(Replying to PARENT post)
He told me he didn’t have a lot of confidence in the Sparrow. They eventually got some aircraft with guns but never used them; despite Top Gun school something like 90% Of his flights were ground attack missions.
👤neurobashing🕑5y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
The no gun thing is over hyped. The Navy never did install guns in their fighters in Vietnam, and still ended up reversing the kill ratio.
👤chipsa🕑5y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
The Vietnamese pilots were using Soviet tactics, mainly Ground Control vectors.
Most Vietnamese pilots were rookies, but they did have some aces who would dogfight, like Colonel Toon, who was shot down by Randy Cunningham:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham
But largely the tactics were to surprise the Americans with first MiG-17's, then have a MiG-21 at high speed do an ambush pass from the clouds through lower-flying Americans.
The Vietnamese could have done a lot more damage had they known how worthless the US air-air missiles were at the time. There were all kinds of problems with taking too long to arm (around 4 seconds) and vibration from takeoffs and landings inerting the missiles. And that no gun thing.
Additionally, US pilots were expected to have up to a dozen radio channels active, causing pilot workload problems until they turned off like 11 of them.