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F-14 shoots down RF-4C, 1987 incident....


Shaun

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I saw that myself, and I hadn't heard of it previously, the Tomcat pilot kept his wings but wasn't allowed to fly anything that carried a lethal weapon thereafter. He made a career in Navy Intelligence and eventually made Rear Admiral.

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No, he didn't make rear Admiral - it was stopped over protest over his actions in 1987. Apparently he never showed any sign of remorse and rumours has it that he fired deliberatelly and not in accident.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/3/senate-balks-at-promotion-for-navy-officer-who-sho/

http://www.militarycorruption.com/timdorsey3.htm

 

 

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11 hours ago, Boman said:

No, he didn't make rear Admiral - it was stopped over protest over his actions in 1987. Apparently he never showed any sign of remorse and rumours has it that he fired deliberatelly and not in accident.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/3/senate-balks-at-promotion-for-navy-officer-who-sho/

http://www.militarycorruption.com/timdorsey3.htm

Its worth reading this,  I can see the pilots point...But still a massive mistake...

Now, my story...

Like most of you, I jumped on the "what a dumbass" bandwagon as soon as I heard about this. After all, Smoke was a new guy, in our sister squadron (VF-74), and had made CVW-17 look bad. I was an Airwing LSO, so I had met him a few times when I debriefed his passes... wasn't a big fan because he was always so freakin' serious, but I did appreciate his eagerness to learn and improve. I was really surprised when my XO, Bluto, pulled me over in the ready room and told me that he had been tagged to do the Field Naval Aviator Evaluation Board ("FEENAB") and that he had chosen me to be on the board. I had no connection to the event, and really didn't have any desire to be pulled into an admin board. But Bluto was the best man under whom I had ever served (he played a line position on the squadron intramural football team - freakin' Spartan), and I would rather be dead than disappoint him.

Big picture, sitting on that board taught me many things, but probably the biggest one is that I NEVER want to be evaluated this way. We read through psychological evaluations, personal diaries, etc. If I was a proctologist I wouldn't have more intimate knowledge of this man. It was really uncomfortable having this much info on another dude, especially a fellow fighter pilot.

During the board we learned that:

When he was in the RAG he had earned a "down" in a simulator late in his training (ADFAS) because he had questioned the order to fire when he had been given "Red and Free." He was extensively debriefed on this event and counseled on the importance of firing when given the order.

2-3 weeks prior to this event, a CVIC briefing had included a piece that told us that there were unfriendly states who had been training pilots to fly the F-4 on kamikaze missions. Most of us reacted dismissively, "not really worried about our chances with an F-4." Smoke had joined the squadron when CVW-17 was already deployed... so he didn't have any experience that would provide context for the CVIC briefing. Let's face it, their job was to talk about possible threats, most of which never occurred. Smoke took it onboard in a way that most of us wouldn't.

Smoke and Dutch (RIO) briefed a 2v2 DACT mission with F-16s out of Aviano over northern Italy. This was part of the overall exercise. While they were behind the catapult, they were told to switch purple for a mission change. Their orders were a snap vector off the cat to intercept inbound unknown. This is when the mental model of Dutch and Smoke began to diverge. Most of you can fully appreciate the jaded "roger" from Dutch as he played the exercise game. Smoke understood this as a real-world reassignment; mind you, he had not done any of the work-ups so he had no context for this mission change. ALL cockpit conversation after this point involved Dutch speaking as though it were an exercise, and Smoke speaking as though it was real world. The uncomfortable reality for the USN is that we didn't use different language for exercises and real-world events. So "Red and Free" in an exercise was the same as "Red and Free" in the real world. This was one of the board's principal findings... and it was immediately discarded by the senior officers. In my view, that's because this event tarnished their career and they wanted to "hang the guilty sweetheart."

Smoke and Dutch did, indeed, find Vodka-51 on the tanker. This is the one piece of evidence that really troubled the board. Smoke understood this as consistent with the "rogue pilot" character upon which he had been briefed. Dutch was understandably oblivious to the mental model upon which Smoke was working. They followed Vodka and Smoke could see that the F-4 had a "busy belly" (his term that I abhorred then and do to this day, but I understood what he was saying).

When Smoke received clearance to fire he double-checked with Dutch, "I'm going to shoot him down." Dutch, thinking that Smoke was going to shoot him with his comm switch said, "yeah, shoot him." Dutch was confused when Smoke said, "it didn't come off," about the first missile. The system station-stepped to the left wing and Smoke pulled the trigger again. Dutch saw the missile leaving the rail and said something along the lines of, "What the wiffle did you just do?" Any F-14 RIO on this site can testify to the poor ergonomics design of the back seat of the Tomcat. When the sun was overhead, the reflection off the CRT in the back seat was impossible to see if they didn't shade it with their arms, cranium bucket, etc. Dutch had no idea that Smoke had flipped the Master Arm switch because he couldn’t see the absent X over the weapon selected.

There were many other system issues related to this event, and unfortunately they all pointed to the USN. That was intolerable, and everyone up the chain of command covered their bottom. They hung Smoke out to dry and it was gutless treachery, period. I'm not saying that Smoke didn't wiffle up. He did; but he had a lot of help from all of us. In the end, we recommended that Smoke keep his wings but that he never fly an airplane that deploys ordnance. In retrospect, I think that was more to assuage our own discomfort with the fact that this could have been us.

Other remarks:
Whomever posted the "no live missiles" comment has no clue about USN deployed operations. We ALWAYS launch with live missiles. This is the difference between being deployed and being back stateside. When you're on the ship, you always carry live rounds; always. AE2MAC, please validate.

