“I loved the Phantom. Classic plane”
At a Marine Air Show when I was about 10 or 11 years old, a Marine pilot gave me my first lesson in aerodynamics by telling me “The Phantom is proof positive that if you put enough thrust behind it, you can make a brick fly”.
Boy, that Marine pilot was spot on with that assessment of the Phantom, wasn’t he? Of course, those big honking, smoking J-79 engines were the epitome of power! From what I know of them (and being a former jet mechanic, I do know a little bit about them) they were apparently some damned rugged engines which could still function with compressor blades or turbine blades missing… and that is saying something!
When I lived in the Philippines when I was a kid, I used to go over to the officers beach that was near Cubi Point. Things were different back then, and as a kid I would go up and walk around all the airplanes that were tied down, and nobody would stop me. I remember seeing the Phantoms, the Crusaders, the Corsairs, even saw a few Sky Warriors and Spads.
As a kid, it was glorious. I used to build these models all the time, and to see them up close in real life, peering into the intakes and the exhausts was too good to be true for me. Oddly enough, they had a high-power test area further down the beach. They would tie down the planes with their exhaust pointing out towards the water and run them at full throttle! We used to go down there and try and throw things into the exhaust, or run through the area even though there were signs up saying not to do it. (It wasn’t all that dangerous because the airplanes were tied down at the top of a large rocky embankment, so wasn’t as if the exhaust would blow directly at you. It was pretty much going over your head…
I did the same thing there that I pretty much did down at the docks where the ships were tied up, and would ask all the sailors leaving the ship if they would take me aboard and show me around. If I asked 50 sailors, one of them will eventually do it, so I got to go all kinds of ships.
Up where they had the planes tied down, I would walk up to the pilots during their preflight walk around, and follow them around asking them questions. Once in a while, one of them would let me sit in the cockpit, which was completely the coolest thing since sliced bread!
One time, there was a pilot doing a preflight walk around on a Crusader. Right before he climbed in the cockpit, he told me I had to leave, then said “Watch what I do when I take off…” while he grinned and climbed up into the plane.
I watched as he taxied out and took off. No sooner than his wheels left the ground, he retracted them, pulled back on the stick and went up into the sky at about a 70° angle. As he gained altitude, the aircraft began to roll continually, and went up and up, rolling wildly until he disappeared into the high clouds. It blew me away, I thought “Hey… he did that for me!”
What was funny is I was up there a few days later and described to another pilot what he had done, and asked if he could do the same thing. I remember he looked at me shaking his head and said “No, he got into a bit of trouble for that…”.