Carrying a Nuke to Sevastopol (sidebars)

The Algorithm of Armageddon

The Low Altitude Bombing System was devised at Dayton's Wright Field in 1952. The following spring, LABS-equipped F-84G Thunderjets were deployed to Europe and the Pacific. In time, the technique was adopted by the U.S. Navy, the British, and of course the Russians. Pilots loved it. They called it the Goofy Loop, competing in annual loft-bombing games at Nellis AFB in Nevada.

The constant-G pullup was key, so the loop's radius remained unchanged from the start of the pullup until the bomb released. Writing in Air University Quarterly Review in 1957, shortly after the technique was made public, Colonel John A. Ryan Jr. gave this example of the calculations involved:

A Thunderjet pilot approached his target at 880 feet per second (520 knots), 50 feet off the deck, and began a 4-G pullup. His loop had a radius of 8,000 feet. The bomb was programmed to release when the Thunderjet pointed 40 degrees off the horizontal, separating from the underwing pylon at 1,920 feet above the ground. By this time, the Thunderjet's speed was 809 feet per second (478 knots).

Following gravity's rainbow, the nuke kept climbing, reaching the top of its arc 16.1 seconds later, at an altitude of 4,240 feet. Then it fell, reaching burst altitude 31.4 seconds after parting company from the Thunderjet. Meanwhile, it traveled 22,000 feet horizontally--a bit more than four miles from the release point.

"The flight path of the aircraft is somewhat more complicated to calculate," Colonel Ryan conceded. "The aircraft would be at the top of the [loop] the same time as the bomb reaches its summit and during the remaining 19 or so seconds to burst would be accelerating outbound from the target, placing the aircraft some 35 to 40 thousand feet from the burst." Call it seven miles. In theory, this was sufficient for the Thunderjet to escape a 100 kiloton burst.

A variant called "over-the-shoulder" was used against targets that had no easily-identified IP, or if a straight-away escape was desired. Here, the pilot threw the nuke backwards, after he passed the vertical but before he reached top of the loop. He then completed the loop and pulled out at blast level without changing direction. Over-the-shoulder was easier to perform, but it provided less separation from the blast.

Lofting remains a feasible way to deliver bombs (British Harriers used the technique to attack Stanley airport during the Falklands War) but has passed out of favor for nuclear weapons. In the 1960s, parachute-retarded nukes came into the inventory, giving a turbojet time to escape without acrobatics. On the prop-driven Skyraider, a Boar missile replaced the MK 7 ballistic bomb, so the warhead could be lofted from a lower and safer angle, with the rocket engine boosting it extra miles toward the target.

Evolution of an Able Dog

Ed Heinemann, the self-taught genius who designed generations of Douglas warplanes, sketched the plane in a marathon session in a Washington hotel room, on a steamy June night in 1944. The Navy wanted it to weight no more than 16,120 pounds. Since tricycle gear would have brought a penalty of 100 pounds, the plane emerged as a taildragger, like the SBDs and SB2Cs it was meant to replace.

Heinemann sailed aboard Lexington, interviewing the men who were flying those older planes against the Japanese. Despite its archaic appearance, therefore, the Skyraider was wonderfully laid out, gauges easy to read and switches easy to find. "I've flown about 7,000 hours in as many as 30 different aircraft," says Tom Beard. "Some I can't even remember how to get into. But I think I could get into [a Skyraider] and fly it today."

It went into service as the AD--attack plane from Douglas. In the phonetic alphabet of 1945, the letters were pronounced "Able Dog." When the Navy wanted to show that it too could fly nuclear missions, Douglas strengthened the Skyraider for LABS, and in May 1953 one of these AD-4Bs set a single-engine weight-lifting record of 14,941 lb. (When carrying a nuclear warhead, they were stripped of weapons and armor, the holes covered by a special "300 mph tape"--what the world now knows as duct tape.)

In the 1960s, American and Vietnamese pilots flew the Skyraider on ground-support and rescue missions. In Vietnam also, its pet name became "Spad"--another play on AD, with a wink to the redoubtable wood-and-fabric biplane of World War I. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was trying to rationalize the U.S. military, a process from which the plane emerged with a new, inter-service designation: A-1.

Douglas built 3,180 Skyraiders, in configurations from single-seat bomber to 12-seat evacuation transport. They went out of service in the 1970s, about the time Bureau Number 135300 flew from Tucson's Davis-Monthan graveyard to Pensacola's National Museum of Naval Aviation. It sparkles there now, with no trace of the half-burned oil that encrusted it through a quarter-century of Cold War operations.