497th TFS Night Owls squadron photo September 1967.
Prior to the Viet Nam War, tactical aircraft had very limited ability to employ at night. That is, they could fly at night but could not do much compared to during the day. The Nite Owls changed all that. The driving force behind their creation was to counter North Viet Nam’s attempts to supply the insurgent (Viet Cong) movement in South Viet Nam. Supply lines ran from North to South Viet Nam on the western side of both countries and into parts of Eastern Laos through a network of roads, trails, and paths known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, named after the founder of North Viet Nam. The main northern port, Hai Phong, was off-limits to attack or blockade due to political constraints (until late 1972), which allowed an unfettered flow of men and materiel to support the war in the south. With targets in the North off-limits, the Air Force’s answer to stopping the flow of supplies to the insurgency was to interdict them enroute. Since trucks and troops moved under the cover of darkness, new tactics had to be developed and the Nite Owls were born. Specifically, the 497th was tasked with preventing the movement of supplies from dusk to dawn down the “Trail” as it snaked through Eastern Laos.
In order to fulfill their tasking, the Nite Owls adapted the Forward Air Control (FAC) mission for night operations and fighters, resulting in the term “Fast FAC.” The FAC mission involves coordination between ground and air forces or, multiple aircraft in support of ground operations. Airborne FACs are trained to identify and designate ground targets for destruction and Nite Owl missions involved flying over suspected enemy supply routes and either slowing their progress (denying them the ability to move through an area) or calling in additional aircraft to destroy the targets. Most Nite Owl FAC missions were flown with a single aircraft and it took a few years for the tactics to evolve.
Nite Owls had the undersides of their aircraft painted black and flew “blacked out” (no external lights on) to make them more difficult to spot by anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) gunners. More importantly, 497th crews had to adjust their sleep-wake cycles to sleep during the day and fight at night.
Flying at night creates many opportunities for vertigo – formally known as “spatial disorientation” – an aviator’s constant nemesis. Combating this required much greater emphasis on instrument flying, crew coordination, and radar use as compared to day flying. Night flying compounded with poor weather makes spatial disorientation even more prevalent. In the words of a former 497th pilot, “It was there all the time.” Even today, “pilot error” is sometimes used as a catch-all reason for why any aircraft crashed, which is misleading and unfair because taken to an extreme, “pilot error” could be blamed for almost any crash. It was 497th squadron procedure that one man (pilot or Weapons Systems Officer, WSO) be “on the gauges” (looking at the instruments) at all times, so safety-of-flight was a shared responsibility. Even so, it was not uncommon under severe conditions for both men to become disoriented. In fact, spatial disorientation was such a problem that beginning in 1969, as an added safety measure, all Air Force F-4s were retrofitted with a backup attitude indicator (instrument that tells you up versus down)
that was independent of the aircraft’s primary attitude indicator. It is important to keep in mind spatial disorientation occurs today, even in advanced aircraft with generations of improvements over the F-4 in instruments, cockpit design, and night vision capability; this extends to aircraft with two-man crews. For example, in April 1995, a state-of the- art F-15E was lost off the coast of North Carolina on a night mission. Both the pilot and WSO became severely disoriented following a partial instrument failure and ejected. In fact, they were so disoriented that at ejection, the aircraft was supersonic and headed straight down at 10,000 feet AGL. Add to the inherent challenges of night flying the demands of the Nite Owl FAC mission – one of the most demanding of all fighter missions – and flight durations of 2.5 to 3 hours during which exertion made it common for crewmen to lose 10-15 pounds, and you get an idea of the demands put on these men.
Two of the main passes on the Trail were Ban Karai (pronounced “ban kuh-rye”; “ban” is the Lao word for town) and Mu Gia (pronounced “moo-ghi-a”). One former Nite Owl interviewed recalled how on one mission of two, 30-minute periods over Ban Karai, 2,000 anti-aircraft rounds ranging from 23 mm to 57 mm were fired at him, a hit from any of which could have been fatal. Not surprisingly, JPAC reports that at least 15 F-4s crashed within a 15 kilometer radius of Ban Karai, making it one of the most dangerous places on earth for aircraft. It was vital for the enemy to keep a constant flow of supplies through these chokepoints. It was just as vital the Nite Owls cut off this flow, which they did better than any other fighter squadron. When it came to operating at night, Nite Owls led the way.
