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The Flyboy Podcast: Guest: Matt "El Cid" Neuenswander · The Flyboy Podcast

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing: cool flying stories.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with Meh Neuwenswander, call sign L Cid.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Colonel retired Newenswander, started out his career as a T-37 instructor at Advanced Air Force Base.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: He followed that with two tours in the uh A-10 in the 1980s, then transitioned to the F-16 in the 1990s, where he flew two tours, culminating as an F-16 fighter squadron commander.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: As a colonel, he returned to the A-10 for two more assignments and significantly opened Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan as the first Air Force group commander there.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: He finished up his flying career as a group commander at Nellis Air Force Base.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: He had four combat tours in Iraq and the F-16 and two combat tours in the A-10, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: El Cid, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, Never.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I always like to talk about flying, even though I don't do it much anymore.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it was an awesome career and I loved every minute of it.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I I loved flying, and I guess as I got older, I loved leading the people who flew airplanes and fixed them and and took care of them and made the commitment to their families and their nation to go spend time in foreign shores, which I seem to have done a lot of.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you flew two primary combat aircraft, the F-16 and the A-10, and you flew them both in combat.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give us a sense of what it's like?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to begin by asking you about your combat tours in Iraq.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about those missions.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: So this was during Operation Southern Watch.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: There was also an Operation Northern Watch going on.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So between 1995 and 1999, we rotated into theater different groups.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Normally aircraft from Europe went into Turkey and did the Northern Watch, and aircraft from the United States went into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, wherever, and supported the Operation Southern Watch based on UN Demarches that said Saddam Hussein could do this and not do that.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we basically patrolled Iraq up to the 33rd parallel and made sure that they followed all the rules.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the F-16, I was in a Block 40 squadron, CGs is what we called them back then.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we were the primary interdiction aircraft.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we would go out initially for the first two assignments that I was over there.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: We would go out and just patrol, look for stuff, be ready to defend Kuwait if the Iraqis decided to do something bad.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then as Saddam Hussein started ramping things up, we got into the business of response options, mostly targeting communications, radar, SAM systems that they weren't supposed to have south of the 33 line.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: So what would a typical mission like that into Iraq entail?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: They would have a number of support assets up there.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: They would have EA6Bs or EF-111s jamming.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: They would have F-15s providing offensive or defensive counterair.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: They would have AWACS up there running the battle.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then typically we were the strike mission commanders, and we would take off and go up and run a route.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: In many cases, for the first two tours over there, they would have us use our targeting pods to see if they had moved anything.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We were prepared to defend ourselves.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: If we were shot at, we could roll in on a triple A side or whatever it might be.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But then after I became a squadron commander and things got tensor over there, then if Saddam Hussein would violate something, we would take off with pre-planned targets.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if he shot at us, we would hit one of those targets.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Normally associated with AAA is anti-aircraft artillery, SAM systems, SAM radars that they were using to target us with.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we would hit telecommunications towers, or sometimes we would hit bunkers where they they had uh cables buried underneath.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: But generally we were over there taking away command control or radar acquisition systems.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever Saddam Hussein would do something, we might be airborne and they would say, hit your R01 target or hit this target.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Rarely did we have a pre-planned target where we would take off, but sometimes probably one and three or four times, then we would launch out and and go after a number of targets at the same time.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we would go deeper into Iraq normally than than they would let the A-10s uh based on the uh surface terror missile threat.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Leading a squadron in combat obviously takes on enormous responsibilities.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious, what's the difference between leading a squadron in peacetime versus in wartime?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in peacetime, what you're trying to do is to make sure all your personnel are trained so that when you go to war, because you don't know when you might get called up to go.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in one instance, I was given a very short notice tasking to get the squadron together.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: In wartime, you have to make sure you take care of your people and you make sure you take care of the mission.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think one of the biggest lessons I learned because of the flexibility uh that was occurring during this time, you cannot afford to have an A team and a B team.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can't say, okay, these are my best guys, and I'm gonna send them on the important missions because you don't know what the important missions are sometimes.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to make sure all your people are trained.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: You have a lot of discussions with them about what I would do in this case or that case.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And um, thank God all my people came home safe.