DATE: Friday, February 28, 1997             TAG: 9702280549

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  305 lines

THE AMAZING INTRUDER FROM VIETNAM TO PERSIAN GULF, THE A-6 HAS EARNED ITS KEEP

Hit three times by anti-aircraft fire, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Schuyler's A-6 Intruder whistled and bucked as it skimmed over the steamy Vietnamese coast.

Schuyler eyed the twisted metal in his left wing, the holes in his canopy, the damage to the cockpit. He pushed on.

Diving at 500 knots, he and Marine Capt. Lou Ferracane dropped thousand-pound bombs on a rail repair yard, then felt the Intruder take two more hits. Fire broke out under the right wing.

The Intruder flew on, bombing a second target, a missile site, and two minutes later took six more hits. One blew Ferracane's bombardier/navigator console straight out the top of the canopy.

Air swooshed from the cockpit. Dirt and dust and debris swirled around them and zipped through the hole. Half of the plane's hydraulic system failed.

Schuyler wrestled with the jet's controls. Two holes perforated the left wing. Three hits had punched in the armor plating under one engine. A hole the size of a large typewriter gaped over the crew's heads. The right wing, chewed by at least four holes, was burning as if cut by a torch.

Still, the Intruder flew on. ``It was like we had a bull's-eye painted on it,'' said Schuyler, a Virginia Beach aviator who retired in 1990 after two decades flying the Intruder, but ``she was flying just fine.''

He and Ferracane headed back to their carrier, the Coral Sea, confident that they could reach the flattop. Their boss overruled them as they limped over water infested with sharks and sea snakes. ``Big ones,'' Schuyler recalled.

So the two men ejected at 430 knots, were plucked from the Tonkin Gulf 45 minutes later, and reached their ship in time for dinner. Ferracane suffered scratches. Schuyler, later awarded the Silver Star, was unhurt.

And the day - May 29, 1972 - became another improbable entry in the history of the A-6, whose beefy resilience has spawned yarns through more than three decades of duty aboard the Navy's carriers.

That history ends, officially, today.

The ``Sunday Punchers'' of Attack Squadron 75 at Oceana Naval Air Station, along with Attack Squadron 196 at Whidbey Island, Wash., officially retire their birds in synchronized ceremonies planned on both coasts.

They are the last of 19 Navy squadrons and five in the Marine Corps that once filled the sky with nearly 700 of the pug-nosed, noisy jets - planes that made their debut at Oceana 34 years ago this month, were baptized under fire in Vietnam, pounded targets in Grenada, Lebanon and Libya, and played a leading role in Iraq.

The last of the Intruders will leave next month for the Arizona desert, joining 300 already baking in a hot, dry boneyard at Davis Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson.

Thousands of naval aviators, their ground crews and their families, grew up alongside the ``ugly duckling'' of the Navy's air arm. Pilots and bombardier/navigators were followed by their sons in flying the beastly machines.

The Intruder's beginnings seem ancient. Dwight Eisenhower was president when work started on a jet that could get to the target 500 miles away, without refueling, in miserable weather and in the black of night. Elvis Presley was at the top of the charts with ``Heartbreak Hotel,'' and an option-loaded new car could be purchased for $1,600.

The resulting airplane didn't resemble the pointy darts fashionable in those space-age days. It had a fat nose, a skinny tail and an odd looking ``horn'' above its snout - a fixed refueling probe in front of the cockpit. Even its fans called it a ``Flying Polywog,'' ``Dragonfly,'' ``Dump Truck,'' ``Tadpole'' or ``BUFF,'' for Big Ugly Fat Fella.

But the jet's appearance - and those nicknames - belied the fact that ``when the A-6 came along it was the most sophisticated airplane in the world,'' said Wes Moseman, who went to work for the Intruder's builder, Grumman Corp., in 1949.

Its appearance and its nicknames masked the plane's remarkable ability to keep up with changing times and the Navy's changing demands.

And they reflect that the Intruder is like no other plane that ever launched and landed on a carrier deck.

The Intruder's broad front end houses the plane's massive search and track radars - the keys to the plane's ability to fly as low as 100 feet off the mud on the way to dropping as many as 28 500-pound iron bombs. The Marines sometimes managed to carry 30 when they removed the landing gear doors.

