A Nail Night-Fighter
submitted by: Alva Leon Matheson
The night OV-10s were slightly different. The biggest difference was that the rear seat stick was removed and in its place a gimbal mounted starlight scope was installed through the belly of the plane. We carried two pods of parachute flares and two pods of logs (ground burning flares), plus the centerline drop tank. We always flew with a navigator in the back seat. When we got to the target area, the pilot would position the plane over a road, then fly down the road following the instructions of the navigator, who looked through the scope and gave instructions to the pilot, “left two degrees, right three degrees” and so on, keeping the airplane directly over the road. When the navigator found a target, we would orbit and he would identify the target using his handheld starlight scope. We would then get back over the road, and on the command of the navigator, the pilot would pickle off two logs, one in front and one behind the target. We would then call in the fighters to do their thing, almost always killing the target, with the best results coming when we could bracket a whole convoy of trucks. Typical missions lasted four hours.
One of the things that made this system work so well was that we usually had at least one set of A-1s from NKP dedicated to each night FAC, Bill and I each in a separate sector. We all briefed together, getting our probable target information at the same time based on sensor data monitored by Task Force Alpha. We then decided on the fighters’ orbit point, based on these expected targets. The A-1s would take off a little before us, since I seem to remember we were the faster of the two, and head to their orbit. We would head to the trail, find the targets and call the fighters. It all worked great.
If things were a little boring, we would go gun hunting together. After rendezvousing with the fighters above us, we would clear them in hot on the muzzle flashes from the ground. We then turned on all our lights, for about three or four seconds, turned them off, then broke left or right. The gunners would usually open fire on the extension of our flight path; of course, we weren’t there. About the time the airbursts started, the A-1s would be dumping bombs on the gunners. It usually worked pretty well, except when the fighter jocks had trouble with simple directions, such as, “We’ll stay to the west, and you can have all the airspace to the east.”
One of my closest near death experiences came in exactly this way, near Tchepone. I was on my side of the river and so was one of the A-1s when he rolled in on the target. When I started a turn away from the target, there he was, canopy to canopy with my OV-10. All I could see in my windscreen was the A-1 silhouetted against the sky. Biggest damn thing I had ever seen, or so it seemed at the time.
“Sorry ‘bout that, Nail,” the fighter jock said.
With this formality over, we both continued with the business at hand.
Another challenge with an OV-10 without a stick in the back was to train the navigator to fly with no obvious controls. We just figured that was smart. If the pilot got hit in the front seat, there sure wasn’t any point in the navigator having to punch-out over the bad guys. The original idea was just to have the navigator be able to get the plane back to Thailand, but eventually we got to where we could do a fairly decent controlled crash landing on the runway. We never actually practiced it all the way to touchdown, for obvious reasons, but we were right there over the runway ready to touch when the pilot would take over again. This was all possible, of course, because the back-seater still had a set of engine controls, the ability to change trim, and raise and lower the flaps. This was all he needed to get back over the fence.
Bill Smith and I liked flying at night so much that we told the operations officer that we would be the permanent OV-10 night pilots and that there would be no need for further rotations. The ops officer bought the idea and we flew all the night missions for several months, until they decided to deploy four of our Broncos to U Tapao and no longer had enough airplanes for the night mission. So off we went to U Tapao. But that’s another story.
Late in ‘70 or early ‘71, when the Pave Nail program was being developed, Bill and I were the only two OV-10 pilots left at NKP with any night experience. So we started on some of the very earliest conceptual flights. Can’t remember what we actual did, just that we did it.