THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702200381
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 198 lines
For 34 years, the A-6 Intruder has been the power behind the Navy's tactical air punch, one of the most capable long-range, all-weather, night-or-day bombers in the free world.
It can carry and drop more bombs than any other plane the Navy takes to sea. It can outcarry World War II's iconic B-17 Flying Fortress. And it can do it while flying low, through mountain passes, in pitch dark and soupy fog.
No plane aboard a Navy carrier can fly as far from the ship with as much firepower. Few planes can equal its ability to take a beating and keep flying.
So why get rid of it?
It's a worthy question as the Navy prepares to bid farewell to this ugly duckling of an airplane, a pug-nosed, skinny-tailed brute that has carried its crews through perilous night missions in Vietnam, the Middle East and beyond.
When the A-6 retires this Friday, the service's ability to wallop targets deep inside hostile territory will suffer - and that worries many of the Intruder pilots and bombardier/navigators who have flown the plane over the years.
``When the A-6 leaves you are no longer going to have a plane fly off of a carrier that has the bomb carrying capability it has, the range it has, the low-level, all-weather capability it has,'' said retired Rear Adm. Fred Metz, who began flying the A-6 in 1964 and accumulated 3,000 hours in its side-by-side cockpit, many of them during 300 combat missions over Vietnam.
Cmdr. Jim Gigliotti, commanding officer of Attack Squadron 75, the last of the Navy's East Coast A-6 squadrons, sides with Metz.
``We're certainly going to miss this airplane,'' he said, ``and not just for sentimental reasons, either.
A-6 crews ``will be sorely missed'' Metz said, ``because they dedicate themselves to one mission: air-to-ground - not air-to-air and air-to-ground. We are experts at what we do. That may sound vain, but it's absolutely true, and I think it's recognized by the air wing.''
Aviators have bemoaned the loss of tactical aircraft in the past - the A-4 Skyhawk, A-7 Corsair, F-4 Phantom come to mind.
But those planes, for the most part, were replaced by successors designed to perform the same jobs, only better. Nothing in sight will replace the A-6.
Today, specialized attack aircraft are being phased out of naval aviation in favor of jack-of-all-trade planes, such as the F-14 Tomcat and newer F/A-18 Hornet. These multiple-task jets are supposed to serve as fighters and bombers and electronic jammers and tankers, and to pull off whatever other missions can be found for them.
They're faster, newer, easier to maintain. But both have shortcomings.
The F/A-18, even with the package of improvements that the Navy is eyeing to turn it into the ``Super Hornet,'' can't match the A-6's range or payload.
The Tomcat armed with the new LANTIRN system - a wing-mounted, laser-guided bomb system that enables the F-14 to lock on a target from up to 20 miles away and steer its bombs to the spot - lacks the Intruder's foul-weather readiness.
Capt. Jim Zortman, commander of the Carrier Air Wing 17 aboard the Enterprise and a bombardier/navigator in the A-6 since 1976, gives the Hornet good marks, but doesn't see it matching the older plane.
Compromises in an age of ever-rising hardware costs, the newer planes lack the A-6's single-mindedness.
``The A-6 is mission-narrow,'' he said, meaning it does one thing - bomb targets - and does it expertly.
``The Hornet, on the other hand, has a good air-to-ground capability, and a very good air-to-air capability. But I'm going to miss this old friend I've spent several thousand hours flying in. There isn't anything in the air-to-ground inventory that compares to the A-6.''
``Obviously some people smarter than I have decided that requirement is no longer needed,'' said Metz, who flew the plane out of Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. ``That they don't need the range and low altitude. That the threat has changed.
``I tend to disagree with that,'' he said. ``If something happened right now, I think they will find themselves in a bind.''
John Lehman, secretary of the Navy from 1981-87 under the Reagan administration, remembers a time when the requirement was a vital need.
Lehman, through his naval-reserve status, flew as a bombardier/navigator in the A-6 while he served as the Navy's civilian chief. It was Lehman who was responsible for putting an extra squadron of A-6s aboard aircraft carriers, instead of the single-squadron arrangement that was prevalent before the 1980s.
In those days, he said, the extra punch of having twice as many A-6s ready for battle was important.
``The experiences we had in the Reagan administration showed the options for crisis management, which required long-distance, rapid-response, all-weather, night flexibility for the theater commanders,'' he said.
Those characteristics enabled theater commanders to launch a precision strike or precision close-air support, and to provide beacon-bombing for the Marines ashore or anti-surface warfare at long distances, said Lehman. They could do it without having to be guided by airborne early warning aircraft like the Air Force AWACS or the Navy's carrier-based E-2C Hawkeye radar planes.
``For the theater commander to be able to count on mounting a very serious load of ordnance over long distance, autonomously, was a tremendous asset,'' Lehman said.
``It is a shame that is now gone and that the theater commanders now have only have a very small mix of options.
