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That is a very good point. It is not regarded as an aggressive act for a carrier to put up “escort” aircraft when approached by a potentially hostile aircraft. Carriers do it all the time, especially when in a restrictive area.

So I think something is fishy, and not what you expect. The USN are no slouches when it comes to defending their ships. So I think there is a very strong possibility that they *wanted* this aircraft to get very close.

And I also suspect that this aircraft was “painted” with the targeting systems of something I would not want fired in my direction. And which could take out that aircraft very, very quickly.

Among current threats to the USN are very high speed anti-ship missiles. Far too fast to be taken out by human operators, once turned on, the ship itself will attack and destroy them without further need of human direction.

As such, 1000 yards, or over a half mile, is a very long distance, with a very slow target.

We never did have a Bear fly within sight of the vessel I was on (JFK), and when we went across the Atlantic, we usually had two Tomcats chained onto the cat with Sidewinders, Sparrows and typically one Phoenix each. LOL...I never once saw a Tomcat wearing more than two of those, and I always wondered if it was because they were expensive, short of supply or simply to hard to maintain in a ready state. I presume in the Gulf Wars, there was no question of not having constant CAP. In the 1970’s there were a few times we stayed in port a while longer than any of us really wanted to, always in Naples.

(Hehe, I hope I don’t get much ribbing for saying that from those who had to frikking live in the Indian Ocean for 9 straight months without landfall or some ridiculous thing like that...:)

However, we DID have a bunch of A4 Skyhawks attack us one time!

We were in an exercise in the Med, and the Australians were playing the anti-ship role. It was a somewhat cloudy gray, with lots of nimbulus clouds. They were so thick and clustered together, with a sheet of gray as backdrop, I would guess maybe four or five thousand foot ceiling. We are in between launches, getting stuff prepared and such, when out of the sky from the about our ten o’clock, a gray A4 comes screaming at us, coming in at about 30 degree dive through a large area between clouds.

It was funny, I completely don’t remember hearing the thing come in. It just seemed to appear, and I recall none of us really knew we were involved an an exercise. I could be wrong, but they didn’t tell us that, so when the planes appeared, it was surprising. As I watched with my mouth open (I think I was carrying six chains too) I watched this A4 come barreling in at high speed. They have a name for A4’s that I loved: they called it “Heinemann’s Hot Rod” after the guy who designed it. (The pilots called it that when talking about it, not us guys...they were A-4’s to us.)

Well, that thing looked like a hot rod coming out of the sky, and at that moment, another A-4 zooms directly overhead from our four o’clock, strait, level and flat out, with a Tomcat behind him in a dive, but pretty far back.

It was an absolute trip...I never took the time to find out what happened there, but it sure did seem like those Aussies did a good job in the anti-shipping role. A few years later, when I followed the war in the Falklands, I could see pretty damned clearly in my head what it must have been like for those lads in the British Royal Navy. Those little planes could go like hell.