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and this was during a time period when I also, as a squadron commander, owned maintenance.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So all my maintenance people, uh, the people building bombs and out there in the 117-degree heat and doing all that stuff, they all came home safe too, which was a blessing for me.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot less pressure at home.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a fascinating question.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so th thanks for addressing that.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: So let's transition to a different airplane and a different location.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Take us to Afghanistan flying the A-10.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: How did combat there differ?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Give us a sense of what it was like flying those missions.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those missions were basically close air support or combat search and rescue for the A-10.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Those were our primary roles.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh General Mosley at the time that we went over there actually transitioned, we transitioned leadership out, but they requested us to have every two ship be CSAR, combat search and rescue, and Ford Air Controller qualified.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And those qualifications are not something held by everyone in the squadron.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your tasking statement says you have to have so many Sandy ones, not everybody.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the most rigorous checkout probably in the Air Force based on all the aircraft I flew.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then Ford Air Controller is also a checkout program.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was a scheduling problem to make sure that every two ship could be a sandy and a facet at the same time.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And basically that meant that the lead had to be a sandy one because all Sandys are FACAs, but not all FACAs are Sandys.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I took a small detachment on the third day of Operation Anaconda to Jacobabad, Pakistan, with about 12 hours of warning.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that was a long night.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: We we had been involved.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: We were sending strike eagles and F-16s from Al Jabber down to participate in OEF, Operation Enduring Freeman.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: We had been doing that since October.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we're well into six months into the war, but the A-10s hadn't been playing because they were too slow and had to be forward-based in order to fly the sorties that were involved.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: The conflict started on Saturday morning, the 2nd of March, and I was on the desk running the group at the time, and we made some decisions to reschedule the strike e goals and stop doing some of the stuff we were doing in Iraq because the group was supporting both Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And is it correct that when you sent those first A-10s downrange to strike targets in Afghanistan, that they didn't know when they took off where they were going to land?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: That is correct.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So tell us how that worked.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the first day was Saturday, it did not go well.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Second day was Sunday, and I got about four hours of sleep Saturday night and was back in there, and now we're maximum effort, strike eagles and F-15s going into Afghanistan.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And finally I was I thought I was exhausted and couldn't do anything more.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: I called my relief in, and about 1800, I went back to my room, hopped in the shower, the phone rang, said, get back down here, you're taking the A-10s forward.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I went back down there, got a couple cups of coffee, and called the squadron commander in.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Hey, you're the senior A-10 pilot in theater.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are you leading this?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, You are the squadron commander.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to lead this.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to solve all the problems that you have not imagined yet.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: All the logistics problems, the airlift problems, and all of that.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we had planned, there was an operation in October of 2001 that went into the vicinity of Kandahar where the Rangers and Special Forces went in there.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we were tasked, the A-10s, different A-10 unit.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I had the 74th Flying Tigers from Pope there, which was also my first fighter squadron.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Love those guys.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Gotta love the shark's teeth.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: But previously I had had the Maryland guard there, and we were going to go support that ranger raid.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we did all this planning, and I knew Jacobabad was the only place we could go and operate and meet the requirements.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Why was that the only base?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was the only place close enough that we could give two hours time on station in basically an eight or ten hour sortie because the rest of them were all too far away.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we would go in and give two hours on station, pop out tank, go in and do it again.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you're wasting four hours to get there to the fight.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what they wanted was a minimum of six hours on station out of each two ship with tank fight tank.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Just to be clear for some of our listeners who don't realize, you had been supporting Southern Watch flying out of Kuwait previously, and now you were having to move forward to Afghanistan.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: How long does it take to fly from Kuwait to Afghanistan if you had not pre-positioned the jets forward?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a six-hour flight for the A-10.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we had to get close enough to where we could get in the fight.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I already knew that the only place that we could do when I when I asked them what their objectives were, they told me, you know, we'd like you to give two hours, tank, two hours, tank, two hours, which basically makes it almost a 10-hour sortie for you.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I get to call on Sunday night and uh call the squadron commander in, and I said, I'll do the planning, give me two of your weapons officers, and then have your pilots show back up.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Initially, we wanted to launch a four-ship out, but we were only able to launch a two-ship.