In the height of the Cold War, any time the Carrier Battle Gorup (As it was know then) got close to the motherland, you'd get daily visits from at least a pair of Bear D surveillance aircraft whose job it was to locate the battle Group and provide realtime targeting (via big Bulge radar on belly) to ship, sub and aircraft launched cruise missiles. The job of the Tomcats was to intercept the Bears NLT 200 miles from the carrier and put a TOmcat on each Bear to escort them and if balloon went up, shoot them down before they could provide the targeting info. During North Atlantic NATO exercises, we would go up to Norway and operate, which always drew out the Bears. Under RADM Tuttle, we started messing with their minds and set out Tomcats with a KA-6D tanker and EA-6B to intercept them 1000 miles away while ship remained in EMCON and "hid" from them electronically.
During a routine Bear intercept, often the most exciting part was the Alert launch especially during heavy seas. When the Alert was called away the engines were cranked immediately as aircrews were already in preflighted and turned jets hooked up to power and air. Goal was to get off in 5 minutes (later changed to 7 minutes, but still fairly quick) and beat your "sister" squadron to the cat. A vector was provided via chalk board by a yellow shirt on the deck just before you launched just like WWII and you were cleared to turn right off the cat to that heading and climb immediately. Always a good show for the troops! Once established, the orbiting E-2 would sweeten the vector and the tremendous range of the Tomcat radar allowed easy detection (unless it was a 1000 mile intercept) and the aircrew ran their own intercept. As the Bears were typically high and usually conning, it was normal to see them visually up to 50 miles away and rendezvous was nice and easy (they did have tail guns). The most surprising thing to me on my first intercept was the noise of their huge contrarotating turbo props and you could hear them pretty far off above our own extremely loud ECS. I can't imagine what it was like inside the Bear. The tail gunner was always watching us out his side blister and typically very friendly. Some held up Pepsi bottles or girly magazines. We took pictures of them and they took pictures of us.
Bear D escort during NATO exercise Ocean Safari 85 (photo by HJ)
wow that's great! thanks for the detailed response! I've always seen the pictures taken by interceptors, it's cool to actually hear what it was like
