In Nevada: A Rodeo for Throttle Jockeys

By James Willwerth

On a hazy desert morning near Las Vegas, growling high-performance engines warn of unseen jet fighters. Images of war darken the imagination. Moments later four slender U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter-bombers are framed against a hot blue sky. From a distance they are lethal mosquitoes: stiletto nose, ! bulging belly, tightly angled wings. Passing over their target area, the fighters roll out into a curved line, vanishing behind a range of mountains. They are preparing to drop bombs on American soil, but groundlings needn't worry. The object is to dominate a point spread, not an enemy.

This is the third day of Gunsmoke, a bombing contest held every two years at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Afterward, the Air Force will name its "top guns" -- an individual pilot and a high-scoring team from a field of 90 active-duty, reservist and Air National Guard pilots flying in from bases as close as Colorado and as distant as Korea. Much of the costly $1.2 million exercise is calculated to impress Congress. It provides comparative statistics measuring the high-tech F-16 against older planes such as the F-4s, A-10s and A-7s flown by Guardsmen and some reservists. Computerized bombing, applied by man, usually triumphs, and the Air Force needs the results to justify an increasingly high-tech budget. Gunsmoke's backdrop is 3 million acres of training range just north of the slot machines and bright lights.

The team passing overhead, one of nine to compete this morning, is led by Major Bob ("Cowboy") Dulaney, 36, from Homestead A.F.B., Florida. His teammates, all Air Force captains from Homestead, follow in a prearranged sequence: Rex Carpenter, 28, Steve ("Wheels") Wheeler, 29, and Nick Anderson, 26. Each was graduated first in his pilot class and has an amiably arrogant opinion of himself as a hot "throttle jockey." At Gunsmoke, every pilot feels that way.

For the moment, the cowboys are simply trying to shoot straight. "Cowboy four," Captain Anderson, an earnest young Florida-born pilot whose dentist father talked him past a water-skiing career by providing flying lessons at 16, is up. Circling a mile high around the mountains, Anderson suddenly dives to 200 feet to avoid "enemy" radar and screams at 600 m.p.h. toward the intended victim, an Army surplus M-47 tank having a bad day. The desert is a Jackson Pollock abstract, and Anderson is so low that when he is just four miles away, he can't see the tank. He searches for a clump of bushes named in briefings as a pretarget landmark. Reaching it, he tugs slightly on the F-16's stick. The jet rockets up 3,000 feet in a standard "pop up" bombing pattern. Climbing, Anderson feels his face droop and his body react "like a marshmallow" to a gravity force four times his weight. Through heavy eyelids, he finds the tank.

Then, like a hawk spotting a squirrel, Anderson banks sharply left and dives. Crammed into a cockpit no bigger than half a phone booth, he has the sensation of "riding on the tip of a pencil" when he wrenches the F-16 sideways, almost upside down. The tank appears below him through his canopy ceiling. For a microsecond the world is turned on its back. Anderson is pulling the stick toward him to "lift" the plane horizontally and down. Simultaneously, he eyes a cockpit screen called a heads-up display. The tank, seen distantly through the screen as if through a window, has to be matched to a targeting figure projected on the screen's surface, then moved, by minute adjustments in the plane's trajectory, to a bull's-eye pilots call the death dot. In effect, Anderson hopes to slam-dunk a basketball while racing by the hoop at 600 m.p.h.

World War II pilots rained death and fire by pulling on a lever said to resemble a dill pickle. The modern military pushes a "pickle" button. Anderson has half a heartbeat to push his. Since this isn't war, he is actually dropping a 25-lb. bowling pin with fins called a bomb dummy unit. It contains a small flash charge enabling technicians watching on video screens to pinpoint the hit or miss. Each pilot drops 28 bombs during the six-day contest. Two years ago, the top team triumphed over the runner-up by dropping a single bomb one yard closer. In theory, spring-loaded reflexes and microscopic eyes should make a winner. Pilots joke that proficiency in arcade video games helps too. But skill isn't everything. "Getting that little bitty death dot on that target isn't easy," says Anderson. "You might get bumped by turbulence or the cart ((bomb rack)) might be slow. The jets aren't perfect."

Anderson pickles -- and misses. His bomb "splashes" six yards left. In war, anything within ten yards would have won the day, but this is a contest. Muttering angrily, he rockets up toward the mountains to get in line again, wondering who missed, man or machine. "Hey, lead," he barks to Dulaney on his radio, "where'd your first bomb go?" It is 28 seconds since Anderson made his 3,000-foot climb. The contest allows 30 seconds from the climb to post-pickle recovery. Back at the base, the pilots gather in briefing rooms, close their doors and punch up video tapes of the day's run. Maybe one pilot stayed too long over the target, jamming the next man. Somebody probably flew too low, or too high. "The R.O.E. ((rules of engagement)) in a debriefing is no rank," says Cowboy Dulaney. "A lieutenant can tell a colonel what he did wrong -- with a little tact."

At Gunsmoke, it is hard to imagine tact. Scriptwriters for Hollywood's Top Gun didn't exaggerate. "I've always wanted to be a fighter pilot," says New Orleans Reservist and Viet Nam Veteran Major Craig Mays, 41, a burly A-10 pilot with blond hair and a Kennedyesque smile. "I'm going to be one until they take the uniform off my cold, dead body." The major's call sign is Darth Vader. Reservist Lieut. Colonel John Haynes, an Air National Guardsman from Georgia, was an F-4 "gib" (guy in back) in Viet Nam. He happily recalls "trolling" Haiphong Harbor, hoping to lure out MiGs. Now owner of two evangelical Christian bookstores in Atlanta, Haynes still finds flying magical. "We take a brick, put a little sheet metal on it, add propulsion and cram it into the air," he enthuses. "That's neat."

Behind the mix of reservists and active-duty pilots at Gunsmoke is a troubling career problem. The hottest active-duty pilots often quit the Air Force rather than endure the desk assignments required for higher rank. They join the reserves or Air National Guard, where part-time Air Force life is pure flying. "They think we should aim to be colonel-managers," snorts one throttle jockey. Another problem is resentment against rusty squadron commanders just returned from Pentagon desks who lack the "need for speed" in combat-readiness drills.

Ironically, reserve units with F-16s are getting some of the best scores. "They're fossils," admits Korea-based "driver" Captain Taylor Gates, 29, "but they're good." Indeed they are. An active-duty squad from Hill A.F.B., Utah, won the team competition -- Anderson's team took fifth -- but a fossil, Major Danny Hamilton, 41, flying with a reserve unit at the same Utah base, won the individual award. Not only is Hamilton a former active-duty pilot who bailed out in mid-career rather than fly a desk, he is also a computer expert. He trusts avionics software far more than do his younger, vaguely Luddite colleagues.

Gunsmoke's final two days gave Hamilton a chance to test his faith. The target was an old Navy surplus plane surrounded by protective earthen dikes. Pilots had to approach it "in the weeds" -- 200 feet above ground again -- from 150 miles out, flying over pretarget locations at precise times. Finally, Hamilton and others had to evade smoke missiles while dropping a bulky parachute-equipped 500-lb. bomb. Hamilton, alone among all Gunsmoke pilots, elected to try an F-16 computer program called dive toss. The pilot fixes the target inside a box projected on the up screen, punches his pickle button as if setting an alarm for a wake-up call, then flies toward the target. The computer drops the bomb. "The other pilots would have thought I was crazy to let the computer decide," Hamilton admits. Like a fox. The aging warrior scored a near perfect bull's-eye each time and became this year's top gun.