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was all based on tanker availability.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the next morning on Monday morning, we launch them out, and about two hours later, I am told that we have diplomatic clearance to go to Jacobad.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Okay, when's my airlift coming for my advanced party, the Advon?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, we don't know because it's not high on the priority list.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was at Moody, I was the chief of weapons and tactics for a composite wing.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew a lot about the HC-130 because when I was at Moody, we had HC-130s, we had A-10s, we had F-16s, we had H H 60s, and we had a uh air control squadron.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Moody was made up of.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I had weapons officers from the HC-130, and we did an ORI, and I learned all about the HC 130 more than I ever wanted to know.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I called back to the the A3 at the AOC and I said, okay, here's what I want to do.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I want to pull off an HC 130 from Alert, and I want to pull the 1700-gallon tank out the back of it.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: HC 130s do not have floor rollers, so you can't roll pallets up into it like a regular C-130.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I want uh an email from the two-star that says I can go up to Aliyas Salim and steal a floor winch and 22 seats, and I will load my addbon stuff on ammo trailers and we'll winch them in and take off.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so we took off at three o'clock that afternoon after having gone through the supply stuff and checked out all the things we needed to.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: As an example, we did not have mosquitoes in Kuwait, but Jacobabad was called Mosquitoville or something like that.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: We had to get all of the medicine that you have to take when you're in a mosquito area with malaria, and we were able to do that with a lot of great help from people in five hours and get on an airplane.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so we landed about two o'clock in the morning because it's a time change in Pakistan time and turned our aircraft.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the two pilots that flew in that morning turned around and flew again.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on Tuesday night, we got our second two ship, and then we ended up with one more aircraft.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: We were only allowed by the Pakistanis to have five aircraft there.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you weren't in Jacobabad that long, were you?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Eleven days.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: Eleven days.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then you redeployed somewhere else.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I went back from Jacobabad.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was interesting because General Mosley had made a deal with President Mushouraf because they had been in war college together.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as the army was out of danger in the Shahikad, we were supposed to leave.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: This was as part of Operation Anaconduct.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as the army was no longer so I get a call from the ambassador on the 10th day, and he says, the President of the United States wants you out of Pakistan.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: How quick can you get out?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now again, here's my airlift.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, where is it?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: All that stuff.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: We were able to send some of our people out early on a Marine C-130, and then we left.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: We went back to Al Jabber for two days.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: In Kuwait.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: In Kuwait, rebuilt our kit, and then Ford deployed into Bagram Air Base Afghanistan.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: And this was the first time U.S.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: forces had been based in Bagram, is that correct?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: U.S.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: forces were there about a month earlier, but it was all SOF.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: So there wasn't an established airfield manager, there wasn't an established air traffic control.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was the combat controllers and they're going, hey, we don't do this long term.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: There was one fire truck.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: There was an ASOC like function, air support operations center like function with the Army.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we built the Air Force camp from scratch, all the standard stuff, cops, maintenance, fire trucks, air traffic control.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we we built that.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: What was the condition of the runway when you got there?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Terrible.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: The 10th Mountain group that was coming in there had a bunch of huge old Soviet aircraft come in and land there.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that airfield was made out of like dominoes.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: They were poor concrete, they were six feet thick, six feet wide, and eight feet long, and they were just put together.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when those big airplanes came in and landed on it, it broke off chunks of those dominoes, creating fodd, foreign object damage, basically a problem to the runway.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Army Engineers' solution to that was to take unbroken pieces and move them into the spots where they were broken.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the runway was 150 feet wide, but we only had 70 feet wide of runway.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of it, if you fell off, you were going six feet in, you know, if you lost a tire and slipped off the curb, you were gonna die.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then at the end of it, there was about 1,500 feet that hadn't been repaired because we bombed that place significantly uh in the early stages of the war.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we really didn't have 9,000 feet of runway.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: They were still working to try to clear it, and it was not a good runway.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there were no lights, and we ended up getting a box four for MVG landing.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: But if you hadn't done MVG training, then you couldn't do it.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: So give us a sense of a typical A-10 combat mission that you flew from Bagram while you were there.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we did a lot of kinetic activity out of Pakistan in support of the Shaikat Valley and the 10th Mountain, the 101st troops that were there.