Douglas A-4 Skyhawk

Take us back to August 5th, 1964.

You were flying an A-4 Skyhawk off the USS Constellation during the retaliatory strikes right up against the Chinese border.

Can you walk us through what happened when your aircraft was hit?

Uh, well, thank you, Rose, for having me.

Flying against a smaller plane was good.

The Navy also used F-5s, but they also used A-4s.

A-4 is a pretty good MiG-17 simulator.

A little bit smaller, not quite so fast, turns really well.

The Lockheed C-5A Galaxy uses boundary layer control.

The Douglas A-4 Skyhawk used it.

Research programs going back to the 1950s showed that a properly designed blown wing could reduce stall speed by 30 to 40% compared to a clean configuration.

That's not a marginal improvement.

Their Air Force, they retired their superintendards, their Dagger aircraft and Mirage aircraft.

I think they've got like nine A4 Skyhawks, according to the military balance in 2026, and maybe four C-130H transports.

So the idea that there's going to be this bolt from the blue Argentinian invasion is a la 1982.

I mean, they do not have the capability to do that.

Killed 183 men.

And you can see a very young John McCain jumping out of his A-4 Skyhawk.

And by the way, the right wing, this is weird, right? The right wing has turned that fire.

I guess Trump, who, of course, dodged the draft and John McCain was flying bombing missions over Vietnam, have turned that fire into blaming John McCain.

What is that capability about? Do you know?

Well, I had, and he may be a good guest for you in the future, Brent Beecham is a classmate of mine at the Academy, flew F-15s, and he's the only guy I know that eventually, and he also flew A-4s for the Israeli Air Force, so he's very knowledgeable on a lot of this stuff.

And he was talking about that this morning, and that's what the strike was against, was there was, you know, I guess, filming or intelligence that they were getting ready to launch those missiles that could deliver mines.

So I don't know much more about it than that.

He was as handsome, probably more so than any of those guys in the movies.

But Tom was flying an A-4 Skyhawk, learning how to land on an aircraft carrier.

He had an unsafe landing gear indicator.

They told him, you're going to have to do a belly landing in Key West, Florida.

I was lucky enough to, because I had 600 hours at that point, uh, the, the wings course wasn't too challenging.

Um, and so I was lucky enough to be streamed to strike, um, in the, uh, A-4 Skyhawk, uh, that we had back then in the New Zealand Air Force.

So I spent 10 years doing that, and I ended up as a senior instructor, uh, in the Air Force.

Uh, when I left, couple of years out of aviation doing some other things, and when I got back, ended up working for Royal Brunei Airlines, uh, 7- 7576, uh-

He called in air support.

Five US Navy A4 Skyhawks from the carrier USS Hancock rolled in and killed the machine gun position.

Two A1 Skyraiders dropped smoke bombs, laying a curtain of white smoke across the river.

Under that cover, three men climbed back into their boat.