That load was greater than that of much larger planes, among them the famed B-17 Flying Fortress of World War II.

Perhaps the plane's most unique feature, though, was that its two-man crew worked side-by-side, the pilot on the left, the bombardier/navigator hunkered down beside him and peering into a sophisticated array of inertial navigation, terrain-avoidance radar and integrated computer-controlled attack systems.

The B/N couldn't fly the plane, but he provided the pilot with a view of the Intruder's surroundings that stretched 150 miles.

The B/N pushed the ``present location'' button on a cigar box-sized computer between his knees, entered the plane's latitude and longitude, then told the computer where he wanted to go - and an arrow of light appeared on a small TV set before the pilot. He followed the arrow, and, before long, the Intruder arrived at its target.

``A lot of people were against the side-by-side arrangement,'' said Navy Capt. P.F. ``Holly'' Hollandsworth of Virginia Beach who started piloting A-6s in the early 1960s. ``But in the attack, all-weather role, it is nice to have the guy looking at the same thing you are. It's a comforting thing to have him next to you.''

The arrangement bred closeness between crew members that, A-6 crews say, surpassed that of fighter pilots and their rear-seat radar intercept officers.

``In the ready rooms of the fighter squadrons, the pilots stayed in the front and the RIOs were in the back of the bus, or not even there,'' said retired Rear Adm. Fred Metz, a veteran A-6 pilot. ``With the A-6 crews, you could never tell the difference.''

Lou Lalli, a retired A-6 squadron commander, said the relationship was unique in naval aviation. ``This was the first time and the last time really where we had a tactical airplane where the crew sat side-by-side - and I mean in an airplane that was going to go downtown.

``And because of that, I think we were a much tighter community,'' said Lalli, who now works on the Intruder's successor, the F/A-18 Hornet, for McDonnell Douglas Aerospace. ``The pilots and B/Ns were not only treated as equals, but I think they really felt they were.

``In the fighter community they still had this feeling of, `Well, he is my back seater.' Well, he wasn't a back seater in the A-6. He sat up front and when I got into the community in 1972, his mission in the airplane was every bit as important to the pilot as the pilot's was.''

Retired Capt. ``J.B.'' Dadson was the youngest Navy pilot in combat when he launched from the carrier America on his first airstrike against North Vietnam in 1968.

The plane around him was a veteran by then, its Operation Rolling Thunder strikes a foundation of U.S. air strategy in the unpopular conflict.

Dadson, then a 23-year-old ensign, returned from that first mission a veteran himself, having flown low and slow through the Vietnamese night, dodged triple-A flak to drop his bombs and safely grabbed the No. 3 wire back on the carrier. He left behind three fires and a tangle of bombed-out trucks and fuel depots.

When Dadson climbed out of his Intruder - all 6 feet, 4 inches of him - he wore not his hard plastic Navy helmet and visor, but a leather helmet from World War I, complete with goggles.

It was a comic moment amid the peril that accompanied the Intruder's deep-strike, low-altitude mission. For all of their strengths, 68 Intruders went down in combat in Southeast Asia, out of a total Navy loss of 530 planes. The loss was lighter than those suffered by the A-4 Skyhawk and the ubiquitous F-4 Phantom, but they hit the A-6 community hard.

``We lost two people from our eight-man bunk room,'' Dadson, of Virginia Beach, said. ``You'd be up in the morning, talking to everyone. Then at night, you'd look around and they were not there.''

Six days later another A-6 in his squadron was felled by Triple-A flak. One of the aviators was recovered. the other became a prisoner of war.

The war's early years were the worst. ``We lost eight or nine planes, the majority because we were flying in an environment we were not familiar with,'' said Metz, a veteran of 300 missions over Vietnam.

The Intruder ``got a bad name, not because of the plane, but because we were flying low, at night and against a missile environment for the first time. Some of the guys couldn't handle it.''

The Navy experimented with different paint to camouflage the jets. It didn't work.

John T. ``Ted'' Been, a retired B/N, figures that many of those early casualties probably resulted from air crews developing tactics under combat conditions.

``This was the first airplane intended to fly low level with a heavy load of bombs,'' Been said. ``People just weren't properly trained and that is why we had a lot of losses. People were flying into the ground. At those low levels, if you get a hiccup in the stick, you are in the ground.''

