Well, I wouldn't read too much into this whole thing...he's not describing something cosmic here.

All it sounds like he's doing is putting the plane in a deep accelerated stall and stomping on the rudder. From the text it's hard to determine exactly what the rudder is doing for him, but there is only two things that it can do, roll or yaw.

In the very simple T-45A for example, the plane had an annoying habit where the horizontal stab would be blocked out by the wings at high AOA; actually at the high AOA you would often fight at. The result was something we just called "pitch buck". When the pilot pulled incorrectly (it's hard to describe exactly), the nose of the plane would pitch, the wings would blank the tail, the nose would stop pitching, the tail would become unblanked, the nose would pitch, etc.

Now it was possible, once you got used to it, to pull through pitch buck into a high AOA region where the plane was in heavy buffet, but not bucking like a bronco (note that this is relatively high AOA for the T-45...not like SU-27 high AOA). This AOA is what you might use to force an overshoot in close or pitch your nose up to stop downrange travel in a climbing flat scissors. In this regime, you would simultaneously roll and yaw the plane by stomping on the rudder.

And I think that's all the author is describing here. Basically putting on an in close break turn and using rudder to reverse into an overshooting bandit. I don't think there is anything magic about it or that it's a Super Sabre only move. In fact, I think that a modern plane might do it even better with the help of the flight control computers to prevent it departing in an ugly fashion, like an A-4 which was reputed for it's nasty high speed departures. Many a Hornet guy I knew would describe parking the nose of the jet at some horrific AOA, shoving in full rudder in one direction or another, and performing some impossibly annoying pirouette. The difference in the F-100 is that no one was going to stop the plane from tumbling end over end unnaturally other than the pilot.

I'm not sure why the author seems to have inflated this maneuver into the prose version of the Top Gun uber "I'll throw on the brakes and he'll fly right by!" maneuver, but I suspect a little literary license is at work.

If you've ever read SHADOW DIVERS, you know what I'm speaking of. The author makes those guys sound like demigods, not divers. Ten pages into that thing and you're pretty sure that they fart diamonds. wink

Deacon

Last edited by Deacon211; 07/11/15 07:54 PM. Reason: Edited for clarity