1 - The Black Vault

Chapter 9
Project Honey Badger and
Credible Sport (1980–81)
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.
It had been nearly six months since planning
for the Iranian rescue mission kicked off in the
fall of 1979. For the Combat Talon community,
the period would come to be recognized as the
greatest period of Combat Talon system advancement
in its history. The tragedy at Desert
One relegated the rescue attempt to one of failure,
but the tactics developed and hardware
procured during preparation for the mission
formed the foundation of Combat Talon capabilities
for the next two decades.
NVG Blacked-Out Landing
The greatest development during the period
was blacked-out landing operations. Before Desert
One Combat Talon crews were trained in
short-field landing operations to austere landing
zones, but they required overt lights to
mark the runway during hours of darkness.
Several portable lighting systems were used,
including smoke pots filled with kerosene and
battery-powered “bean bag” lights that provided
marginal overt illumination of the runway. The
major drawback of these lights was twofold:
first, they were hard to see by the pilot flying
the approach, and second, unfriendly forces on
the ground could see them. General Vaught had
tasked Kyle early in the planning phase to develop
a capability to land the Combat Talon
without any external overt lighting, including
lights on the aircraft or lights on the runway.
To fulfill this tasking, NVGs were acquired and
employed for the first time by fixed-wing crews.
When the 8th SOS first began to develop its
NVG procedures, the copilot (or right-seat pilot)
wore NVGs that were focused on infinity, and
he searched outside the aircraft for the runway
environment. A five-light pattern was developed
to provide the pilots a visual reference for the
runway. In the early stages of NVG airland development,
these five lights were overt and
could be seen by the naked eye. As the capability
matured IR filters were developed so that
the lights could be seen only by NVGs. One pair
of lights was placed on each shoulder of the
runway 500 feet down from the approach end,
and a second pair was placed 1,000 feet from
the first set of lights. At the far end of the runway,
a single light was placed on the left side of
the runway. The visual effect was similar to
sighting a hunting rifle with manual sights—
the distant light was centered between the four
closer lights, resulting in the aircraft being
lined up properly down the runway.
Approach guidance was provided to the pilot
by the left navigator, who constructed a standard
2.5-degree airborne radar-approach glide
slope for the aircraft’s landing. As the left navigator
called out headings and altitudes, the leftseat
pilot, who initially was not on NVGs, flew
the approach according to the navigator’s in -
structions. When the right-seat pilot acquired
the landing light pattern or the runway environ -
ment on NVGs, he notified the left-seat pilot
and started flying the ailerons to assist in align -
ing the aircraft with the runway. When the leftseat
pilot acquired the runway with his naked
eyes, he took control of the aircraft and landed
using a controlled sink rate and visual references
to the portable lights. Both the aircraft’s
landing and taxi lights remained off during the
approach and landing. Although the procedure
proved to be reliable, several hard landings occurred
when the left-seat pilot misjudged the
aircraft’s actual sink rate.
After 17 December 1979 when IR filter paper
was attached to the landing and taxi lights to
provide covert illumination during blacked-out
landings, procedures were changed so that the
left-seat pilot landed the aircraft while using
NVGs. The IR filter paper was sandwiched between
two pieces of tempered glass and attached
to both the landing and taxi lights by
using modified brackets developed by Oliver
and his developmental team. During the approach
to landing, the landing lights were extended,
but not turned on, until one to two
miles out on final. At that time the left-seat pilot
called for lights, and the flight engineer
turned them on to illuminate the approach end
of the runway. The later NVG procedure required
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