Above left to right:
A fl ight line full of
509th FIS Delta
Daggers at Saigon
in September
1964.
Bob Donaldson
via author
The Royal Thai Air
Force fl ew F-86s
out of Don Muang.
Although the
Sabre lacked the
sophistication of
the F-102, the Thai
pilots did a great
job of intercepting
intruders during
the daytime.
Bob Donaldson
via author
Below: A 509th
FIS F-102 near Da
Nang in April 1965.
At this time, the
aircraft were still
in light gray fi nish
with no tail codes.
Robert Mock
via authorthey could pick up. These missions
caused a lot of disruption among the
North Vietnamese troops.’
Winkeler went on to say, ‘If any of
the ‘Deuce’s’ [F-102’s] exploits could
be classi ed as ‘high-pro le’, it would
probably be their escort and protection
of the ‘Arc Light’ missions own by the
B-52s. They were often fragged to y
lead for the SAC bombers when they
rst started to bomb north of the DMZ
[demilitarized zone]. On station at
35,000ft, the F-102s could detect if they
were being tracked by any ground units.
When this happened, the B-52s would
swing to the south and set up their
bomb runs in a safer area. Most of the
missions were own over southern Laos
or south of the DMZ.’
Early on, there was a slight problem
between the B-52s and the F-102s when
they joined up. Lt Harry Hoover explains,
‘Usually, we would take o and join
with the bombers pretty close to their
assigned bomb runs. There were usually
three of them in trail. Suddenly, the
entire formation would turn and exit thearea. Later, we learned that since our re
control system emitted pulses similar to
the MiG-21’s, coupled with the fact that
our long-range silhouette was almost
identical to the MiG-21, the bombers
thought they were being attacked by
enemy ghters. Needless to say, we
performed no-lock join-ups after that.’
There wasn’t a sortie own by the F-102s
that had a better chance of drawing the
MiGs than escorting B-52s.
Many Delta Dagger pilots were
scrambled on air defense missions.
One was Capt Samuel Dibrell, who
ew most of his ops with the 64th FIS.
He describes one memorable sortie:
‘It was on my nal day at Da Nang,
August 9, 1969, when I was on back-
up for the ve-minute alert which was
scrambled at 4.30am to intercept two
unknown aircraft coming down from
the north. At 4.45am our back-up ight
was scrambled to add assistance to the
search for the two unknown aircraft. It
was expected that these aircraft were
North Vietnamese helicopters bringing
in commanders, because I believehistories of the war will show that
an insurgency just south of Da Nang
began in early September 1969. There
were very few times that both sets of
ve-minute birds were scrambled at the
same time.
‘An interesting sideline to this sortie
was that one of the rst two scrambled
F-102s had requested clearance to arm.
I discovered after returning to base that
he had picked up two blips on his scope
— thankfully he was advised by the
controllers that the blips were my ight
coming in to assist.’
The F-102 force’s time in Vietnam was
well spent. However, the risks were
signi cant. Only one Dagger was lost to
aerial combat, when a MiG-21 ying at
36,000ft downed a 509th FIS example
on February 3, 1968. Two were lost to
ground re, one was written o in a
ground collision with an RF-4, and three
were destroyed on the ground by enemy
sappers. Six more were lost due to
engine failure while one was destroyed
due to enemy re, speci cally a direct hit
by a mortar round.The most extraordinary role the
delta-wing Dagger played was that of
harassing Viet Cong ground forces by using the
aircraft’s heat-seeking air-to-air missiles
64 August 2018 //^ http://www.combataircraft.net
58-64 F-102 Vietnam C.indd 64 21/06/2018 13:55