operation Diamond in MiG-21 in Israel, see Mossad-led operation, They had actually gotten the Iraqi captain to defect in 1966, what then was a brand new to the Western world, MiG-21. So that airplane, years later, long story, you can read all about it.

23:44That airplane was loaned to the U.S. Air Force to exploit during the half-donut exploitation and later was part of half-idea. And then we ended up flying. I ended up flying that airplane. It was an airplane number 007. And I flew that airplane for quite some time as part of the Red Eagles. But all the rest of them were MiG-21s. And then we had additional, in addition to those, we had eight Chinese F-7s, which were basically a Chinese knockoff of the MiG-21 and almost identical copy. There were some subtle differences, which I point out in the book. but to the untrained eye, airplanes were sitting side-by-side airborne off your wing.

24:28You probably wouldn't know the difference. And for all practical purposes, they flew almost identical. So very subtle differences that only an experienced Mick Byler would know. But those all came right from Red China. And a brand new fact, one day I went out to the airplane. It was an F-7 that I had never seen before, never flown before. And as I opened the logbook, I looked in there and I noted it had a total of three and a half hours on it. So we all think about getting into a new car showroom and stepping into your latest Mercedes or Jaguar or whatever and has that new car smell. This had that new MIG smell to it.

25:13You walk in, I sat down, I go, my God, three and a half hours. I was afraid, I was embarrassed to even step on the seat cushion. for fear of getting it dirty. But anyway, so that was, that's how we got all the MiG-21s and the F-7s. And now the MiG-23s, that was easier. I shouldn't say it was easier. We got all those, both the air-to-ground and air-to-air model. We got those from Egypt. And all the heavy legwork and footwork was done by the CIA years before 1977. And later on, that became part of the IDEA program, the initial MiG-23MS, which is a floggery that was exploited as part of the half pad exploitation.

25:54And that was 1978. And then the Red Eagles got their first MiG-23 in 1980. And just a few years later, I was flying it. And yeah, so that's how we got all those airplanes. And was all the instrumentation changed over to English or was it still in Cyrillic or Chinese? All the Soviet-built airplanes were all in Cyrillic. All the Chinese air cranes, the F-7s, were all in English, surprisingly. Now, having said that, all the switchology, there were a few labels that some of our maintenance guys had put like a little sticky label on it. This was that or the other thing. But for the most part, all the instrumentation was all stock Soviet.

26:41Now, the notable exceptions were we did put a U.S. altimeter on it, so we're red in feet rather than meters. Air speed indicator, obviously right in knots versus kilometers per hour. We put a U.S. radio in it, and we put a U.S. transponder in it, IFF. And we also had a change of the oxygen and G-Suit hookup so we could obviously inflate our G-Suits and plug in our oxygen mask and our Comcord. So other than that, everything was stock. Yeah. But it must have been an incredible job maintaining these aircraft and getting spares for them as well. Yeah, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out because they're real magicians of this whole thing.

27:32And really the reason in large part that the program constant peg was the success it was due in no small part to our maintenance, our maintainers. These guys made the extraordinary look ordinary. Every day, think about it, you couldn't just go out and order a part, obviously, from the Soviet Union. That just wasn't going to happen. So how they sourced parts was clandestinely, back channels through different countries, not necessarily on the open market for sure. Sometimes they had to fabricate their own parts. They did have some contracts with some U.S. vendors for things like tires, brakes, canopies.