The HORRORS of the A-1 Skyraider in Vietnam 

The HORRORS of the A-1 Skyraider in Vietnam 

A World War II propeller plane carried more bombs than a B-17 Flying Fortress, shot down communist jet fighters, and rescued hundreds of downed pilots. While the Pentagon spent billions trying to replace it with machines that couldn’t do its job. September 1st, 1968. Lieutenant Colonel William Jones III is sitting in the cockpit of a propeller plane designed before the atomic bomb existed.

He’s 90 mi from home. The rocket motor mounted behind his head has just ignited inside the cockpit. The aircraft is on fire. His ejection system is destroyed. His skin is melting off his hands and he will not bail out. He will fly this burning airplane home with third-degree burns covering his upper body because somewhere in the jungle below there’s a downed pilot whose coordinates only he knows.

This is the story of the A-1 Skyraider. A plane the Pentagon tried to kill for a decade. A plane that embarrassed every supersonic jet the Cold War produced. And the plane whose sound that deep unmistakable growl of a 2,700 horsepower radial engine meant one thing to every man lying wounded in a ditch in Vietnam.

Someone’s coming to get you out. Here’s what shouldn’t make sense. By 1965, the United States Air Force owned the most advanced combat aircraft on the planet. F-4 Phantoms that broke Mach 2. F-105 Thunderchiefs were designed to deliver nuclear weapons at supersonic speed. Billions of dollars worth of afterburners, radar interceptors, and heat-seeking missiles.

And field commanders in Vietnam kept requesting propeller planes. The Douglas A-1 Skyraider was designed in 1944. First flew in March of 1945. Months before the war it was built for even ended. A taildragger in an era of tricycle landing gear. A piston engine relic in the age of the turbine. Its pilots nicknamed it the Spad after the wood and canvas biplanes of World War I because because that’s how ridiculous it looked next to an F-4 on a carrier deck.

But the Spad had a secret that jets didn’t. An F-4 Phantom burned fuel so fast that it could loiter over a target for maybe 20 to 30 minutes before it had to leave. The Skyraider could orbit the same target for 4 to 6 hours. Sometimes 10. The F-105 needed an aerial tanker just to reach its target on missions over North Vietnam.

The Skyraider launched, flew to target, delivered ordnance for hours, and came home without refueling. And here’s the number that made jet pilots sick. The B-17 Flying Fortress, the four-engine heavy bomber that defined World War II, typically typically carried 4 to 6,000 lb of bombs. The single-engine Skyraider carried 8,000.

One pilot. One propeller. More payload than a heavy bomber with a 10-man crew. 15 external hard points, 4 20 mm cannons firing 48 rounds per second combined. Napalm, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, Zuni rockets, mini gun pods. If you could bolt it to the wing, the Spad could carry it. And on one occasion in November 1965, someone bolted a toilet to the wing.

Commander Clarence “Bill” Stoddard of VA-25 aboard USS Midway, commemorating the 6 millionth pound of ordnance dropped, had his crew rig a damaged porcelain toilet with tail fins and a nose fuse. The forward air controller reported it “whistled all the way down.” But that story makes you smile. What comes next won’t.

The speed that made jets impressive made them almost useless for one critical mission, saving the guy on the ground. When American pilots were shot down over Laos or North Vietnam, they didn’t need something fast. They needed something that would stay. The Skyraider became that something under the call sign Sandy.

As F-105 pilots put it, if a Sandy pilot walked into the bar, he would have a hard time paying for a drink. Here’s how a Sandy rescue worked. A downed pilot is hiding in jungle crawling with enemy troops. Four Skyraiders arrive and begin flying at treetop level, deliberately drawing fire. They called it “trolling for fire.

” Fly low, fly slow, dare the enemy to shoot, and the second a gun reveals itself, roll in with 20 mm cannons and napalm. Four Spads would form a daisy chain, a continuous circle, so that as one pulled off, the next was already diving in. An unbroken curtain of fire, while a rescue helicopter crept in underneath.

The enemy learned to use downed pilots as bait. They’d surround the survivor with anti-aircraft guns and wait for the slow, low Skyraiders to come in. They called it a flak trap. May 31st, 1968. Navy Lieutenant Kenny Fields, call sign Streetcar 304, gets shot down near Chepone, one of the most heavily defended stretches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

His very first combat mission. For 40 hours, 189 sorties were flown to save one man. Seven aircraft lost or heavily damaged. One Sandy pilot was captured. Five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. But they got him out. The 602nd Special Operations Squadron alone lost 77 Skyraiders and 38 pilots running rescues.

Across all CSAR operations, two Medals of Honor, 38 Air Force Crosses, 71 rescue personnel killed. And now, we need to go back to the man in the burning cockpit. Lieutenant Colonel William Jones III, commanding officer of the 602nd, launched as Sandy 01 on his 98th combat mission. Two F-4 Phantoms had been shot down near the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

One crew was recovered. The second pilot was still hiding in jungle near Dong Hoi. Jones made repeated low passes through intense anti-aircraft fire to find the survivor. He spotted him. Then he spotted a multiple barrel gun position on top of a karst formation nearby and attacked it. On the second pass, rounds struck his aircraft.

One hit the Yankee extraction system rocket, the emergency escape mechanism mounted directly behind his headrest. The rocket ignited inside the cockpit, but it didn’t launch. It turned into a blowtorch pointed at the pilot. Jones pulled the extraction handle. Nothing. The system was destroyed. He blew the canopy, which only fed the fire.

He was trapped in a burning airplane with second and third-degree burns spreading across his arms, hands, neck, shoulders, and face. His radios were gone, and he turned the aircraft toward home base, 90 mi away. He needed to report the downed pilot’s position. That was the only thing that mattered. He landed the destroyed Skyraider at Nakhon Phanom and passed the coordinates while lying on the operating table.

