At Area 52 With Secret MiGs and the F-117 | Rob "Z-man" Zettel Podcast Clip

[00:00:04]You're there, Area 52.

[00:00:06]>> Yeah.

[00:00:07]>> Places that you hear of, but you never expect to find yourself at, right?

[00:00:11]>> Exactly.

[00:00:11]>> Wow. And along the way, once you're there, there's affidavits, there's secrecy oaths, there's there's all that that goes along with it.

[00:00:20]Um What did that first night feel like when you were there?

[00:00:24]>> Well, the first day, you know, of course I'm in the squadron, I've been there about a week.

[00:00:28]>> Yeah.

[00:00:28]>> And uh George Jann in the squadron commander he says, "Okay, tomorrow, Z-man, you're coming up. You're come riding up on the MU-2 Mitsubishi MU-2s.

[00:00:36]We flew We had two in the squadron."

[00:00:38]>> Okay.

[00:00:39]>> Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprops. And that's how we got up to the the test range every day. We'd take off out of Nellis, fly about 45 minutes to 50 minutes, land at Tonopah Test Range, and we come back in the afternoon. But he said, "Tomorrow, you're coming up and you're going to be on the same plane with me."

[00:00:54]So, I get on the airplane with him and we're going up to Tonopah, and again, you conjure up ideas of what this place must be like. Sure. before you get there. Of course, I get there, it's nothing like I thought.

[00:01:04]>> [laughter] >> Before I get to the squadron, I'm getting off the airplane, walking to the squadron building. I'm following everybody cuz I don't know where I'm going. I'm walking across the ramp, and there's no airplanes. Nothing there.

[00:01:16]Just big hangars.

[00:01:18]I go, "Oh, okay. It's pretty impressive airfield, but there's no airplanes.

[00:01:22]Well, makes sense. They're not going to leave the MiGs out overnight."

[00:01:24]>> Yeah.

[00:01:25]>> Uh so, [clears throat] we go on, we have our big morning brief, lasts about half an hour. At the end of it, Jannert looks at me, he says, "Okay, Z-man, grab your jacket. We're going to get the grand tour."

[00:01:35]So, I walk with him, and he takes me out to his Jeep, and we drive down the flight line to the first big hangar, and we stop in front of the hangar, and the doors are just starting to open.

[00:01:46]>> Yeah.

[00:01:47]>> And he goes, "Okay, it's showtime. This is This is where we keep the MiG-21s." I go, "Great." So, as these doors are opening, now get this.

[00:01:57]Heretofore, I had never seen a MiG-21 anywhere. Much less a bunch of them.

[00:02:01]Yeah, as these doors are opening and I'm in back of my mind I'm thinking, this has got to be staged. The doors are opening and I look inside that hangar and there are two rows of MiG-21s, maybe 10 to 12, parked nose to nose in all the different phases of maintenance. Some of them being towed out to launch for the first flight here about half an hour and I'm just I go, "Wow."

[00:02:25]10 to 12 MiG-21s right there. And he goes, "Come on, follow me." He goes, "Go." And he He's not everybody's of course. And sir, how you doing? Good morning, sir. And we walk down. There's two on the very end and they're painted a little different than all the other ones, a different camouflage scheme.

[00:02:40]They all have big red stars on the tail.

[00:02:43]And he He asked me a question. He goes, "You know what these are?" And I look at them and I'm thinking, okay, it's got to be a trick question cuz they're MiG-21s.

[00:02:52]And I go, "Well, it looks like a MiG-21 to me." He says, "Well, technically, they're not. They're F-7s." I go, "F-7?"

[00:02:58]He says, "They're Chinese."

[00:03:00]I go, "What?" And they look just like a regular MiG-21 F-13. Subtle differences that only those of us who flew them and those who flew against them a lot would know, but it looked just It was a copycat of a MiG-21 that Chinese built.

[00:03:15]And he goes, "Yeah, these are brand new.

[00:03:16]We just got them within last year." So, he goes, "Jump on up, sit in it." And he shows me around. And anyway, that was my introduction to the MiG-21 and after sitting about 5 minutes, he goes, "Okay, let's go look at the MiG-23." So, we go to the next hangar. Same thing. Two rows of MiG-23s all lined up.

[00:03:32]I'm just blown away. So, I was That's my first day up at Tonopah.

[00:03:35]>> Great first day.

[00:03:37]And it only got better, right?