After Vietnam, the A-6 settled into noncombat cruises - most of the time.

In December 1983, when the carriers Independence and John F. Kennedy launched a 28-plane strike on Syrian forces in Lebanon - retaliation for the destruction of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut - Intruders carried a large share of the bomb load.

The daylight attack saw an A-6 crewed by Lt. Mark Lange and Lt. Bobby Goodman from Oceana's VA-85 take a hit from a Syrian missile. Lange was killed, and Goodman was held prisoner for 30 days before presidential candidate Jesse Jackson negotiated his release.

The Intruder's next tangle turned out differently. In March 1986, A-6s made night attacks on Libyan patrol boats, sinking or damaging at least four that threatened American warships. Thirteen months later, Intruders led a major retaliatory strike against Libyan ground targets, knocking out several surface-to-air missile sites and military compounds.

Not until 1991, and the Persian Gulf War, did Intruders again see battle. Ninety-five Navy A-6s and 20 Marine Corps Intruders flew more than 5,600 sorties during that war - and, on some days, the hairiness of their work rivaled that of the Vietnam years.

On Jan. 18, 1991, two A-6Es were lost in combat in the Persian Gulf, the first shoot-down landing Lt. Robert Wetzel and Lt. Jeffrey Zaun of Oceana's VA-35 in Iraqi hands. The second plane simply vanished over Iraq, and a third A-6 was shot up so badly it barely got back to Saudi Arabia.

A few weeks later, on Feb. 2, the last combat loss of an A-6 was recorded. At 11:15 a.m., in clear skies, an A-6E on patrol over the Persian Gulf was presumably hit by anti-aircraft artillery. Lt. Cmdr. Barry Cooke and Lt. Patrick Conner of VA-36 were lost.

Peacetime wasn't without its perils: The last loss of an A-6 in flight came last June 4, at the hands of an ally.

Lt. Cmdr. Will Royster and Lt. Keith Douglas, flying off the carrier Independence near Hawaii, were shot down while towing an aerial target. The hits came from the Japanese warship Yaguri, which fired its 20 mm Phalanx guns at the aircraft instead of the target a mile astern. Both men ejected and were recovered with minor injuries.

In the end, the Intruder's biggest foe proved not to be missiles or cannon, or anything else devised to shoot it down, but its own crankiness - and time.

Maintenance on the plane was a chore from its first days with the fleet, though the Navy managed to improve the routines with which it serviced the plane, and new equipment eased the load over the years.

Among the first squadrons to deploy with the Intruder was VA-75. In addition to its 14 planes and 260 maintenance and support personnel, the squadron had to take along 33 civilian technical representatives on that first cruise to help with a myriad of problems, Metz said.

``We didn't know how to maintain the computers and radars,'' he said. ``The airplane came into being and the next thing, we were going to war with it.''

Today, the Intruder has a better maintenance record than the F-14, said Senior Chief Petty Officer John Boensch, maintenance chief for VA-75. Experience at troubleshooting, improvements to various systems and a cadre of seasoned mechanics make the Intruder easier to maintain, he said.

No ``tech reps'' accompanied the squadron on its last cruise to the Mediterranean aboard the carrier Enterprise, according to Boensch.

``Actually, some of the older ones were our best fliers,'' he said, ``because we had enough time to work all the bugs out of them.''

For 20 years, the plane had a starting problem in a device called a constant speed drive. Likewise, a faulty generator built into the plane from its inception wasn't corrected until six years ago, when a new generator was introduced.

``Until 1992 we never had a proper generator on it,'' said Cmdr. J.P. Gigliotti, VA-75's skipper. ``That drove a lot of maintenance problems. We changed 15 to 20 (generators) a month during a good month.

``We finally got a new one and it never failed.''

Even so, the Intruder's labor-intensive nature was a headache. To change one A-6 engine took a polished crew eight hours. The more modern F/A-18 Hornet's engine can be swapped in 45 minutes.

Some maintain that 44 hours or more of maintenance are needed today to keep the Intruder in the air for one hour. The Hornet is supposed to have a 17-to-1 ratio.

And no one disputes the effects of age on the plane. The A-6's air frame, struts and landing gear designs came out of the factory in the 1960s. The newest bird in Va-75 is 8 years old.