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: By kinetic action, you mean you were shooting the gun and dropping bombs, yes.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we we blew a lot of people up in the Shahikot Valley.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, you know, I can't say enough about the the pilots that I took in there.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: I believe we won 14 distinguished flying crosses in 11 days uh during that period of time, and that's only because some of the silver stars got downgraded.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: But in any case, after that, that broke the back of that pool of resistance, and nobody really wanted to play that much after that.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: There were small instances, but I never dropped a bomb uh flying out of Afghanistan.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: We probably had during my two months there three small instances where someone shot the gun, shot a rocket, dropped a bomb, because all the bomb dropping that had happened March 2nd through about the 14th kind of broke the spirit of of the last resistance there.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Probably my most significant sortie, which is a CSAR sortie, I was supporting a ranger takedown of a town where they were looking for some Al-Qaeda personnel.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, Osama bin Laden had not been found by this time, and they were still trying to find him.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I got called off because a German special forces team was surrounded by a with a bunch of guys with guns.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we go flying over there and they're running.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a lone survivor.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're surrounded by people with guns, and my first question was, are they shooting at you?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer was no, but I couldn't get a GPS coordinate from them.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: I had to use the old ADF function of the A10 where you're doing a hold down and you're using the needle.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: All the stuff I learned from all the Vietnam guys in when I flew A10s in the early 80s.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: ADF stands for automatic direction finding.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if you tell the guy to give me a five-second hold down and you do this switch, and he says like five, four, three, two, one, your needle goes to where it's at, so you fly in that direction.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you do a couple of cuts, and I got close enough to where I could say, Do you hear an airplane?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Yes, but I still don't know where you're at or whatever.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I had learned a trick from one of the old Sandy pilots in Vietnam.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: He said, What I want you to do is I want you to put yourself between the sun and the survivor and hold your thumb up in the cockpit.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when you hold your thumb up the cockpit, you'll see the shadow from your thumb.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's your aiming reference.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then you tell the guy on the ground, flash your mirror, and it's got to be over your thumb, over the shadow.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way I found him.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's a heck of a trick.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: We rolled in and I kept my wingman high putting flares out so they knew there was someone else up there and kind of went in and put some flares down low and uh chased them away, and then was able to vector those guys to an open area where they brought the uh the 160th came in with the Chinooks and did that.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so on the way back from that sortie, it was it was a very long day.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: AWAX calls me and said, Sandy one, are you a Sandy?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, like, yes, I am.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh there was an army helicopter that crashed, and they needed to do another rescue.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Okay, I'm gonna need a tanker.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Can you just stay airborne long enough to start doing this with the F-18s that are coming in?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I started that rescue, passed it off to the F-18s, and then went back and landed at Bogram because there wasn't a tanker available.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's a busy day.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, Matt, tell us about your worst in-flight emergency.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was at F-16 Squadron Commander at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, we went to a range south of Jacksonville.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little Navy range called St.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: George Range.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was down there doing level bombs.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we were doing all sorts of bombs, but the particular event I was doing at the time was a level delivery at 500 feet and 500 knots.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And right after I dropped the bomb, I got a fire light in the F-16.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the F-16 says, if fire is confirmed, eject.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's the bold face.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's the bold face.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: If fire is confirmed, eject.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Got it.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I zoom so that I have options if I'm gonna punch my tanks off, if I'm gonna eject, I want I want to be higher, if I'm gonna do that.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I zoom and I say, okay, I'm just gonna give this one chance, and I pull the throttle back and the fire light goes out.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I get the my wingman up close to me.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I have now translated 500 knots to about 250 knots and about 25,000 feet.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's a pretty good zoom up to 25,000 feet.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I didn't pull the power back immediately.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh to confirm the fire, you want your wingman to come up and say, Hey, you're on fire, you know.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You got smoke or whatever.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I don't see anything but kind of a black spot on the side of your airplane.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I pulled the throttle back.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: In the F-16, you have the option of doing what's called a flame out landing.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: You practice them all the time.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this thing called one-to-one based on the number of miles you are and the altitude.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I had pointed at Navy Cecil.