NY Times Retracts 12 Years Of Calling McCain 'Fighter Pilot'

[Pilotguy]

The Times published two amazing corrections this morning, starting with one stating that the newspaper had erroneously called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "fighter pilot" on Sunday and in "numerous other Times articles the past dozen years." Wow, a correction that spans more than a decade! When McCain was famously shot down over Vietnam, he was flying his usual plane, a small jet aircraft known as the A-4 Skyhawk, which the Times now refers to as an "attack aircraft." That's a safe and widely-agreed upon label for the plane pilots dubbed "Scooter" (heh), but the newspaper needn't have apologized for calling it a "fighter." Many in the aviation community regard it as precisely that, starting with the military's most famous training program, Top Gun.

Top Gun, the nickname for the Navy fighter pilot school made famous in the Tom Cruise movie of the same name, originally used the A-4 to simulate Russian MiGs. The key attribute for a "fighter," according to widely recognized definitions, is high speed and maneuverability and weapons designed to shoot down enemy aircraft.

There's more...
http://gawker.com/5035890/times-retracts-12-years-of-calling-mccain-fighter-pilot

[liberal N proud]

1. That is amazing

Facts never seem to matter when it comes to these things and the GOP.

[The River]

2. The A-4 is an Attack Bomber

I served aboard a carrier in Viet Nam.
The A-4 was used as a bomber. period.
McLame was not a fighter pilot, he just dropped bombs
on an enemy he never saw up close.

Nothing heroic about it.

[DemoTex]

4. USMC flew Fast-FAC missions out of Danang in the TA-4F (call-sign "Playboy")

The TA-4 was, of course, the two-seater trainer version of the Skyhawk. The Fast-FAC missions were usually fragged into Route Pack 1 & 2 (southern-most North Viet Nam), and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Fast-FAC'ing was a widow maker .. read Misty, Fast-FAC'ers' stories edited by USAF Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd ("Misty" was the call-sign of the USAF F-100 Fast-FACs out of Phu Cat).

http://www.chancefac.net/A-cs_pgs_rebuild/Fast_FAC.htm


USMC TA-4

[mwb970]

3. They've also called him a "hero" for being shot down.

Will they retract that too?

[moondust]

5. McCain missed his calling in life.

His military experience might have helped him get a job as a crop duster. Or, alternatively, as a crash dummy.

:evilgrin:

[LiberalFighter]

6. He looks more like a crash dummy.

[DemoTex]

8. I knew a Navy A-4 pilot from Viet Nam who became a crop duster in south Georgia.

Damn good crop duster, too. He dusted in a Stearman. I think he ended up flying for Delta.

[bullwinkle428]

9. I live in Iowa and see the crop duster pilots in action all the time -

they absolutely amaze me with the way they maneuver those little planes, with the rolling terrain, power lines, trees, barns, etc. I get distracted to the point of nearly driving off the road watching them in action!

I have no doubt that these pilots could have flown circles around a pilot like McCain in his "prime", given his personal history of aircraft destruction!

[TexasObserver]

7. it's about time

I suspect McCain crafted that change decades ago. It's a lot more glamorous to say one was a fighter pilot who got shot down than to say one was a bomber pilot who got shot down.

[caraher]

10. Nah, the media are just a bit sloppy about labels

And not just the right-wingers... I'm working my way through Naomi Klein's excellent "Shock Doctrine" and there's a part where she describes the architects of economic shocks in a Latin American dictatorship talking about their "mission" in terms of the atomic bombing of Japan and the pilots of those planes. In relating the anecdote she calls them "fighter pilots."

To many journalists, if you're flying a plane and it kills people by design, you're a "fighter pilot." They just don't get that anyone cares about the distinctions among the many different kinds of military aircraft and combat flying.