“The 106’s speed and range gave us the ability to ‘… get there the firstest with the mostest,’ which of course is how the Cold Wars were won,” Mark Foxwell, former F-106 Delta Dart driver.
The F-106 all-weather interceptor was developed from the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger. Initially called the F-102B, it was renamed F-106 due to significant structural modifications and a more powerful engine. The inaugural flight of the F-106A occurred on December 26, 1956, and the Air Force began receiving deliveries in July 1959. Production ceased in late 1960, resulting in a total of 277 F-106As and 63 F-106Bs being manufactured. The F-106 was equipped with a Hughes MA-1 electronic guidance and fire control system. After takeoff, the MA-1 could take over the aircraft’s control, guiding it to the correct altitude and attack position. Then it could fire the Genie and Falcon missiles, break off the attack run, and return the aircraft to the vicinity of its base. The pilot took control again for the landing.
Conceived to prevent large groups of Soviet bombers from saturating U.S. airspace, the AIR-2 Genie was designed to be launched on a path that would lead it to collide directly with its target. Due to its relatively extensive lethal envelope at the moment of detonation, it could either envelop the target or compel the target to fly into it. With a warhead yield of 1.5 kilotons, the maximum lethal radius of the AIR-2 for an aircraft was approximately 1,000 feet. Retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Bill Rutledge, who used to pilot the F-106, although he never deployed a “live” Genie missile, did fire an ATR-2A, which was a Genie with a ballast in place of the warhead but equipped with the necessary tracking technology.
Rutledge released its impressions about firing the ATR-2A to Ted Spitzmiller, who reported them in his book Century Series The USAF Quest for air supremacy 1950-1960: “It was amazing, an 832-pound rocket with a 35,000-pound thrust rocket motor. When that rocket motor fired, there was an instant contrail out in front of my aircraft. The standard load for an F-106 was four AIM-4 Falcons (two G models-heat seeking, and two F models-radar guided) and a Genie. The primary weapon was the Genie-a nuclear air-to-air rocket.” According to Rutledge, the fire control system calculated a launch point and heading to effect proper launch, set the time of flight before detonation, and automatically launched the AIR-2A Genie given that the pilot had switches properly set. Then the pilot did one of several escape maneuvers, depending on altitude, to keep himself out of the fireball and overpressure shock wave.
Another former Delta Dart pilot, Daniel R. “Doc” Zoerb, recalled his experience with the ATR-2A: “We fired the (practice) Genie against high-speed, high-altitude drones, the most challenging of which was the Bomarc at about 70,000 feet and Mach 2.5. The experience of feeling the weapons bay doors open, the “clunk” as the 850-pound rocket fell from the bay, and the audible (even in the cockpit) roar as the rocket motor lit was quite an experience, as was the speed and smoke trail that allowed you to maintain visual contact with the rocket until the spotting charge exploded. As I recall, the distance to the target at rocket launch…was about 7 or 8 nm at high altitudes. The Genie accelerated to twice the launch Mach (which was circa 1.5 Mach) in a two-second rocket motor burn… a real bullet!”
As Zoerb explained, since the Genie was a nuclear warhead rocket, its detonation in the vicinity of any type of enemy aircraft would have had a negative effect on its electronics, on its structural integrity, or on the desire of the target to continue its mission. The effects on friendly fighters, unaware of the Genie launch, would have also been unpleasant, with (at least) temporary blindness being the biggest fear. Hence, the eye patch carried by the F-106 aircrews in the survival vest in hopes of preserving sight in at least one eye.
The F-106 was also a very fast aircraft that featured a supercruise ability, as Mark Foxwell, another former Delta Dart driver, explained: “I recently visited the 27th Fighter Squadron at Langley, flying the F-22. They touted the Raptor’s supercruise capability, where they use AB to take it well supersonic and then cruise supersonic in the military. Well, I/we did that routinely on the Six (as the F-106 was called by its pilots); I would take it in full AB to 49,000 and Mach 1.5, then go to full mil and cruise supersonic for 500 miles or more.”
Finally, Foxwell believes that the F-106 was also a bomber interceptor better equipped than today airframes since the Delta Dart was optimized for its job of anti-Soviet bomber defense more than anything in its day and more than anything today. As he explains, even if the F-15 and F-16 had (and still have) greater firepower, radar, and computer capabilities as does the F-22, these fighters are not optimized for the Strategic Air Defense mission, and the F-106 could match or exceed them in speed, range, and endurance. According to Foxwell, in fact, “the 106’s speed and range gave us the ability to ‘…get there the firstest with the mostest,’ which of course is how the Cold Wars were won.”
Century Series The USAF Quest for air supremacy 1950-1960 is published by Schiffer Publishing.
Photo by Air National Guard and U.S. Air Force
