#RESCUE JETTISON CANOPY DRIVER#

On July 27, 1965, Tullo was flying as Dogwood Two in a flight led by his good friend Major Bill Hosmer, a former Thunderbird and the best pilot Tullo had ever flown with.

At about the time that Tullo got his captain's bars, air rescue planners decided to try to improve the pilots' chances. In fact, the Air Force commissioned a study that showed that during a typical 100-mission tour, an F-105 pilot should expect to get shot down twice and picked up once.

#RESCUE JETTISON CANOPY DRIVER#

There was a standing joke among the often chain-smoking Thud crews that the definition of an optimistic Thud driver was one who thought he would die of lung cancer. Pilots of the F-105 Thunderchief, or 'Thud,' in particular, suffered a high loss rate. Most fighter crews were not optimistic about their chances for rescue. Many of my friends had been shot down over there, and a lot were never heard from again. I flew 122 missions in F-4E Phantom IIs, also out of Korat but at a later time in the war. I heard Tullo's story a few years ago when he was an airline captain and I was negotiating the sale of radios to his airline.

He was wearing those bars when North Vietnamese gunners on the outskirts of Hanoi shot him down. News of his promotion had come through late the evening before, and he had sewn a pair of shiny new captain's bars on his flightsuit. He was 25 years old and flying from Korat Royal Thai Air Base, one of two F-105 bases in Thailand. Frank Tullo has never forgotten his first day as a captain.

Rescue jettison canopy