[00:03:38]>> Yeah, I was going to say if >> Cuz he says, "Yeah, you're going to fly all these while you're here." I go, >> My god.

[00:03:43]>> Those MiGs came from Egypt. Where do we get MiG-23s did, yeah?

[00:03:46]>> Yeah.

[00:03:47]>> I think what you're getting to, where we got them.

[00:03:49]And usually one of the first questions, All of the MiG-21s >> Yep.

[00:03:54]>> Uh MiG-21 F-13s. All of them we got from Indonesia except for one which we got from Israel and it'd been a defector aircraft.

[00:04:02]>> Okay.

[00:04:02]>> And then we had uh by time I left, they had gotten eight brand new F-7s from China.

[00:04:08]Uh and when I say brand new, they were brand new. I went out to the flight line one day to fly an airplane and to me I look at it and go, "Oh, I've never seen this one before." Khrushchev says, "Yeah, we just we just got it like yesterday." I go, "Great." So, I look in the logbook and three and a half hours on it.

[00:04:25]So, it's kind of like going to your new car showroom and sitting in the car you just bought and go, "Yeah, it smells like a new car." This still had that new MiG smell to it. It was so new I was afraid to step on the ejection seat cushion for fear of getting it dirty.

[00:04:39]>> Brand new.

[00:04:40]F-117?

[00:04:42]>> Yeah.

[00:04:43]>> Stealth fighter?

[00:04:44]>> Yeah. Yeah, they were up there.

[00:04:45]>> They were there?

[00:04:46]>> Yeah.

[00:04:47]When I first got there in October of uh '83.

[00:04:52]About the time I was getting off those MU-2s, the F-117 when they got their 14th airplane, they were operational. So, about time I'm getting there and this is October of '83, they're an operational squadron.

[00:05:04]They had 14 airplanes.

[00:05:06]And it was interesting cuz as we're walking to the squadron, I noticed these hangars up to the north side of the complex.

[00:05:16]And there were about 14, maybe no more than 20 at the time, but there was a lot of construction going on further to the north.

[00:05:24]And he said, "You'll be in brief to that program shortly, but for the meantime, don't concern yourself with that. Okay?"

[00:05:32]So, about 5 months later, one morning at the brief, Genin looks at me and three others and said, "Tomorrow night, you four guys are going to stay overnight and you're going to go to the 4450th and get in brief to their program which is called Senior Trend."

[00:05:47]>> Okay.

[00:05:47]>> So, we knew there was something flying only at night cuz we had heard the other guys whisper about it, but they would never say what it was. So, the following night we go there and the commander of the 4450th Tactical Group briefs and briefs us to the stealth fighter program and shows us a video. We're like, cool.

[00:06:07]We look at it, we go, "My god, what is that thing? Can it really fly?" And he goes, "Yeah, let's go take a look at it." So, after it's over we go down to the hangar just, you know, a few yards away and we crawl over an F-117. This is in April of 1984.

[00:06:23]Five years later, it would make its debut over Panama and in Operation Just Cause.

[00:06:29]But we had seen it all these years way ahead of everybody and yeah, that was it. But it was there at Tonopah. They only flew at night for obvious reasons. Yeah.

[00:06:39]>> We only flew there during the daytime.

[00:06:41]And after that, first time I saw it I never saw another one because I never flew at night.

[00:06:47]>> See, you know how many people are listening to us and they're saying, "Okay, so here's the deal, Z man.

[00:06:53]You lived the life I was supposed to live, man." You got a lot of people right now saying, "Boy, I wish I had been there."

[00:07:01]>> Yeah.

[00:07:01]>> That's Okay, so let's talk about uh first contact with the MiG MiG. First time getting in the cockpit.

[00:07:11]What hit you first when you when you crawled into it, sat in the chair?

[00:07:16]>> First time you sit in a MiG-21, of course, it was days actually about a week or so before I actually flew the airplane.

[00:07:21]>> Yeah.

[00:07:21]>> Our typical checkout in a MiG was you'd have four to five days of academics and then you, you know, you sit in the airplane, you go through all the switchology all this stuff before you ever got ready to fly it. But the first time I sat in it was okay this is obviously a a different than I'm used to flying. The big things are, you got your throttle, you got your stick, you got your rudder pedals, instruments, airspeed, all that kind of stuff.

