Pacific Stars and Stripes information
for USS CONSTELLATION

For date 700421


USS CONSTELLATION was a US Navy unit
Primary service involved, US Navy
South Vietnam
Description: The following is an edited version of an article titled "Hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail - Navy Jets Carry Air War to Laos." Aboard U.S.S. Constellation, South China Sea (UPI) - Twenty four hours a day, wasp-like planes swollen with heavy bombs catapult from the flight decks of U.S. carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin heading for the Ho Chi Minh Trail complex in Laos. Some of the pilots have not returned. Others, their fighter-bombers badly damaged, manage to limp back to the carriers which steam in a racetrack-like circle to catch the returning planes. Since the U.S. Command on March 10 acknowledged the secret Laotian air war, four helicopter crewmen have been reported killed, and two bomber airmen missing in 13 crashes. "You don't ever think you won't come back," and A7 bomber pilot said just before his flight. "No pilot ever thinks that. You just worry about the unknown, I guess. You're always nervous. But all these men love to fly." The A7 "Corsair" carries only one passenger: the pilot. It's designed for close support of ground troops and to destroy ground targets. It carries two 20mm cannons in addition to other bombs and missiles. "Alone is the only way to fly," the pilot said. "I don't want the responsibility for another person. If I feel I have to make a sudden maneuver with the plane I want to do it without scaring someone else. I'll just frighten myself." The pilot, a veteran of many raids over North Vietnam before the bombing halt in 1968, said, "there aren't enough" targets on the Ho Chi Minh trail complex "as far as I'm concerned. "The traffic situation over the trail is bad," he continued. "With the large number of small spotter aircraft locating the moving North Vietnamese targets and the huge fighter-bombers overhead ready to drop their loads, there is the danger of an air collision," he said. The A6 "intruder", a twin-engined jet, carries side-by-side the pilot and bombardier-navigator team. A highly specialized computer does everything from keeping the craft on course to accurately dropping the bomb payload without the pilot visually spotting the target. The computer decides when and where the bombs should be released and "answers" the pilot's uncertainty 100 times a second. "I used to teach school before doing this," an A6 navigator said. But the excitement of working with this highly specialized piece of equipment and the thrill of flying "is really the life," he said. The navigator voiced complete confidence in the aircraft's computer system and stressed "it won't make a mistake," if the computer is fed incomplete of wrong information it "tells" the navigator it can't solve the problem. "We don't even have to look out of the plane to do our work," the navigator said. "So I love to fly at night - it's the best time." Another navigator said the daily bombing missions "keep the adrenaline working. I don't want to keep doing this forever, though," he added, "just until I'm 30."

The source for this information was 7004pss.avn supplied by Les Hines 02/02/2000


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Last updated 02/03/2000

Date posted on this site: 05/13/2023