No -- as a Fighter Puke, you'd be deaf and dumb AND a liar -- the latter becoming more prominent and egregious as we move down the passageway and on into the debriefing room ...
Hey, we were a lot more egregious than that!!! Maybe you (attack-LSO-puke) are getting to be too kind (soft?) as you age?
For us, bigger liars there never were...... and for you, √-6
But, seriously, if memory serves, we had certain specifics as to what constituted an 'asymmetric' loads for bring-back & arrestment. They were either in the back of the PCL or under the care & feeding of the 'Tower Flower', or both ... that I can't remember.
Perhaps in ol' Smokey depicted -- the 3 X Mk82's on that particular wing pylon was 'O.K.' ... whereas a heavier load somewhere else would have been a jettison answer to the question. Beefy, wide apart main gear always helps ...
The A-6 could take some things aboard better than others -- again it depended on the station, the particular item (a.k.a. things that go 'BOOM'), and the total 'asymmetric' weight ... I know a drop tank failing to XFER (2000# +) on either stations 2 or 4 was a jettison.
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We had the same thing – a matrix in our Natops PCL and the "Tower Flower" corroborated. It listed all the different asymmetric ordnance combinations showing the configurations we could and could not recover.
But I'm pretty sure 3 MK82s on one side and none on the other (with an 'unfortunate' symmetric missile load) was out of our limits.
I don't remember the story behind this F-4 recovery. But personally, as you probably know, if it were us my RO and I would be on the beach having a beer.