[00:07:48]But, the layout was just totally different than you know, I had just come out of F-5 and before that the F-4 which were, you know, comparable as far as how they were laid out, the typical T pattern for instruments. But, now I'm in the Smig and it's just totally different.

[00:08:03]And everything in the Soviet uh Russian built airplanes, they're all in Cyrillic, everything's in Russian, all the labels. There's a few here and there that are you got labels in English, but after a while you just get used to what they're the the what they are and you know what the throw. Here's battery switch, okay, I got that. Boost pumps, you name it, hydraulics.

[00:08:25]And uh it's relative. So, once you get accustomed to it, I kind of use the analogy it's sort of like getting out of your car that you've been driving for years and you go someplace and you get into some sort of exotic rental car. You go, well, you know, it's going to take you a while. But, after you've been driving it for 20, 30 minutes, you got your iPhone hooked up, you know, your navigation, you go, okay, I got it. You Well, kind of same thing only on steroids with a Mig. Cuz once you get used to it, you go, okay, these are the procedures are different than the F-5 or the Phantom or later on what would be what would be in the F-15, but this is how you fly this airplane. This is how I operate. This is the emergency procedure should I have an engine failure and all the rest. So, you real quickly grow accustomed to it.

[00:09:14]Yeah. And after a while, no longer a surprise.

[00:09:17]>> I mean, Russian labels, things are labeled, right? Different ergonomics.

[00:09:22]It's got to feel a little weird.

[00:09:24]>> And it did cuz you know, the stick [clears throat] is a little higher.

[00:09:27]Yeah. You're sitting in it just your physical presence, how you sit in the cockpit is a lot different than the F-5 cuz I'm sitting lower. The canopy I lower the canopy and the canopy is down here at my shoulders. You know, at F-5 it's a little lower, not a lot. Of course, F-15 it's going to be down here.

[00:09:44]>> Yeah.

[00:09:44]>> So, when you try to turn around you kind of really can't see anything behind me.

[00:09:49]And even if I lean forward I can't see much. So, those are the things that really hit you right away.

[00:09:54]>> We've heard stories. No oil gauge, weird switch placements, the key switch.

[00:10:03]What did you learn about Soviet pilots by flying one of their planes?

[00:10:07]>> What I assumed to to know about the Soviet pilot they are these aircraft were totally dependent on GCI on radar control. Cuz obviously the early MiG-21 we didn't really have a radar in it and even the MiG-23 that's behind us actually this is a newer version so it did have a radar.

[00:10:27]But the one I flew at Tonopah had a what we call a NATO code named Jaybird Jaybird radar which was the equivalent of what they had in the later model MiG-21s. It wasn't very good. It wasn't even as good as the the radar I had in the F-5 that I was flying as an aggressor.

[00:10:42]>> Okay.

[00:10:43]>> So, that told me that whenever a Soviet pilot or anybody flying those MiGs got in them they're totally relying on radar to get to the fight >> Yep.

[00:10:52]>> and to be somebody. And that was also a lesson learned from Vietnam.

[00:10:57]And that's you of course one of the offshoots of Vietnam was hey, we need to get something like AWACS to give our guys some eyes out there well ahead of the of the combat zone. So, yeah, those are the things that I learned from them. They're very regimented how they flew the airplane.

[00:11:15]I doubt they flew it near as hard as we did and that was part of the contract of being a Red Eagle is you're not a Soviet pilot. You're not a you know, Iraqi pilot. You're a US fighter pilot. You just happen to be flying a MiG. So, fly it the best you know. So, we would ring them out and I dare say I'll have no qualms about making this saying I don't think there's anybody that flew those airplanes harder than we did. Because not only were we good fighter pilots, not saying other people aren't, but we came from F-4s, F-5s, F-15s, F-16s. We knew what they were capable of. And we flew those things right to the edge of their performance.

[00:11:49]And so that's what we would tell the people we fought against. Like if you can beat me in a MiG-21, you're not going to have any problem with anybody anywhere else. That was the contract. And uh Yeah.

[00:12:04]>> Did they bother teaching you any Cyrillic? You just nah.

[00:12:08]Probably a waste of time.

[00:12:10]>> Waste of time.

[00:12:11]>> Yeah, I got you.