He described his burned hands as looking like mozzarella cheese. The downed pilot was rescued later that day. Jones was promoted to colonel. On November 14th, 1969, President Nixon approved his Medal of Honor. The next day, November 15th, Jones was killed in the crash of his personal Piper light aircraft near Woodbridge, Virginia.

He was 46. He had a PhD in philosophy. He never received the medal in person, but the Skyraider didn’t just absorb punishment. It dealt out things that shouldn’t have been possible. June 20th, 1965. Four A-1H Skyraiders from VA-25, Fist of the Fleet, launched from USS Midway on a rescue patrol over North Vietnam near Dien Bien Phu.

The pilots were Lieutenant Commander Edwin Greathouse, Lieutenant Junior Grade James Lynn, Lieutenant Clinton Johnson, and Lieutenant Charles Hartman the third. They were cruising at 12,000 ft and 170 knots, the speed of a commuter airliner. Two MiG-17s appeared at their 9:00. Johnson later said, “At 12,000 ft and 170 knots, we looked like Tweety Bird to Sylvester the Cat.

” Greathouse dove for the deck. The Skyraiders went to treetop level. The MiG-17 could do over 600 knots. The Skyraider topped out at 320, but the Spad had a stall speed of roughly 100 mph. It could make turns that were physically impossible for a jet. The MiGs kept overshooting. Then Johnson and Hartman came around a small hill and found one MiG lined up behind Greathouse.

It turned for a head-on pass. Both Skyraider pilots fired simultaneously. Eight 20-mm cannons. Johnson recalled, “Charlie’s rounds appeared to go down the intake and into the wing root, and mine along the top of the fuselage and through the canopy.” The MiG’s canopy shattered. It rolled inverted and hit a hillside.

Propeller plane shot down a jet. Shared kill credited to Johnson and Hartman. Both received Silver Stars. It happened again on October 9th, 1966. Four A-1Hs from VA-176 off USS Intrepid were jumped by four MiG-17s as Lieutenant Junior Grade William Thomas Patton got behind a MiG and opened fire. His cannons ran dry.

So, he armed his 5-in Zuni rockets, unguided rockets designed for destroying bunkers, and fired them at a jet fighter. The MiG spun out of control and crashed through a cloud deck. Patton emerged to see the enemy pilot’s parachute. That was the last time in aviation history that a propeller-driven aircraft shot down a jet.

Final tally: Skyraiders two confirmed MiG kills, two probables, at least one damaged. MiG scored zero against the Skyraider in a fair fight. And then there was the rescue that broke every rule. March 10th, 1966. A Chau Valley. 2,000 NVA troops besieging a Special Forces camp defended by 17 Green Berets. Weather was catastrophic.

800-ft ceiling over 1,500-ft hilltops. Jets couldn’t operate. Only Skyraiders could find holes in the clouds. One pilot compared it to flying inside Yankee Stadium with the people in the bleachers firing at you with machine guns. Major Bernard Fisher was leading six Skyraiders when Major Dafford Wayne Jump Myers took a hit from what he believed was a 37 mm cannon.

Fisher radioed, “You are on fire and burning clear back to your tail.” Myers belly-landed on the camp’s steel-planked runway and dove into a ditch. His aircraft exploded behind him. He crawled toward safety, hit a minefield, crawled back. The nearest helicopter was 30 minutes away. Enemy troops were within 200 yd.

Fisher radioed two words, “I’m going in.” He landed a Skyraider on a cratered, debris-strewn runway under continuous fire. He taxied the full length to Myers. Myers sprinted through gunfire, scrambled up the wing, and Fisher grabbed him by the collar, pulling him headfirst into the cockpit. Fisher taxied back through shell craters and took off with 19 bullet holes in his aircraft.

 First living Air Force Medal of Honor recipient for Vietnam. His quote was five words, “When a man is down, you don’t leave him there.” Over 9 years, USAF Skyraiders flew more than 90,000 combat sorties. 266 American Skyraiders were lost across all services. 104 Air Force pilots were killed. Roughly one in seven who flew combat tours. The South Vietnamese Air Force lost approximately 242 more over 15 years of continuous operations.

And the Pentagon never stopped trying to retire it. A 1965 article in the US Naval Institute proceedings captured the absurdity. No aircraft now in production or on the drawing board can replace it. Nevertheless, it is being displaced. The Navy was pulling Skyraiders from carriers for nuclear bombers at the exact moment submarines were taking over the nuclear mission.

At the exact moment limited war was the only war America was fighting. The Air Force ran out of flyable Skyraiders during the 1972 Easter Offensive. SA-7 missiles gutted the fleet from 32 aircraft down to 13. South Vietnamese pilots flew Skyraiders until the last day, April 30th, 1975. Major Ho Van Hien of the VNAF 514th Fighter Squadron, “I flew back to Bien Hoa with 25 people in the back of my A-1E.

When he landed in Thailand, American soldiers met him with guns leveled. They took our weapons and all of our flying gear. We were devastated.” Retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Sparks, an F-105 pilot rescued by Skyraiders after being shot down 75 mi northwest of Hanoi, said it best. The A-1 Skyraider is the second prettiest airplane in the world.

The reason it is the second prettiest is that right behind it comes the Jolly Green helicopter. And if you don’t believe it, stand in the jungle and look up. In 2025, the Air Force named its new armed overwatch turboprop the OA-1K Skyraider II, 80 years after the original first flew. They’re still trying to build what Ed Heinemann built in 1944.

They haven’t managed it yet.