‘When the Hornet maxed out at Mach 1.6 (didn’t make its max), I was approaching Mach 2 and closing rapidly,’ Travis Brannon former F-4 Phantom II pilot with the US Navy
To replace the F-4 Phantom II and A-7 Corsair II, the US Navy created a multi-mission aircraft after the Vietnam War that could do air-to-ground and air-to-air missions. The lightweight craft chosen was the YF-17 because of its adaptability to aircraft carrier operations. In collaboration with Northrop, McDonnell Douglas built the F/A-18 Hornet strike aircraft. The US Marines and US Navy, respectively, were the recipients of the initial aircraft. USS Constellation (CV-64) received the first Hornets to be deployed in 1985.
Positive fleet reports emerged early on, showing that the Hornet was incredibly dependable—a significant improvement over its F-4 predecessor.
However, the legendary Phantom II, with its top speeds exceeding twice the speed of sound, was still faster than the then-new Hornet, as Travis Brannon, a former F-4 pilot with the US Navy, recalls on Quora.
‘When the F/A-18 was being developed at Pax River, Maryland, every flight had a plane with them whose mission was “safety chase”, in case there was an issue with the Hornet and support and/or SAR were needed.
‘I was assigned a safety chase in an F-4 because the mission was to verify that the Hornet could go from Mach 0.9 to its max speed of Mach 1.8 in the amount of time McDonnell Douglas had promised.
‘We started at 50, 000 feet at Mach 0.9, and on signal, both of us went to full afterburner. The Hornet was able to initially out-accelerate me and pull ahead by about a quarter of a mile. However, the Phantom was one of those planes where it seemed the faster it went, the faster it wanted to go, and the Hornet was not.
‘When the Hornet maxed out at Mach 1.6 (didn’t make its max), I was approaching Mach 2 and closing rapidly. Just as I was about to even with him, the Hornet pilot, who was responsible for navigating, started a hard left turn without warning.
‘A fighter pilot, when faced with an overshoot, instinctively pulls his nose up to trade airspeed for altitude and decrease the amount of overshoot, so I did that as I started my turn to the left with him. At about 45 degrees nose-high, I realized that since I was nearly going Mach 2, my vertical speed was Mach 1.4. I looked at my altimeter, and the big needle was actually spinning. I was climbing at 82,125 feet per minute!
‘I rolled inverted to stop my climb at 62,500 feet, but not before I noticed I could now see two horizons, both remarkably curved. One was the normal one we all see at the beach: blue-green ocean and robin-egg blue, but the second one was robin-egg blue below, and the most spectacular, dark, iridescent blue of space. So lucky to have seen it!’
Brannon concludes:
‘I would have had to shut the engines down at 75,000 feet to prevent them from overheating. That would have caused me to lose my cockpit pressure and since I was not in a pressure suit, I have blown up like a toad, instant pulmonary edema, and probably death.’
Photo by U.S. Navy