[00:12:12]>> Oddly enough, of all the weird things that they put in the airplane is the hydraulic gauge is this tiny little gauge. It's about not much bigger than it may not be no bigger than a silver dollar. If people remember what those are like. Probably a quarter is more more like it. And it sat way down at the bottom of the pedestal in front of the control stick. And there not only was it one gauge, but it was one gauge it had two pointers in it to measure both your main and your boost hydraulics.

[00:12:45]And so [laughter] if you had to look at it, you had to physically move your head and look and it was very hard to see. And when I had this hydraulic main hydraulic failure in the MiG-23, I all my first indication was I get a master warning light. And then I get an idiot light over my you know over the right pedestal that says main hydraulics, which other than engine failure is the one you don't want to see.

[00:13:09]Because main hydraulics and I won't get go down this rabbit hole too much, but as I'm looking through the periscope cuz there's not much more you can see from the MiG-23 turning around, I look through the periscope and that's where I see over my left wing root this angry looking cloud at my left wing root, and it's this hydraulic fluid just escaping into the wind stream being atomized at like 500 600 knots.

[00:13:35]And I go, "Okay, this isn't good." And I look Oh, yeah. And there's my needle going right down almost at the zero, but you know, you talk about um human engineering, there wasn't a lot of thought in put placing it there.

[00:13:49]>> Yeah.

[00:13:50]>> Yeah. I mean, we had some lights, but I go, "Yeah, okay.

[00:13:53]If [laughter] it's in the green, I guess it's good, but you know, if it's gone, it's gone, right?"

[00:13:58]>> So, this is the great follow-up to that then where the moments where Were there moments, just describe one maybe, where you thought we genuinely do not know what this thing will do? Were Did you have those moments where it was like >> You know, surprisingly not too many. Um you know, good That's good news.

[00:14:17]>> Yeah.

[00:14:18]>> And I was the beneficiary of being getting in the squadron about in its 10-year existence. I got there at about year five. So, a lot of lessons had already been learned, but in that instance, that MiG-23 main hydraulic failure, they had never experienced that either before or even after I left. That was the only time that ever happened.

[00:14:37]>> Okay.

[00:14:38]>> So, when you wrote the book in there, there were little things we didn't know, and that all we could go on is what we had transcribed from some of their manuals and then put into our own flight manual. But, that particular emergency uh you know, you didn't have any Well, you you didn't have any or leading or trailing edge flaps.

[00:14:59]You had uh some spoilers. You had uh uh some rudder. Didn't have the differential stabilizer. So, you really had reduced uh capability when you're landing the airplane, and consequently did a controllability check all the way down to 210 knots. That was my airspeed on final, 210 knots on final.

[00:15:18]>> Okay.

[00:15:19]>> Which in miles per hour is about 241.

[00:15:23]>> Yeah.

[00:15:23]>> So, I'm coming in with a boatload of airspeed.

[00:15:26]>> Yeah.

[00:15:26]>> Touchdown speed was 190, which is about 218, 19 miles an hour.

[00:15:32]>> Still a boatload of speed.

[00:15:33]>> go, "Okay, this airplane normally likes to land at about 140.

[00:15:37]And on a good day, the MiG-23 is kind of a a handful of to to take care of. But now I'm going to be landing it about 50 knots over what it wants to land at. So, even when I'm on the ground, the airplane is still going to want to fly.

[00:15:52]>> Yeah.

[00:15:53]>> Even with all this stuff. And so, it's going to be going to take some depth controls to keep it on the ground. Thank God it wasn't any stiff crosswind. And uh as I recollect, I got on the ground, everything's good, pop the drag chute, drag chute fills up. I look, yep, got a good drag chute, slows me down. It works so well that I actually make the early turnoff.

[00:16:15]Cuz all I had was emergency brakes. And but I still made the early turnoff. Uh didn't bother drop the drag chute, bunch of vehicles waiting for me there. And I shut it down and pop the canopy and you know, they give me the cut it off.

[00:16:28]And the quickly the ladder's up. And uh guy by the name of Tech Sergeant Jerry Fields is up the ladder cuz he was sitting crash crash recovery that day.

[00:16:38]>> Okay.

[00:16:38]>> He comes up and he says, "Great job, Z man." And takes my helmet bag for me and my helmet and reaches out to shake my hand. And I look at him, give him a wink. I go, "Other than hydraulics, good airplane."

[00:16:50]>> [laughter] >> He laughed.

[00:16:53]And it was. Other than hydraulics, which is [laughter] the whole left side is just full of hydraulic fluid. But made it down.