I'm assuming that there were a few DACM hops with 15s vs. 14s in the 20 years when the 1st TFW and east coast Tomcat squadrons were base within 20 miles of each other, what generally were the outcomes?
Like the movie "Sandlot" the game never ended and nobody kept score. Generally Eagles tried to use superior thrust to weight to stay high. Then the A+ arrived in 1987 with little fanfare and sporting the big motors. The Eagle drivers found some Tomcats were willing and able to go vertical with them at the merge. But before that happenstance, there was the saga of Sneakers....an able bodied Eagle Driver based at Langley. Like Hacker, he laid on the smack talk with the best of 'em. When the movie Top Gun hit the streets and Tomcats got so much attention, he couldn't stand it. He took his pride with him in an interview with local Hampton press reporter and poured out his heart on how the Tomcat could never best the mighty Eagle and the movie focused on wrong aircraft. At the time, VF-101 OPS was legendary "Flash" Gordon who lived for the merge. He cut his teeth on the F-4 Phantom and eventually became OinC of the VF-171 ACM Det at Key West flying stripped down A-4 Skyhawks daily amassing hundreds of hours of pure ACM time against all comers. So Flash reads the article and calls his counterpart at Langley at tells him...well first, if you don't know Flash, his voice is a dead ringer for the cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn....so imagine the booming voice coming over the duty black telephone "I say there, you know what needs to happen here....." so the OPS O agreed to show up in Whiskey 72 with Sneakers on his wing. Flash said he'd bring a FRS student for a syllabus hop. The two section meet over the Atlantic at the appointed time and the fight separates into 2 1v1 engagements. The FRS students flies his prescribed tactics and dispatches his opponent after a few turns. He turned out to be Sneakers. That left the two masters to settle the score. Not knowing who his opponent was, Flash decided to forego missiles and settle the matter with gun camera evidence just in case it was Sneakers. As the fight slowed down, the Tomcat's wings programmed forward giving Flash the benefit of a tight turning machine with considerable pitch authority and then he put the big boys down, a varsity move in close and slow. He pulled for all he could get for a firing solution and the P&W motor suffered a compressor stall. Flash told his RIO, "Don't worry son, we'll tend to that shortly". He proceeded to satisfy the proscribed criteria for an up close and personal guns kill on what he hoped to be Sneakers and then unloaded to restart his stalled motor. At the telephone debrief, Sneakers was absent, but the OPS O said he didn't think Sneakers would be following up with another interview with the press as he hoped.
Note to Hacker: Flash went on to command one of the first F-14D squadrons on his next assignment. He had a toddler son at the time of the epic engagement. Flash and I were there at Oceana about 20 years later when he "patched" to his father's squadron as the last Tomcat nugget in 2005. He made the last deployment and transitioned to the Super Hornet. He was patched last year at TOPGUN. Flash couldn't make it, but I was there. I'm pretty certain if you can arrange to be in an Eagle over Whiskey 72, he can show up in a one or two seat Super Hornet to see if history repeats itself.
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