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“By his own admission, then, McCain failed to follow instructions in combat. He did not try to evade the missile.”

Going down the chute takes about 5 seconds. At the end, your recovery is essentially an evasive maneuver. Once you start down the chute, you SHOULD ignore SAM warnings - in part because SAM warnings are not - or at least, were not back in the 80s, let alone the 60s - perfectly reliable.

As for AAA - if your planned release is at 3500 feet, you are in the AAA zone. You are not “wrong” for pressing to your planned release altitude to drop a bomb. You MUST do so with dumb bombs to get reliable hits. You dive bomb so that you will only briefly be in range...but you need to get to planned release altitude, which is determined before you take off.

There is no reason to fight your way to the target if you are going to chicken out during the most critical 3-5 seconds of the flight. Whoever wrote this stuff was tactically WRONG. Once you commit to the dive attack, you finish it - at the planned release parameters - and then recover.

“Yet Rice had figured out under tremendous pressure how to eject without getting himself killed or injured. Just as most other pilots had figured it out when they were shot down. It left a question: Why wasn’t LCDR John S. McCain, 31, able to put himself in the proper position to eject like LTJG Charles D. Rice, 24, who had much less flying experience?”

Written like an idiot lawyer! When you are in an inverted spin below 3000’ AGL, you eject any way you can. It is accepted that you may have injuries. Someone who has never been in a spin has no business trying to critique the ejection!

I’ve known guys injured in ejections. Luck plays a role. One guy was killed when his checklist caught on part of the ejection seat and spun the seat into his face, crushing his skull. Luck. I’ve known guys who ejected out of the ejection envelope, and who survived without any injuries. It happens.

The article was written by someone with no clue about dropping manual bombs or flying jets.