- Hi, I'm Matthew Burchette, and this is Behind the Wings.
Get it?
Behind the wings?
Oh come on, it was funny.
(intro music)
Today's episode is on the A-7 Corsair II.
In 1962, the Navy knew that they needed to replace
their aging A-4 Skyhawk, so they came up
with what was known as the VAX competition.
Now, if you don't speak Navy,
VAX stands for heavier-than-air, experimental.
Now the big deal was to keep costs down.
Everybody that was a part of a VAX competition
had to plan for an existing aircraft
so that they could put it into the competition.
Well Vought came up with a chubbier and stubbier
version of their awesome F-8 Crusader.
Now pilots had a much different nickname
for this little guy, they called it the SLUF.
Which stood for Short Little Ugly Fellow.
The A-7 made it's first flight in 1965
which put it right in the middle of the Vietnam war.
This thing was chock-full of groundbreaking
technology and a lot of it was in the cockpit.
I even think there's a guy in the cockpit
who might even be an A-7 pilot.
Let's go talk to him.
All right, so I'm here with
Bob Beabout, who actually flew this very A-7
with the Colorado Air National Guard.
He also flew F-100s which is super awesome.
Bob, thank you so much for being here.
So tell us a little bit what it was like
flying the A-7, you were telling me earlier
that this thing was kinda heads
and tails above the F-100.
- Well, yeah, you know, it didn't go as fast
but this was built primarily for close air support,
and with the system that they had in here,
the Initial Measurement System, there we go!
It had all kinds of good stuff.
If you were delivering something
it would do all the projection of the speed
and release the bomb automatically
and it just was very accurate,
compared to what the F-100 was, for instance,
which we had to use a lot of Kentucky Windage.
I dunno if anybody knows what Kentucky Windage is
but you had to judge if you were a little fast,
yeah, you had to do a lot of eyeballin'.
- So Bob, I understand when you punched out of an A-7,
you actually kept the parachute and we've got
it here in the museum, how cool is that?
- What happened was it was a brand new engine
that was in there, only had five hours on it.
And I got a warning right in here and
the next thing that happened was
the oil pressure went down to zero
and then my wingmen said hey, you're on fire!
- (laughs) That's never something you wanna hear.
- And the airplane started rolling over and he said
get out, and when he said get out, I'm already
halfway out (laughs) you know, reached up here
and pulled this down over me and boom, I came out.
Actually, that happened out east here and I came down
in the ditch next to interstate 70.
- I bet that was an exciting ride.
- Oh yeah, that was an exciting ride, and I didn't
get hurt so everything worked good.
- Bob, thank you so much for being here.
It's been awesome talking to you.
It was kind of a chore to get you in here,
you okay with spending the night?
- Oh, that's all right, yeah I don't mind spending
the night, I'll sit here and play with
all of these gadgets and dream again.
- Awesome, well hey, that's what pilots do.
Okay, I'm gonna go do a walk around of the plane
and I'll be back in probably 20 minutes, is that all right?
- Oh, that'll be fine, yeah.
- All right, thanks, we'll be right back.
(music fades in)
- When we were in the cockpit with Bob,
he was telling us about the groundbreaking
armament system that the A-7 had.
And I'm standing right behind something
that these guys carried a lot of in Vietnam.
The Mark 82 Snake Eye.
I'm actually standing behind the fins
in the deployed position, they didn't
look like this when they were on the plane.
They actually folded forward, but as soon
as it came off the rack, these things
sprang out like this and what it did
is it slowed the bomb way down
which allowed the A-7 pilot to get down
low and slow and into the weeds and drop their
ordinance right where they needed to
in conjunction with that super cool bomb system.
Not only did this thing carry Mk 82s,
it also carried something even scarier.
This may look like a bomb,
but it's actually a cluster-bomb.
It's a CBU-58.
Now what does that mean?
It means that this is actually nothing more
than just a tube filled with 650 smaller bomblets.
About the size of a baseball.
And so what you would do when you drop
this weapon, it would actually split apart and
all those 650 bomblets would scatter around a huge area.
It was a great way to attack troop concentrations
or lightly skinned vehicles like jeeps or trucks.
The A-7 could carry eight of these guys,
that's a ton of firepower.
You want more firepower, you say?
Come with me, my friends.
Boom! I mean, bam!
You wanted more firepower, you got more firepower.
That is the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
A little heat-seeking missile,
an air-to-air heat-seeking missile.
Now what does that mean?
What it means is when this guy comes off of that rail,
it's gonna home in on any heat signature it can find.
Now hopefully, it is the massive heat signature
of that big jet engine in the enemy plane
in front of you, because when it senses that, pow!
No more plane.
This unassuming panel right here actually holds
something super scary, the M61 Vulcan Rotary Cannon.
That's a 20 millimeter cannon that can spew out
6,000 rounds a minute.
That is scary.
Now, considering that you're only carrying
about a thousand rounds in here,
if you really hold down the trigger,
you're gonna go through your ammo really fast,
so you wanna shoot in bursts.
Now let's go see what made this thing go so fast.
All right, I know what you're thinking.
This SLUF didn't go fast.
Well, it didn't, but let's go see what
at least got it off the ground.
(music)
Here we are at the go-fast part.
All right, so we talked about it earlier,
the SLUF didn't go that fast, but did you know
that the Navy A-7s were actually equipped with the
same engine that the F-111 and the F-14 were?
That's the TF30.
There's a huge difference between this engine and those.
Those guys had an afterburner, this guy did not,
which means womp, womp.
The SLUF couldn't go super-sonic, how sad.
But he could go 700 miles an hour
and that's still a heck of a ride!
Another amazing thing, this guy flew with the
Colorado Air National Guard.
Bob, the pilot we interviewed, flew this very plane.
It is so awe-inspiring to be standing
this close to history, this is why I love my job.
Unfortunately, since we're at the end of the plane,
we must be at the end of the episode.
If you guys have questions or comments,
hit us up on Facebook and our YouTube channel
and we will be sure to get back to you.
Until then, adios!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Rubber baby buggy bumpers, rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Hello? Hello? Can you at least send up craft services?
(outro music)