AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2014 - 74

Jim Brightbill of Fort Worth, Texas, who logged about 705 hours
in the QU-22 from fall 1970 to fall 1971. "They [air-dropped] seismic sensors in along the [Ho Chi Minh] Trail, and a few acoustic
sensors that hung up in the trees, and those were line-of-sight transmissions." The airplane was an airborne radio repeater, flying a
racetrack pattern at 20,000 to 25,000 feet and relaying transmissions
from those sensors to a monitoring station in Thailand, code-named
Blue Chip. "We had a few real-time strikes called in from our information, but for the most part it was intelligence gathering," he said.
When Ken Clagett of Henderson, Nevada, arrived at NKP, seasoned squadron members took him under their wing. "They taught
us really what the mission was. Because so much of this stuff was
secret, they didn't tell you a lot...if we didn't know, we couldn't share
it with anybody else. We were sworn to secrecy."

"These guys would bring a big black box out. They
had it manacled to their wrists-they were spooks,
I guess."
-D.L. Martine
74 | AOPA PILOT September 2014

The Q stands for unmanned, and U
stands for utility, Clagett said. The QU-22
was intended to be a drone, and sometimes
was flown remotely. "It just never was practical to do it in the actual theater, so it was
always flown by pilots when we were on a
mission." But the knowledge gained contributed to development of the Predator and
other highly sophisticated unmanned aircraft of today. "They can be halfway around
the world, with cameras, watching live footage. It's pretty phenomenal. This aircraft
laid the foundation for what we have today."
After taking off from NKP and climbing to altitude, the mission involved flying
along the Ho Chi Minh Trail or around the
demilitarized zone (DMZ), a dividing line
between North and South Vietnam. "You
stayed up there for about five hours, doing a
racetrack pattern," said Louis Pucilowski of
Fort Worth, Texas; the return to NKP made
a normal mission about 6.3 hours.
"Aircraft engine failure concerns and
weather were the two biggest concerns,"
said Pucilowski, who flew B-52s before
and after the QU-22. No aircraft were lost to
ground fire, "but we lost several to weather,
and we had several engine failures." Six
QU-22Bs were lost in Vietnam-four
because of engine failures-and two pilots
were killed.
"And then we got another mission," said
D.L. Martine of Henderson, Texas. "These
guys would bring a big black box out. They
had it manacled to their wrists-they were
spooks, I guess." The box would be installed
and connected in place of the regular radios,
and the pilot would fly down the middle
of Laos, paralleling the Mekong River to
Cambodia.
In this mission, Compass Flag, the
QU-22B carried a multi-user radio
receiver downlinked to the 6908th
Security Squadron at NKP. There, trained
Vietnamese linguists operated 15 radio
intercept positions. "The quality and quantity of intelligence data resulting from the
QU-22B Compass Flag mission was superb,"
said Paul Bernard, who served with the

AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2014

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