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had two more thousand feet of altitude than I had miles to get there.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I did a basically engine out landing into Navy Cecil Field.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: For the F-16, that's 17.5 degrees nose low.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: I elected not to punch my tanks off.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I could do it.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to punch my tanks off on any town or any of that stuff.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And fortunately was able to go in there and take the hook.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: It burned less.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Burned less.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the time that I'm asking myself for about 25 miles, am I gonna jump out of this thing or I'm not gonna jump out of this thing?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's probably the only time I really, really seriously considered punching was then.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so did you just bring it back to idle or did you have to shut it down or I left it in idle so that I had both side hydraulics, but I did turn my EPU on.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it's only good for 10 minutes.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Emergency power unit.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, emergency power unit, which runs off hydrazine, which is kind of a nasty chemical, and you've got to be careful with it.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, Matt, what's the worst weather you've ever flown through to land an airplane?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: So on one of my missions out of Jacobabad, Pakistan, you know, we had army guys in the valley, they were getting shot at, the weather was bad.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we elected to launch anyway and see if we could dodge thunderstorms is the best way to put it.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I got up there with my wingman and we got into St.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Elmo's fire and ISIN, and then the A-10 doesn't have a radar, so you're using what's called an air-to-air tack-and to keep track of each other.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the tanker aborted because of the lightning and thunderstorms, so now we got to go back to the base.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Can we pause for a second?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what St.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Elmo's fire actually looks like.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I've seen it in the cockpit.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like the Aurora Borealis 12 inches in front of your face, kind of going on your cockpit.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I had always heard that that was a precursor to getting hit by lightning when St.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Elmo's fire happens.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And here I am flying with all these bombs and rockets and ammo and missiles on board.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, this will not be good to get hit by lightning because some of this could go off.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we're trying to, I'm trying to figure out where it's at, but it's like flying on the inside of a ping pong ball.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: In the F-16, I could throw my radar out and see where the heavier cells were, but we were trying to jink left of them.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: The tanker aborts because of the weather.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: So now we got to go back because we we we can't make it into the combat area without hitting the tanker and then make it back home.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: So as we turn back home, you know, I'm telling my wingman, and we're in the clouds, he he goes, Well, we can't turn our lights on because the enemy might see us.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: I go, they can't see anything right now, brother.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Turn your lights on.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we had to get rejoined, and then we had all this ice, you know, and so we had to get some clear airspace to let the ice sublimate off because it'll go into your engines.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Ice and A10 engines are not good.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the flight that was in front of us that really didn't make it to the valley either because of the weather, is struggling because the base, the thunderstorms we went around, hits the base, and now the lights are out, but it's still clear for them, so so they land.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, by the time we get there, it's pouring down rain.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I just said to my wingman, okay, here's what we're gonna do.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I joined him up in clear air space, about 30 miles south of the field.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we did what's called a nav check where I'm making sure he is seeing the same stuff that I am.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: The tacan's down now.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: I gave him the coordinates to the approach into the runway to brick one, and then we did an alpha check, uh nav check again to make sure we were seeing the same thing.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, okay, fall back into one mile trail, keep your lights on, watch me.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna stay at this altitude.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: You go 500 feet above me.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to put new batteries in your MVGs.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Well, I'd I'd go, I want you to put new batteries in your MVGs.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we both put new batteries in our MVGs.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And neither one of us had ever landed on MVGs before.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: But we had no alternate.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: There was zero alternate for us and no tanker.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: And oh, by the way, all this is happening at night.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: At night, yeah.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's black on the inside of a cow up there.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Pakistan is not known for its cultural lighting, and Jacobabad was not known for its lighting at all because power went out.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, this is how I'm going to do the landing.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you see a big fireball, then go back 10 miles south and eject.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: So in the A-10, you have a system, it's a bombing system with the old lastie, but before we got to the new cosmic A-10 Charlie, where you could go CCRP and get steering to a point.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I said And CCRP is can continually computing release point.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Constant computed release point.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you would get steering to whatever thing that you were going to hit on the ground.