We, the U.S., lost the service of a good man. Again, the only reason I "know" Smoke Dorsey is because I sat on his board. I've never seen or heard from him since, and I don't have a dog in the fight... except for one thing.

Congress pulled the recommendation of promotion for Smoke based on the activism of the pilot of Vodka-51. I fully appreciate the suffering that this man has endured through multiple back surgeries. I'll be blunt; his activism was understandable, but dead wrong. Dead. Wrong. Smoke recovered from this event early in his career and served our country exceptionally well for years and years after this event. If you've read this and said, "I could never have been this stupid," then I would never trust you on my wing. Humans wiffle up, and if you assert that you haven't, then you're full of poo-poo. I have and I do, much as I hate to admit it.

I'm just a pilot. I've been flying for 36 years and have north of 17,000 hours. I have over 350 traps aboard 10 CVs, and over 100 of them at night. I have a MS degree in Human Factors and Safety Systems Engineering and I work every week in real-world applications of HF science. I'm just a pilot, but I sat on the board and I saw ALL of the evidence. If you're smugly sitting in judgment of this event then you're uninformed or delusional. It could have been me, and it could have been you.

 

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Enlightening reading when you look at the incident from both sides.  

 

In many ways it's another demonstration of the principal that something generally goes wrong not because one item fails or because one person does one thing wrong but because, on a given day a number of failures, some human and some in the wider system, happened to occur in just the "right" sequence.

Edited by Richard E
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Yes indeed it's the old Swiss cheese model. All the holes have to line up for the incident to happen. The pilot on the board makes a fair point that there were systemic failures in the USN and there was an attempt to make sure the blame was aimed squarely at Dorsey. 

However his suggestion that anyone could make the same mistake is something I can't agree with. I think the first hole in the cheese was the fact that a man who was tempermentally unsuited to the job found himself in charge of an F14 with live missiles probably because of who his Father was. His failure to apologise is telling.

 

Of course people getting into jobs they are unsuitable for isn't new or gone away as recent events have proven. 

 

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Oh, blimme. We all make mistakes, but this one is an absolute stormer. Why would the pilot believe that the RF-4 was in any way a real threat to the carrier?

 

It's such a weird and messed-up story...

 

Chris.  

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Its very confusing when you read the story, also the F-14 sort of cheated the exercise by finding the Phantom on the tanker?and then still took him as a rogue pilot!  Like Richard said, its normally a series of mistakes that makes the big one....The RAF Phantom crew did not set out to shoot down that Jaguar, but it happened!

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47 minutes ago, spruecutter96 said:

 Why would the pilot believe that the RF-4 was in any way a real threat to the carrier?

 

It's such a weird and messed-up story...

 

Chris.  

He was briefed about a possible real F-4 threat... and re-rolled on the cat from his briefed mission to find a hostile F-4... 

 

2-3 weeks prior to this event, a CVIC briefing had included a piece that told us that there were unfriendly states who had been training pilots to fly the F-4 on kamikaze missions. Most of us reacted dismissively, "not really worried about our chances with an F-4." Smoke had joined the squadron when CVW-17 was already deployed... so he didn't have any experience that would provide context for the CVIC briefing. Let's face it, their job was to talk about possible threats, most of which never occurred. Smoke took it onboard in a way that most of us wouldn't.

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I remember when this happened. The article kinda waxed over why the selection committee passed on the guy, during the interviews he wasn't even remotely remorseful for the event.  They say in the article he apologized, but his RIO and both Air Force officers said he didn't.  And he absolutely refused to in interviews. Added to the fact that his dad did the exact same thing when he was a pilot, it was politically prudent to pass him over.  The point the injured pilot made that stuck with people was, "I understand that it was an accident,  they happen,  but if this guy wasn't the son of an admiral his career would have been over."

 

 

As far as the guy speaking about his character,  so what?  Over my career I've meet dirty cops, gang bangers, murders and corrupt politicians.  Should they get a pass from what they did because I liked them? (Which I did, more often than not) Or because they had potential?  Most reasonable people would say no.

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  • 4 weeks later...

These things do happen (RAF Germany 1982: Phantom 1, Jaguar 0), but the account suggests to me that by joining up with the RF-4 at the tanker and then following him to the exercise area Dorsey knew exactly who was flying the Phantom and what he was about to do, and indeed made that decision twice as the first missile failed to launch.

 

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Interesting Piece. I wonder if his mindset may have been caused by his education - as a son of an Admiral, he will probably have been told to follow orders, and apparently having made the mistake to think once before and gotten an enema for it...

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On 17/02/2017 at 1:18 AM, T7 Models said:

These things do happen (RAF Germany 1982: Phantom 1, Jaguar 0), but the account suggests to me that by joining up with the RF-4 at the tanker and then following him to the exercise area Dorsey knew exactly who was flying the Phantom and what he was about to do, and indeed made that decision twice as the first missile failed to launch.

 

I've read of this before. While not pretending to be privv to all the info, like T7, I really struggle with how you could not think it was an exercise when you've just shared a tanker with the guy. I'm guessing that Dorsey was assessed as having a personality which in some way could not make real world judgements to perceived scenarios. This strikes me as being the "unstated" subplot to this incident though I admit that its difficult & maybe unfair to sit in judgement from this distance in both space, time & experience.

Steve.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The issue of mental models is very important. Experienced operators often underestimate how ambiguous many of their everyday instructions are, simply because they have resolved the ambiguities through experience. It takes a fresh pair of eyes to highlight how truly stupid some operating procedures are, because they haven't learned to dodge all the potholes.

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