CHAPTER 3
THE WARRIORS
I have commanded my dedicated soldiers,
I have summoned my warriors,
Eager and bold to carry out my anger.
—ISAIAH 13:3
Hagai Katz couldn’t believe his luck. Among the first operational training unit (OTU) group at Hill, he had become a founding member of the IAF’s newest and most modern fighting squadron. Tall, trim, with thick, sandy brown hair, Katz looked like a high school quarterback, but with the intellect of the president of the chess club. Though too proud to have ever admitted it, as a “nugget”—a rookie pilot—stationed at Beersheva in 1973, Katz had looked up to the base’s famed Phantom squadron fliers Iftach Spector, Doobi Yaffe, and Amir Nachumi. Indeed, to the young trainees in Katz’s unit, the veteran Phantom drivers were celebrities. Stuck in “conversion” at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, training half the time in the French-made Orugan fighter jet and half the time in the more sophisticated U.S. F-4 Phantom, Katz found himself forced to stand on the sidelines like a spectator and watch Spector’s elites fly off to battle Syrian bandits over the Golan while he remained behind. Now, finally, he was in The Club.
The twelve pilots selected to form the core of Israel’s new F-16 Fighting Falcon squadron began moving their families into the officers’ quarters at Ramat David in the late fall of ’79. The residential area housed some one hundred families. The accommodations were small two-bedroom apartments, each with a living room and a tiny kitchen, located about twenty meters apart in neatly landscaped rows about three hundred meters from the base runway, so that the wives would hear the constant roar of their husbands’ planes taking off and landing all day long. As a perk, the pilots, most of whom had families, had day nurses to aid their wives in the care of their children. It was not an uncommon sight to see smartly dressed nannies wheeling a small squadron of tykes down base streets in wooden strollers that looked more than anything like small wooden market baskets—or toy circus cages.
The squadron’s first assignment was to become expert in the design and mechanics of the F-16’s various systems. Flying tactics, or “switch orientation”—which buttons did what—would come later. Each pilot was assigned one of the plane’s systems to study in detail, to master the theoretical principles behind its design and the mechanics that comprised its operation in order to teach future trainees. The pilots also translated the original General Dynamics specification and operation manuals from English into Hebrew and wrote up the IAF’s own conversion courses to be used in training incoming Israeli F-16 pilots. Yaffe, who moved into quarters just down the road from Katz, was responsible for the engines. Hagai was made both weapons specialist as well as F-16 project manager, responsible for determining the IAF’s requirements for the entire aircraft and then ordering the appropriate design and production modifications from General Dynamics in San Diego.
The process was complicated by the fact that the first eight F-16s off the production line were Iranian and had been built to the shah’s specifications. Israeli Air Force tactics and combat protocols were significantly more sophisticated than those of the Iranians, and therefore so were the IAF’s operational needs. For one thing, the shah had ordered his planes built to United States Navy specifications. As such, the planes were designed to carry the navy’s standard 1,000-pound ordnance. The IAF on the other hand used only 500-pound or 2,000-pound bombs. Katz had to ensure that the F-16s already on the line were retrofitted with the proper bomb clips and release systems to accommodate Israeli ordnance as well as make sure the necessary design changes were incorporated into production of future Israeli F-16s. The IAF’s F-16s would be outfitted with Israeli-made, air-to-air Sidewinder missiles instead of U.S. Stingers. This change necessitated not only new modified missile clips under the wings but also changes in the plane’s computerized missile logic. Likewise, the Iranian-ordered F-16 communication systems had to be replaced and modified to conform to the IAF’s own secure Com links. There were many such changes throughout the aircraft’s various systems.
Katz ordered the retrofittings and/or design changes through the GD liaison engineer, now posted to Tel Aviv. Some changes were relatively simple mechanical replacements; others would take months to design, build, and implement, delaying the delivery of the planes. The first two planes off the line would be F-16-003s, two-seaters that would allow OTU pilots to train alongside future conversion fliers. The bulk of the F-16s, however, would be single-pilot fighters. By December 1979, Katz finished his project work overseeing the mechanical conversions and began to think about something other than the insides of the plane. In two months he would ship out with Zeev Raz and the first conversion team to Hill Air Force Base. He was excited about the prospect of flying again. That was what it was all about, after all.