As Boensch noted: ``It's worn out, and they aren't building any new stuff for it.''

The exterior, especially, is not holding up well. Constant exposure to salt air turns the plane's skin into white powder. ``It tends to want to return to its original state,'' said Boensch of the aluminum and magnesium hull. ``A lot of metal in this thing is pretty well worn out.''

Many of these jets, Gigliotti noted, have recorded more than 6,000 flying hours. According to Boensch, aircraft No. 503 - flown by VA-75 - has accumulated more than 1,500 landings, the majority of them jolts to a halt on a carrier's three-inch-thick arresting wire.

On top of all that, this aging airplane isn't getting any cheaper. The first A-6 was a bargain at $4.6 million, but, by 1983, inflation and new hardware had driven the cost to $36 million.

After VA-75 retires today, its last Intruders will be readied for the flight to Arizona. Some of them may find new life with another nation's air force: One of the few American aircraft that has never served with any other country, the A-6 today is sought by France.

More of them likely will squat on the desert floor beside hundreds upon hundreds of other retired aircraft.

A few, however, will remain on sea duty.

After it was ordered in September 1993 to stop work on all upgrades of the plane, Grumman found itself with 80 spares. Six of the Intruders went to museums. A few went on display at naval base gates.

But 71 were dumped last summer into the Atlantic to form ``St. Augustine Intruder Reef,'' a fishing haven 25 miles off Florida, and a second site was created 30 miles off Daytona Beach.

``As a Grumman guy, it broke my heart,'' Steve Blalock told Air & Space magazine late last year, after watching a crane tear into the jets and drop them from a barge. ``But as a diver I was excited.''

Fighter jocks jokingly called the reefs ``Naval Air Station Atlantis,'' and, in doing so, may have unwittingly struck on the beauty of this fate for the old jets.

The ugly ducklings are now drawing spadefish, blues, amberjack and barracuda.

Always adaptable, always eager for action, the Intruder is off on a new mission. MEMO: INSIDE: FULL-PAGE POSTER HIGHLIGHTING THE A-6'S HISTORY AND

MORE/A10 ILLUSTRATION: An A-6 roars off the deck of the carrier Enterprise

Dec. 19.

[Color Photo]

``It was like we had a bull's-eye painted on it,'' says retired Lt.

Cmdr. Philip Schuyler, describing an A-6 mission over Vietnam.

[Color Photo]

LAWRENCE JACKSON photos/The Virginian-Pilot

The ``Sunday Punchers'' of Attack Squadron 75 at Oceana Naval Air

Station are among the last of 19 Navy and five Marine Corps

squadrons that once filled the sky with nearly 700 of the pug-nosed

jets - planes that made their debut at Oceana 34 years ago this

month and were baptized under fire in Vietnam and pounded targets in

Grenada, Lebanon, Libya and Iraq.

TO HEAR THE CEREMONY

Former A-6 crew members and others who cannot attend today's

retirement ceremony can listen in on the proceedings, live, courtesy

of AT&T.

A toll-free number - (800) 248-7600 - will carry the sounds of

the 2 p.m. ceremony for listeners anywhere in the country. The

broadcast will be replayed for 24 hours, starting at 8 tonight.

The ceremony itself is not open to the public.

This was the first time and the last time really where we had a

tactical airplane where the crew sat side-by-side - and I mean in an

airplane that was going to go downtown.

Lou Lalli, a retired A-6 squadron commander

This was the first airplane intended to fly low level with a heavy

load of bombs. People were flying into the ground. At those low

levels, if you get a hiccup in the stick, you are in the ground.

John T. ``Ted'' Been, a retired bombardier/navigator

In the ready rooms of the fighter squadrons, the pilots stayed in

the front and the RIOs were in the back of the bus, or not even

there. With the A-6 crews, you could never tell the difference.

Retired Rear Adm. Fred Metz, a veteran A-6 pilot

A lot of people were against the side-by-side arrangement. But in

the attack, all-weather role, it is nice to have the guy looking at

the same thing you are. Navy Capt. P.F. ``Holly'' Hollandsworth, who

started piloting A-6s in the early 1960s KEYWORDS: INTRUDERS HISTORY A-6 MILITARY PLANES <

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