‘I told Yehoar to prepare to eject, but when I lit the afterburners, the spin stopped and the nose came up.’ Ziv Nedivi, Israeli Air Force F-15 Baz Pilot
One aircraft that might have nearly succeeded in defeating an Israeli F-15 Baz in ‘combat’ was the iconic McDonnell Douglas A-4 Skyhawk. These agile aircraft have served both the US Navy and the Israeli Air Force (IAF) as ‘Red Air’ aggressors, leveraging their maneuverability to challenge more powerful adversaries.
In his book F-15 Eagle, Bertie Simmonds describes an incident in May 1983 involving two IAF F-15Ds, one of which was the 106 Squadron F-15D Baz (957) called ‘Sky Blazer,’ engaged in simulated combat with four A-4N Skyhawks over Nahal Tzin in the Negev when a collision occurred between the two aircraft. Fortunately, the pilot of one of the A-4s was able to eject, leaving the two crew members in the F-15D to face the consequences.
In the pilot’s seat was Ziv Nedivi and his navigator, Yehoar Gal. Initially, they didn’t realize the extent of the damage to the Baz, oblivious to the fact that most of the aircraft’s right wing had been sheared off in the collision. Literally only a two-foot stump was left of the starboard wing, protruding from the wingroot/fuselage itself. Nedivi recalled: “We were on a simulated airfield defense mission when it happened. I saw the number three man, and he was upside down, while I was at 13,000 to 14,000 feet. I fired a simulated missile, and then we were ‘stomach-to-wing’ so we couldn’t see each other. That’s when we collided, and the A-4 fireballed immediately. I then found myself nose-down at about 30 degrees, and the aircraft was spinning. I told Yehoar to prepare to eject, but when I lit the afterburners (not the normal thing you do in a spin), the spin stopped and the nose came up. I asked my wingman to inspect my plane, but the spray of fuel from the wing hid what was (or not) there.”
After another spin after power was reduced, Nedivi found that control of the F-15D could be held, but only with the application of lots of power. With Nedivi and Gal some 10 miles out from Ramon Air Base, the plan was to come in fast and make as safe a landing as they could. With the pair unaware that they were—in effect—flying on one wing, they made their approach at much faster speeds than normal. Nedivi explained: “A normal approach is around 130 knots, but we made ours at around 250 to 260 knots, about twice that of a normal landing. As a result of this, I put down the F-15’s emergency arrestor hook, which engaged the cable around a third of the way down the runway. We hit that, but the speed we were going meant that the hook itself tore off the aircraft, and we eventually stopped 20 feet short of the barrier at the other end of the runway.”
The sight that awaited them was shocking. “I remember the last 50 knots on the runway, and our wingman said, ‘You’ll not believe what you flew in on.’ When we came to a stop, I shook Yehoar’s hand and looked back to see no wing on my right-hand side. If I had seen that, I would have ejected.”
It appears that the wide body of the F-15 acted as a ‘lifting wing,’ and the additional thrust from the operational F-100 turbofans, along with the other working control surfaces, was enough to keep the Baz in the sky. Interestingly, when officials from McDonnell Douglas viewed pictures of the damage, they assumed it resulted from a ground taxiing crash and doubted that the aircraft could fly in that condition.
The aircraft itself—957—had already claimed four kills during 1982 and would go on to share another kill—a MiG-23 at the end of 1985. The IAF had been able to repair the damage, and the aircraft lived to fight another day.
Nedivi is in no doubt about what saved him and Gal that day: “I’m not sure any other aircraft could have handled that damage and brought us home safely. The final testament is that an F-16 pilot friend who, after seeing the damage, said, `Can I transfer to F-15s?’”
F-15 Eagle is published by Mortons Books and is available to order here.
Photo by: Israeli Air Force