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I pulled out the tac-an approach and I said, okay, I want you to run the DME, the distance measuring equipment off of the front of the runway.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to fly the tac-an altitudes.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when you get to the descent point, I want you to put your flight path marker on CCRP three degrees nose low.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to fly to the end of the runway.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in the rain.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't really know where we broke out.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: I just know we didn't see hardly anything until all of a sudden the landing light illuminated the runway.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when the landing light was on the runway, then you could see it in the MVGs, and it kind of blinded you, so you had to raise your head.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that's the way I landed.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then he landed safely too.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: First and only ever MVG landing, no lights.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: So prior planning prevents death or ejection.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that is the only sortie in my over 3,000 hours that I ever climbed down the ladder and kissed the ground.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I did.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: I kissed Pakistan.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what was on the ground, but I didn't care.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: That is a hell of a story.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, Matt, what sortie's giving you the greatest sense of accomplishment?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a toss-up between rescuing those German guys.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was an F-16 Squadron Commander, we were getting shot at a lot by uh AAA anti-aircraft artillery, big artillery, because somehow in the De Marches, when they said you can't have stuff south of the 33 line, they left off the anti-aircraft artillery.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we would frequently go after the radars associated with that.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1999, in March or April, April, I guess, I took my squadron over there and we did three months, and we were dropping a lot of bombs.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, I'm really proud of the 68th Fighter Squadron during that time period because we had 100% hits of the 22 response options that we went after.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every single response option was a hit.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was hilarious because the Intel guys would go, Well, we don't know if it was a hit or not yet.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: I go, look at my tape.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was a building there, and now there's not a building anymore.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, they had to approve our bomb damage assessment.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I get off the airplane back at Moody, and the wing commander says, Hey, you're going back in 45 days.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it turned out to be 60 days, and we went back.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we had left our aircraft over there, and my sister squadron, the 69th Fighter Squadron that I had been the opso of, went over and fill in on airplanes.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we went back over and were doing a bunch of options.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: And General Zenny was a Centcom commander at the time.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in the vicinity of a bunch of names in Iraq, Al-Salman, Talil, and Basra, they had these really large AAA things.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you got too close to them, they had about a 13-mile range.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: They would shoot at you.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the F-15s that were going north of that area, which was about 3130, were having to fly through those gaps, and they were moving the guns around so they could get one of our airplanes, and they were also doing science projects with Katusha rockets trying to shoot rockets up and get us because Saddam Hussein really wanted to shoot an airplane down.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: General Zinny comes to Jabber, which I was at, I was at Jabber five times, but when he comes to Al Jabber in Kwait and says, it's a shooting gallery up there.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: The guys who are stationed in Saudi Arabia want to know what the solution is.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do any of you all have any solutions?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Yes, sir, I got a solution.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, What?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, It's the same thing every day.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: They have five sites at Tallil, they have five sites at Al-Saman, they have five sites at Basra.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: One site shoots at you, you bomb it, the other shoot four shoot at you.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: What we need to do is to do a mission where we get overhead imagery, good imagery, and then we put one bomb in all five sites on the first pass, they'll all run away, and then we can go back and bomb all the guns.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Really?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: You think that'll work?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Sir, I've been over here for almost six months this year.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think it'll work.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: So what you do is you send out a small package early in the morning, so they think you're done.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: They all take their naps till you come back in the afternoon, but you send the big package out at noon when they're all napping and hit them.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, plan it.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the Air Force Two Star was not real happy that a squadron commander had came up with that.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, What do you mean?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't talk to me about that.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: I go, he asked me a question, sir.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: A four-star general asked me a question, and I answered him.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said, plan it.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we did.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I led a 72-ship package in September of 99, and we had imagery of 72 or three guns.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we had 36 strikers off the boats.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: We had the Brits, uh Bali Asalim, we had my squadron.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: We got 55 guns, and they stopped shooting at us.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I was pretty proud of that sortie.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the biggest package ever led.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Plans led.