Keeping It Simple

Mission planning and inflight navigation in Vietnam was different from stateside in several ways. Except for our one encounter with a Texan shooting at us, such threats to our health and safety were greater in the combat zone of Vietnam. And the general lack of air traffic control, routine position reporting and such made it actually easier in Vietnam than back home. Oh, there were some places where we had to "check in" with local area controllers, but in the main we didn't worry too much about clearances to alter course, let down into target areas, or climb to get out of the weather. We went where we had to, when we needed to and by whatever route we decided was best, under the circumstances.

We flew at ground speeds usually multiples of 60 knots, such as 420, 480, 540 and so forth. That makes keeping track of progress or estimates of arrival to waypoints easy from a mental reckoning. Seven, eight or nine miles each minute keeps estimating easy. And using a standard range of speeds makes planning and executing turns pretty straightforward. In fact, we often used standard templates for such turns to mark our charts to allow for turns needed both enroute and at target areas.

Most of us became pretty adept at mental navigation, seldom needing to pull out our E6B computers to determine time to waypoints or destinations. We'd simply mark our charts with "tick marks" corresponding to minutes to go .. and make notations of numbers to go with them.

Unlike navigators in Strategic Air Command or Military Airlift Command, who had to keep detailed flight logs, RF-4C navigators did everything on the flight charts. We'd make minimal notations on the chart to confirm progress, time of arrival or observations at various target or threat areas. Our chart was our flight log.

The inertial navigation system of the RF-4C was pretty accurate, not perfect by any means, but generally close enough to keep us near to the desired track. We'd update the positional readout on latitude and longitude at known geographic points along the way, such as the precise chart coordinates of a river bend, hamlet, mountain peak or other identifiable checkpoint. And then we would let the inertial system and its navigational computer guide us to the next point along out mission route.

For me this was a great luxury. I was used to navigating by more complex methods in days and airplanes past. In RF-4C's I never took celestial observations or performed the associated complex calculations. I never worried about polar techniques, grid navigation or gyro precessions. And I wasn't bothered about pressure pattern techniques. It was great.

Our navigational radar capabilities were a mixed bag. In some ways we had terrific capabilities, especially for terrain avoidance at low level. But in others the equipment was far inferior to what I'd used in bombers. The quality and resolution of the radar image was poor, functionally useful but far from precise. It was pretty good for topographical reference, mountains and terrain patterns, and the like. But it was imprecise for pinpoint aiming, tracking a target or the like. And there were only minimal offset aiming capabilities, basically only a left-right cursor displacement and not the kind of offset aiming accuracy of a bombing system. I especially liked the combined terrain-avoidance and mapping mode capability, wherein our radar antenna cycled between a nodding mode and a lateral scanning mode.

I had great confidence in our equipment to guide us through low level target areas, down in deep valleys at night or in the weather. We learned to read terrain contours and correlate the screen images to the topography portrayed on our charts. That's good, because most of our missions were down low and avoiding those clouds containing rocks (mountains) was a high priority.