Bob Pardo, a fighter pilot who, through the Vietnam War, saved a wingman’s broken airplane aloft in a daring feat of aviation that turned often called the Pardo Push, died on Dec. 5 in a hospital close to his house in College Station, Texas. He was 89.
His spouse, Kathryn Pardo, mentioned the trigger was lung most cancers.
In March 1967, Captain Pardo was on a mission over North Vietnam in an F-4 Phantom when antiaircraft hearth hit his airplane, inflicting harm, whereas extra badly ripping into the gas tank of one other fighter within the strike drive. Both jets pulled away to move house. But the second airplane had misplaced an excessive amount of gas to make it to security. Captain Pardo realized that its two-man crew could be compelled to eject over enemy territory and face seize or worse.
Flying beneath the compromised airplane, Captain Pardo instructed its pilot, Capt. Earl Aman, to decrease his tailhook — a steel pole on the rear of a fighter used to arrest its touchdown. At 300 miles per hour, Captain Pardo nudged his airplane’s glass windshield towards the tip of the pole. For virtually 90 miles, he pushed the opposite airplane as each jets hemorrhaged gas, till they crossed the border with Laos. Both crews ejected by parachute, and all 4 males have been rescued.
When they returned to their airfield, Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand, Captain Pardo confronted criticism for that extremely unorthodox maneuver, which could have saved the lives of Captain Aman and his weapons officer, First Lt. Robert Houghton, however got here at the price of Captain Pardo’s plane.
“When we got back to Ubon, they didn’t know whether to court-martial me or pin a medal on my chest,” he recalled in an interview with an Air Force publication in 1996. “Some people felt I should have let Earl and Bob eject and take their chances, so I could land my aircraft safely.”
“Pardo’s Push” entered Air Force legend — a unprecedented act of aerial ballet, however one that will by no means be prescribed in any pilot manuals or flying simulators. Only as soon as earlier than, through the Korean War, was an analogous rescue maneuver carried out.
The navy didn’t honor Mr. Pardo for many years. It wasn’t till 1989 that he was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry. The quotation described him pushing Captain Aman’s plane to security. “The attempt was successful,” it learn, “and consequently allowed the crew to avoid becoming prisoners of war.”
In a subsequent interview, Mr. Pardo mentioned he considered phrases his father had instructed him when he made the choice — a dangerous one, since his jet’s windshield may have shattered.
“My dad taught me that when your friend needs help, you help,” he mentioned. “I couldn’t have come home and told him I didn’t even try anything. Because that’s exactly what he would have asked me. He would have said, ‘Did you try?’ So I had to be able to answer that with a yes.”
John Robert Pardo was born on March 10, 1934, in Lacy Lakeview, a suburb of Waco, Texas, to William Roland Pardo, who put in pipelines for a fuel firm, and Lucille (Williamson) Pardo, a homemaker. He graduated from highschool in close by Hearne, Texas, in 1952 and enrolled on the University of Houston. He dropped out to work briefly together with his father earlier than enlisting within the Air Force in 1954.
He was awarded his pilot’s wings the subsequent yr at Bryan Air Force Base in Texas and stationed at bases in Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Missouri and Maine earlier than his tour of fight in Vietnam in 1966-67.
After a 20-year profession in uniform, he retired in 1974 as a lieutenant colonel and labored in company aviation, together with as a pilot for the Adolph Coors Company in Golden, Colo.
His first marriage, to Barbara Pardo, led to divorce. Along together with his spouse, whom he married in 1992, Mr. Pardo is survived by a sister, Stella Gordon; a son, John Jr.; a daughter, Angela Fresh; two stepsons, Scott and Kevin Arnold; 10 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
In Southeast Asia, Mr. Pardo was assigned to the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron when his strike drive took off from Thailand on March 10, 1967, to bomb a metal mill 30 miles north of Hanoi, the capital of what was then North Vietnam.
With the backing of China and Russia, North Vietnam was combating South Vietnam, which the U.S. supported. The struggle price the lives of greater than 58,000 American troopers and an estimated one to 3 million Vietnamese troopers and civilians.
Between 1965 and 1968, the U.S. Air Force and Navy carried out an intense bombing marketing campaign of the North, often called Operation Rolling Thunder, to destroy infrastructure. The tonnage of U.S. bombs dropped exceeded American bombing within the Pacific in World War II. North Vietnam’s defenses included antiaircraft batteries, missiles and Russian-made MIG fighter jets.
Both Captain Pardo’s and Captain Aman’s F-4 fighter-bombers have been hit about 40 miles from the metal mill, Captain Pardo recalled in a 2019 interview with The San Antonio Express-News. Captain Aman started climbing after taking hearth.
“I knew something was bad wrong because of his fuel state, so I started climbing with him,” Captain Pardo recalled. “When we got up to, oh, 30,000 feet, he leveled off and he was streaming fuel.”
He knew Captain Aman’s airplane wouldn’t be capable to make it out of North Vietnam to rendezvous with a flying refueling tanker. At first, he tried to push Captain Aman’s airplane by sticking the nostril of his personal jet right into a rear port, however there was an excessive amount of turbulence. Next he tried to maneuver straight beneath the opposite jet and provides it a piggyback journey. That additionally failed.
Then he conceived of pushing Captain Aman’s tailhook. A tailhook pole was utilized by the Navy’s model of the F-4 Phantom to land on plane carriers. The Air Force used it for emergency runway landings, when the hook snags a cable stretched throughout tarmac.
Captain Pardo instructed his wingman to close down his engines. He then fastidiously made contact with the tailhook, utilizing his airplane’s windshield.
“If he so much as bumped the windshield, he would have had that tailhook in his face,” Mr. Houghton, who was within the rear seat of the injured airplane, recalled in a 1996 interview. “We’re talking about glass here. It was phenomenal flying, nothing less.”
Mr. Pardo recalled, “I can’t remember how many times the tailhook slipped off the windshield, and I had to fight to get it back in place.”
After one in all Captain Pardo’s personal engines caught hearth and he shut it down, the 2 planes started quickly dropping altitude, sinking 2,000 toes per minute. They crossed the border with Laos at an altitude of solely 6,000 toes, leaving them simply two extra minutes of flying time. Both crews bailed out quickly after, floating all the way down to the jungle by parachute. They have been rescued by U.S. helicopters.
Source: www.nytimes.com