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: 72 aircraft.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's damn impressive.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, a lot of those aircraft were support.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: The jammers and the OCA and all that stuff, but I was a mission commander of all of them.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: And once I checked in and we didn't say a word after that, and I think the most impressive thing was between because we had TOTs for everybody.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Between time on target.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, time on target.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Between Basra and Al Salman and Talil, and Al Salman's 150 miles west of Basra, out in the middle of nowhere.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was 32 seconds between the first and the last bomb and those five sites.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the timing worked out perfect.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone ran away.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: We we got almost no shots at us, a couple of man pads, but we killed them.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: We killed the guns.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: So proud of that one.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: So Matt, if there's any sortie you could re-fly, what would it be?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to refly my turkey chute sortie at Sioux Air Base, where we were competing against the 36th Fighter Squadron, F-16s on Cooney Range.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And a turkey chute, for those who don't know, is like an inter squadron rivalry bombing competition.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I generally was one of the better bombers and one of the best strafers in every A-10 squadron I was in.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was having a good day.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: When you hit the bullseye or the truck or you're within five meters, the range control says shack.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we all dropped six bombs, and going into strafe, I had six shacks.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, I'm gonna win this turkey shoot because strafe is my thing.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I came in on my first strafe pass, and I had the only gun malfunction I ever had in my A10 career, and the gun blew up under my feet.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: It went sh one bullet, a bullet exploded in the barrel, and then it shot a second barrel.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: I got a gun on safe light.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: I got fouled for double burst, but I didn't double burst.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: The gun basically didn't shoot the second round.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: It blew the barrel up underneath me.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: I got some smoke coming in, even though I'm in the titanium bathtub.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: Declare an emergency, go home, didn't get to strafe.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I had the perfect bomb score.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: If I could have strafed, uh I got second in the turkey chute, beat by like almost just a little bit by one of the Viper guys.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: But um, yeah, I'd like to re-fly that one and not have a gun unsafe because I would have won it.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only time in my career that I ever got six bullseyes out of six bombs.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think maybe I got four out of six before that, but it was it was the day and then the gun blew up.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta say that's impressive.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: My my best was five out of six bullseyes in the A10.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, Matt, what's the coolest thing you've ever done in an airplane?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: So coming back from that second combat tour, leading a six ship, past New York City, past Lady Liberty.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: That was cool.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: No need to apologize.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's damn cool.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: So my last question for you today.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that line can be dangerous, and most of us have lost a number of friends along the way.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is there anyone that you'd like to be sure we remember today?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Probably Steve Phyllis, uh, who died trying to save his wingman, Rob Sweet, who's an another friend of mine.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've lost a lot of friends, and and they they all deserve to be remembered, but probably none like Steve.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was during Desert Storm and uh he was a true hero.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: He went he went back to do a single ship combat search and rescue, which we all say we're not going to do, but he w wanted to make sure his wingman was safe.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Sweetness, Rob Sweet ended up as a POW, and the same system that shot him down shot Steve down and uh he roaded it.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of other people I gradu from I graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1980.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Seventeen of my classmates died in aircraft accidents in the first ten years.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And uh if you if you could see if I could throw a nickel on the grass for all of them, I would.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Nickel.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Nickel.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: All right, before we finish up today, I want to take a moment and let folks know that my novel about the F-117 called Have Blue Sky will be published on Veterans Day, November 11th, 2026.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: And if you'd like to learn more about it or to pre-order a copy, you can go to have bluesky.com.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can also find it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble's and hope you enjoy it.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, end of the commercial break there.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, Matt, I just want to say thanks so much for being with us today on the podcast.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: You are quite welcome.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: My honor.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: You've been listening to the Flyboy Podcast.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is brought to you by our parent organization, the Flyboy Lab.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: The mission of the Flyboy Lab is to elevate awareness and appreciation of aviators, their service, sacrifices, and contributions, and hopefully we've fulfilled that mission today.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: New episodes of the podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: Until our next sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.