Word: jettison
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...planes last week-U.S. pilots for most of the war were little bothered by the North's MIG air force. The MIGs frequently did not come off the ground to meet U.S. pilots or, when they did, tried merely to force U.S. planes to jettison their bombs and defend themselves. Last August, the U.S. air commander in Viet Nam, Lieut. General William ("Spike") Momyer, told a Senate subcommittee: "We have driven the MIGs out of the sky for all practical purposes." Then the situation changed dramatically. The MIGs began coming up in greater numbers and harassing U.S. planes...
...that nothing will be done until the President wields a hatchet himself. In a humiliating rebuff to its Democratic leadership and Lyndon Johnson, the House of Representatives last week bluntly told the Administration that it should either make immediate and specific plans to cut federal spending or else jettison all hope of its urgently needed tax boost...
Instead, Pentagon officials had to go through all manner of contortions to explain why the MIGs had suddenly become a threat. For one thing, they said, the Communist jets have forced many U.S. pilots to jettison their bomb loads so as to lighten their planes for impending dogfights which, as often as not, failed to materialize. For another, when the MIGs are aloft, U.S. planes fly closer to the ground to avoid becoming targets -and that makes them more vulnerable to intense flak and small-arms fire. Moreover, as one Air Force general put it, if the MIGs were forced...
...North's jet airfields (it now has six such fields). Only 13 of the 521 U.S. planes thus far lost over Viet Nam have been brought down by MIGs; antiaircraft fire has downed most of the others. But MIGs frequently force a U.S. fighter-bomber to jettison its payload or to fly into a heavy curtain of flak in order to evade their pursuit, and lately they have been more aggressive in challenging U.S. planes. Red China last week claimed to have shot down three U.S. aircraft over its territories, including an automatically controlled reconaissance plane. But U.S. pilots...
...months of the air war had produced only 37 air-to-air "kills"-27 of them against the enemy. Uninterested in dogfighting, the North Vietnamese prefer to harass U.S. fighter-bombers on their runs over the North, attempting by feints, forays and cannon fire to make the Americans jettison their bombloads short of target or burn extra fuel in evasive maneuvers. Last week the U.S. set an aerial ambush to end that harassment-and in the process chopped Ho Chi Minh's air arm off at the elbow. Final tally: destruction of nine MIGs, representing nearly half...