``It was a degree of flexibility in crisis management that every president for the past 25 to 30 years has had. Now they don't. That doesn't mean you can't reach out and strike people at long distances. But doing it with land- based air carries a lot more complications, as we saw in the Libyan strike; getting over-flight rights and landing rights,'' Lehman said.
``It seems to me in the future the Navy ought to have again a big utility dump truck that can do 20 different kinds of missions, from mining, to surface warfare, to long loitering over the battlefield, to beacon bombing, laser designating, interdictions - all the different kinds of missions that require autonomy and long-loiter and long-range.''
Its warfighting prowess is only part of the A-6's charm: The plane has played an important role in carrier air wings even when it wasn't bombing targets. Its massive fuel capacity makes it a fine airborne gas station for a flattop's other jets.
Without it, carrier air wings will have to rely on a far smaller number of refueling planes. The few subhunting S-3 ``Viking'' jets aboard each carrier are likely to bear the brunt of the load.
``The S-3s have to take over that refueling duty,'' said Lt. Patrick Day, a pilot in Gigliotti's squadron. ``So without it, you lose a lot of flexibility.''
Zortman agreed. ``When they go away, our organic refueling capability is going to be limited to the eight S-3s we carry aboard,'' he said of his air wing. ``Plus, we'll have more F-18s in the air wing, which will need that refueling, so we'll have more aircraft needing it, and fewer able to deliver it.''
It will, in all probability, take the Navy a few years to figure out how to juggle its remaining carrier planes to accomplish - or at least approach accomplishing - the A-6's missions.
And it'll take longer to replace it with a next-generation fighter-attack plane that offers improvements on the F/A-18's performance.
Despite several attempts to devise a specialized successor to the A-6, none has materialized. The last, the A/F-X, succumbed to government belt-tightening and cheaper upgrades to the F/A-18. Before that, the A-12 ``Avenger'' amassed huge cost overruns early in its development that ultimately doomed it.
The Navy's best hope for a modern, carrier-based jet with a long-range punch may be the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program, a Defense Department-sponsored effort to develop a tactical strike fighter that could be used by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
But the joint-strike fighter, as it's known in shorthand, is a ways off: A prototype is not scheduled for a first flight until 2000, and it probably won't be operational until 2010.
That's 13 years of relying on the F/A-18 Super Hornet and aging F-14 Tomcat to carry the Navy's deep-strike load.
As Gigliotti noted: ``As far as all-weather attack (missions), we will have a little void for a while.''
So why discard a proven performer that has no equal? Why junk the A-6 when newer, sleeker planes can't carry its load?
The A-6 has its weaknesses.
The Intruder can't fly as fast as other Navy jets. It is subsonic: It might, its pilots joke, reach 675 mph if aimed straight down from 40,000 feet. Otherwise, its best speed is about 575 mph.
It can't defend itself very well, either, though it can carry a Sidewinder air-to-air missile for air defense.
Most importantly, it is old.
Through the years, the Grumman-built Intruder has been upgraded with carbon-composite wings, new wiring, completely new weapons and navigation systems. But its equipment is not modular, like that aboard the newer jets, and its computer system is archaic.
``Your laptop computer has more computing power than this aircraft,'' admits Gigliotti, who was 3 years old when the first A-6 rolled out of the factory.
``We could not run Microsoft Office on this airplane.''
Its age and nonmodular design make it expensive and difficult to maintain.
``So far as getting you back, it was a pretty reliable air frame,'' said Capt. Bob Leitzel, chief of staff for the Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force, headquartered in Norfolk. ``But to get it at 100 percent it was a constant manicure. Dials would actually spin in the computer. The B/N would have to kick the pedestal to unstick the dials.
``It took a lot of grooming. It was a manpower-intensive airplane.''
And, even its staunchest defenders admit that the weapons it was designed to carry have been eclipsed somewhat by high-tech ``smart'' bombs. The A-6 can carry the new ordnance - a lot of it - but its original strength, of taking off from a carrier deck with a slew of ``dumb'' iron bombs strapped under its wings, is not in the demand it once was.
No matter that it could do it with a load equal in weight to five Honda Civics.
Regardless of what sort of bomb it carries, the A-6 may have found itself left behind by the world's political changes. The plane's retirement without a true successor seems an acknowledgment that the Navy is unlikely to find itself in the sort of fight it anticipated during the Cold War.
With the diminished threat of a tangle with the Soviets, the need for unrefueled, deep-strike attacks may, too, have diminished.
And should the Navy need to hammer an inland target, it now has dozens of ships capable of doing so with a weapon that seemed the stuff of science fiction when the first Intruder prototype appeared in 1960.
Cruise missiles, even at $1 million a pop, may be the cheaper way to go. MEMO: Jack Dorsey may be reached at 446-2284 or through E-Mail at
jdorseyinfi.net ILLUSTRATION: U.S. Navy Photo
Color Photo
A-6 Intruder
Color photos
Ret'd. Rear Adm.Fred Metz
John Lehman, secretary of the Navy under the Reagan administration.
KEYWORDS: A-6 INTRUDER U.S. NAVY